Agree? I have all the music I want for the rest of my life. No need to hear anything new.

What a depressing thought.

And 2016 brought us some great new music so far.

 

I'm an old, fat, balding slob and was never cool or hip even when I was a young, thin slob with a full head of hair. I do have some cool and hip friends who are also good and decent people who can look past the surface to appreciate me for my non-visible qualities.

It's baffling to me. We are in a Golden Age for music. There is more music being recorded right now than at any point in history, it is so easy and cheap to do. The only "problem" with that is that there is so much music being recorded that it can be difficult to identify what you may like, but there is an rich and diverse set of tools to make it possible to find music that will appeal.

Instead, they point out that radio is terrible. Well, duh! Radio has been terrible my entire life. If I had depended on radio to introduce me to music, I'd never have discovered the vast majority of the music I love.

And the most bitter irony is that they are saying this on a music discussion forum! They are like the proverbial hayseed who couldn't get lucky in a cathouse with a fistful of twenties!

 

For me, it's definitely trying to identify with the teenage girls.

Seriously though, there's been one album come out in 2016 that's interested me. That's it. I'm not writing that to imply there's nothing good going on in new music, it's just how it is. And I'm okay with that, and I'm okay with others who have found more than a dozen releases this year that they enjoy. It's not a contest to see who can get into the most new stuff, or one to see who has the finest taste regarding the old stuff. It's about what makes us happy. Seriously, if The Monkees does it for ya, more power to ya. Just don't insist that I have to appreciate it too.

I'm familiar with that "other member" and their claims that decent music basically went away after the '70's or so. And I don't have a problem with their liking what they like. This insistence that it needs to be that way for everyone is a problem. One of these days, it might be nice to discuss why our love of music and the artists who make it brings out the worst in us when it comes to imposing our taste and ideals on others. As the song goes, "I'd rather trust a man who doesn't shout what he's found, there's no need to sell when you're homeward bound...".

And so, OP is happy with where they're at, and this is a problem? Why is it a problem, and whose problem is it? What difference does it make?

Anyway Grant, you're a good guy and I'm not arguing with you. I pasted your quote as a convenient jumping off point to write is all. Thanks for being around.

 

I was around in 60's but still find new releases I really like.

I may not have the same feeling I had when I was in high school and college when I was really into new music

having gone through many stages of interests it is harder to find songs that are both fresh and interesting as I tend to still like pop elements vs more challenging sounds or the current hip hop trends

 

I still think it's more like saying -- I only like pork chops and that's what I want to have for dinner for the rest of my life, I'll have 'em prepared different ways, and with different side dishes but it's still pork chops; or I only like barbecue, I'll have all kinds of different things barbecued, but it's gotta be barbecue, and I don't want anything put into that smoker I haven't tasted before.

People are different I guess. To me, only listening to music I've heard before, and/or only listening to one or two styles of music, would be torture, and would feel like, kinda, death itself aesthetically and emotionally and mentally. I need to have new art experiences all the time. Can't live without it. I need to hear new stuff that's of the moment and I get enormously curious about other stuff I've never heard from the past. It's such a fundamental need of mine that I feel like this other idea of never needing to experience anything new is honestly unfathomable. To me, it's not a "search," so much as it's just life. Of course I do have lots and lots of old favorite books and movies and music that return to, and others that I once loved that I almost never return to and all that. But I love music -- all kinds of music -- and I love discovery of knowledge, as much as I enjoy and as often as I return to music I love like Ornette Colmen's 1959 L.A. quartet recordings, or the Bach Cello suites or Songs for Swingin Lovers, I get more of a thrill coming across something like this year's debut EP from the teenage sister duo Chloe X Halle or going through Allen Shawn's book on Schoenberg and listening to and really examining all of Schoenberg's music piece by piece having only heard a couple of the best known in the past. Experiencing something new and now and fresh and young, and learning something in depth that I never new before, these are experiences that motivate me to get out of bed in the morning in a way that spinning Highway 61 Revisited again never could.

 

there is just soooooo much

 

There's so much music out there, I could spend the rest of my life listening to nothing but pre-millennium recordings, and I would STILL have only scratched the surface.

