One thing I can't make sense of with some of the responses on here is people not liking them because they didn't like the people who liked them. That baffles me. I can understand someone disliking a group or artist because of the music, but because of the fans?
I???m not sure whether or not these sentiments are directed toward the statements I made earlier. If they're not, please disregard the following. If, however, they are:
Like I said, I no longer dislike Zeppelin because of what I once considered to be their typical fan; I doubt I ever
really disliked Zeppelin in the first place, and I wouldn???t say that I dislike them now, as ideas of ???like??? and ???dislike??? imply strong feelings in one direction or the other, which???with regard to Led Zeppelin--I simply don???t have. All I???m saying is that my (admittedly misguided) dislike
back then of what I thought constituted the ???typical Zeppelin fan??????typical at
my school, in
my town, where
I lived--is what kept me from listening to Zeppelin
back then. And ???back then,??? for me, happened to be those years when one is most susceptible to going through the kind (not the
magnitude, not the
quality, but the
kind) of phase that I believe TREW was talking about at the very start of this thread. That???s all.
That said, I think people that have never ever formed opinions about music based in any part on the typical listenership of said music (judging by the outcry in this thread, there seem to be a number of you) fall into one of three categories:
1. People that spent their formative years in a truly heterogeneous, truly wall-less environment, where everybody at their school listened to everything, everybody listened to all kinds of radio, tape dubs flowed like water between the races, and the lion laid down with the lamb.
2. People that are 25 or under, who???as exponents of the internet and its attendant provision of streaming audio, archiving, file-sharing, infinite reproduction, and general disposability???take musical choice and diversity as a given. Since getting exposed to and acquiring music no longer so much entails going to certain clubs to see certain shows, listening to certain radio stations at certain times, going to certain stores to get certain records, or even talking to certain people to get certain information, there are fewer preconceptions about what a certain music???s ???typical??? listener is like.
3. People that are kidding themselves, looking back at their old unformed self with the eyes of their new fully-formed self, believing that they were always as omnivorous, indiscriminate, and ostensibly impervious to cultural influence as they are today.
People in the second group get a pass. It???s a new day, and although it may not necessarily be my day, I???m not mad. I feel like I gained something by having to fight for mine in the manner I did, but I think you???re gaining, too, just differently. It???s mostly a beautiful thing.
People in the first group are a) really rare, at least in the U.S., and b) lucky as fuck if that was in fact their experience. I grew up in a few small towns in the Midwest and the semi-rural South, spoke to three non-white people in my first nine years of life, and went to a high school that was integrated in 1972. I mean, it???s not like I was living in lock-down; music, information, and cultural association
did cross back and forth, but not freely, not without some gravity, some thought. My friends and I all had tastes that crossed some cultural and sub-cultural lines, to be sure, but we were always
conscious of it, because we knew that there???d be some reckoning, however small, on one side or the other. ???Man, when did you start liking that rap shit???? ???Yo, punk-rock--what the fuck you doing over here???? Anyone that came up in an environment where it was truly???
truly--a non-issue, where diversity was purely organic, has my sincerest envy. I???m not y???all, though.
But I think the reality is most people that horn about this stuff fall into the third group. Their satisfaction with who they are now is admirable, but that it seems to have come at the price of denying the unformed, susceptible person they once were is regrettable.
In short, anyone who says "It's just about the music," and who is older than 25 and who didn't grow up 100% music-boundary-free and who looks back at a teenager's social consideration of what kind of people are listening to what kind of music and sees that as anything other than
being a fucking teenager is, as they say,
suspect.
