Rock And Roll From Art To Fashion

I was reading a review in the paper the other day about the new Spiderman movie and whether it was too soon to make a remake of a film only five years old. The article contended that although the Baby Boomer generation thought of movies as art the Millennials consider movies fashion. The kids today want their own version of Spiderman and  the original series of films which ended only five years ago is ancient history to them.

Interesting concept. I wonder if it also applies to music? Should today’s hip, young bands be recording remakes of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or The Dark Side Of The Moon? Another article I read recently, in the same publication, told about an album made in 1978 which is now getting rediscovered. Although some new artist did re-record one of the songs that only helped to get the original recording noticed and now it’s that original 1978 record that becoming popular. The writer of this article claimed that the kids today don’t care when a song was recorded, if they like it the year it was recorded means little.

Why are movies becoming so quickly dated but not music? Perhaps it’s because of all the retro sounds used on records in the past ten years. Remember the Garage Band sound of the Hives and Jet a few years ago? Much of today’s music sounds like New Wave of the 80s or even older. It must be difficult for a kid today to be able to tell an old recording from a new recording so age just doesn’t matter. With film it’s different as you can see how young the now aging stars were then and you can tell the time period by the clothes and styles of automobiles.

The big difference between movies and music is probably that while motion picture technology has greatly evolved over the last few years so that movies actual look different than they used to, music technology hasn’t really changed the sound that much. Synthesizers have improved so that they more closely approximate the instruments they’re suppose to sound like and drum machines actually do sound like real drums but technically the sound quality hasn’t changed much since the advent of Dolby in the 1980s.

Recently I found an old cassette of the album Toy Matinee by the band of the same name which I hadn’t heard in a decade. I found an old Walkman (remember those?) and played this 20 year old cassette, actually more like a thirty year old cassette. I assumed it would sound like crap compared to the CDs and MP3s I’m used to but it really sounded surprisingly good. Maybe even richer than a CD. I was expecting tape hiss but that Dolby Noise Reduction really worked well and it sounded as clean as what I’m used to. I probably wouldn’t be that impressed if I watched a thirty year old movie on VHS tape. Or maybe my vision and hearing are so shot these days that I can’t tell the difference anyway.

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