I like learning about various bands/artists and their connection to other various bands and artists, not to mention producers, engineers, session musicians, etc. and who they have in common as well. Like the last LP I played, Tower Of Power's "Bump City". When I was looking at the back cover, I realized it was produced and recorded by Ron Capone, whose name I happened to remember as the remix engineer on the "Shaft" soundtrack. I like tracking the work of producers and engineers especially, same as mastering engineers (and mastering facilities where those engineers work). I track session guitarists and drummers, horn players, etc., not to mention the rooms/studios where an album was recorded. I'm fascinated by that stuff.

 

I'm kind of the opposite. I struggle to get into more recent albums by artists I liked when I was younger. Like I loved Smashing Pumpkins from Gish up to The first Machina album. I still love and listen to those records. I have bought Zeitgeist & Oceania but as yet haven't really listened to them much. I'm sure they're good but my tastes are in a different place at the mo. Same with Pixies absolutley LOVE pilgrim to Trompe, bought indy cindy on double vinyl, listened to it once.

 

Yeah... I was like that after a certain point with the Stones. "Undercover" was the last album of theirs that I really gave myself a chance to like more than a little. (besides "Stripped", but that's a live one, so... ). And I admit, I've lost touch with the Chili Peppers and Rage Against The Machine over the last 10 years or more (RATM reformed at some point, right? ... See? I don't even know).

One band I need to get back in touch with is Portishead. I first heard them while in Holland on vacation back in 1995 (A coffee bar near my hostel was playing it a lot), and I remember buying the CD on the way home from the airport when I got back to the states. I need to go see them live if the chance ever comes up (if they back/still together). I like that live one they did back in the late '90's.

 

Oceania is pretty good. Zeitgeist is horrid. Still, whenever I listen to Oceania, I wonder why I'm not listening to Siamese Dream or Mellon Collie. What would make me choose to listen to an "inferior" record?

 

That looks like an intellectual suicide.

I've always thought that being curious about everything is a duty - and this kind of laziness proves you don't like music that much.

I'm at the point where I rarely have the time to listen twice to the same record, even if I like it - so much to listen to and discover, I try to have the same approach with records that the one I have with concerts, a unique experience not to be repeated.

 

That's about the size of it.

I agree that it does take a different kind of effort to find good, intriguing new music in 2016. But it's not that hard and it is worth the trouble.

It's still OK to lean on our comfort food favorites from the past, but a lover of food does not live on Pizza and Smokey Links alone! Why would a music fan limit oneself to childhood favorites? I find it baffling.

 

I (wholeheartedly) disagree.

No new music might mean i.e. no 'Blackstar'.

I'll never cease to add new colors to the never ending palette that music is.

p.s. To me not discovering new music is like fasting: a non sustainable & non desirable behaviour

 

I remember being quite shocked when I saw an 8-track tape of The Band in my high school guidance counselor's office, but he was a fan.

I think the difference here is that the vocabulary of the music we "geriatric cases" grew up with is still in currency. It's not like asking my dad to leave The Harry James Fan Club, drop acid and listen to Jimi Hendrix. The music we grew up with has been refined, beaten, bruised, stolen, regurgitated and reinvented 1000-times over and there's been a lot of derivative crap dished-up in the process. But some artists take the familiar ingredients and add enough of a fresh perspective to make it their own. I think it's a phenomenal accomplishment to do something fresh in the year 2016, and some artists still manage it. Personally, I take great satisfaction in expanding my Top Shelf library.

A lot of people in America are circling the wagons. I prefer to keep the door open.

 

But that makes sense as, with rare exceptions, most artists have a narrow "window" of outstanding work and then tend to fall off. The window can last a couple years or even a couple decades, but at some point quality slips. That's why it's worth seeking out newer music and artists.

For instance, if you were only listening to the Stones, Neil Young, Dylan, and Floyd in the 80s, you would've heard some BAD albums... And missed the truly great music from that decade. (R.E.M., Prince, The Cure, The Smiths, Pixies, New Order, etc etc...)

I'm glad my collection includes music from Bon Iver, War On Drugs, LCD Soundsystem, Robyn, and Grimes.

 

Old? Didn't we once establish that you are younger than me?

 

And, no one is insisting that, or at least i'm not. But, some of these guys take a few steps more and bash the music, and those who like it in the pitiful attempt to validate their opinions. And then they come here to shore up like-minded people and make this forum look like a bunch of old, crotchety men resisting change, and wishing death to "hipsters", and anything else new and youthful.

I don't either, but the guy doesn't have to shove it down our throats on every thread. A few years before, we had another member who took every conceivable opportunity to tell us how much he hated rap music. He eventually stopped, but he kept it up for years. God knows where all this hatred of a type of music comes from! It's just music, people! If you don't like it, just don't listen to it. Can people just talk about what they do like without having to constantly bash what they don't, and belittle those that do?

Rant over.

Again, it's only a problem when they denigrate new music in the attempt to validate what they do like. There's no need for it. If they feel comfortable enough in the strength of the music they do like, they would not feel the compulsion to constantly rail against that which they don't.

Thanks! You too! Oh, but, i'm sure there are a few people who wish I weren't around.[/QUOTE]

 

I like fresh sounds too, but, like you, as a child of the 60s and/or 70s, and a fan of top 40 music, I also gravitate toward new music that has a similar pop or R&B sound of the stuff I grew up with. I suspect we are not alone. There's a reason we liked fairly recent songs like Daft Punk's "Get Lucky", Cee Lo Green's "F*** You", or like collectively Santana's new album and Justin Timberlake's new single, recall music of the 70s. But, if something new comes up that sounds different apart from the old and familiar, and it's good, i'm all in too.

Well, many autistic people are known for their preference for eating the same thing every single day. Disrupt their routine with something different and they react quite negatively. Just a thought...

 

That's alright. I have a lot of brain cells to utilize. Use 'em or lose 'em!

 

It's all relative.

Physically, I'm 55.

But when I'm documenting the musical performances of a bunch of tremendously talented 8 to 18 year old kids like I have been the last 4 weekends, their youth and vitality makes me seem 97.

Here, relatively speaking, I'm 15.

 

I'm definitely in the new to me camp when it comes to discovering music. This is one example of something I just decided to check out: I'm a huge Yes fan, and I'm just now listening for the first time to the first two Yes albums-and I love them. I don't know why I avoided them for all these years-and even more amazing is the fact that one of my long time favorite Yes albums is "Yesterdays"! Crazy, I know.

 

I've recently gone through a period of some financial distress that forced me to curtail my music expenditures. I didn't stop paying attention to new music altogether, of course. I continued to check out unfamiliar fare online, pick up CD's from the library, borrow from friends. But I also took the time to go back through my existing collection of thousands of discs to re-examine stuff that I probably hadn't paid enough attention to the first time around. I think that sometimes it's possible to get so caught up in seeking out the next new thing to get excited about, we forget to fully appreciate all of the great stuff we already have and it feels good to go back and get more satisfaction out of the investment I've already made.

The money's a little better now, so I'm buying new stuff here and there, along with the occasional deluxe reissue. This morning--partially in reaction to this thread, I'll admit--I decided to check out a new band that's been getting some buzz in the indie circles, Car Seat Headrest. I have to admit that it was pretty gripping, invigorating stuff and now I really want to get their new album--and that's a good feeling, that new music rush. Their stuff feels fairly familiar to me, similar to other bands that I've enjoyed in the past two decades, but still fresh and distinctive. Sometimes I feel like I don't try hard enough to go outside of my traditional stylistic wheelhouse, but while I can try to keep an open mind, I can't force myself to embrace something that I'm not really feeling.

 

OK, you got me beat by two years!

I'm physically in my 30s, and mentally in my 20s. Too bad my chronological age is much higher. I age slower than most people my age. I guess no drinking or smoking, and avoiding the sun helps.

 

I'm 35, and I totally get your point and find it kinda sad as well - but hey, what can you do? I even bought a turntable to be able to enjoy recent albums that are better mastered on vinyl (and not only recent albums, of course). Admittedly, a lot of my music listening isn't done on my stereo - so I'm not uber crazy about sound quality.

But anyway, the more I listen to music, the more I find that, at the end of the day, there's more to music than DR numbers. I personally would never let that get in the way between me and music.

 

With over 3000 titles I have more than enough music to listen to for the rest of my life, but the problem is:
- A lot of my favourite artists keep releasing new music that I really want to hear
- A lot of my favourite artists keep releasing things from their archives that I really want to hear
- I keep discovering new artists, some of them have big back catalogues
- Currently I'm very much into jazz and classical music, areas where my collection is relatively modest and where I have a lot of catching up to do
That's why I just keep on buying more and more.