February 15th, 2012 at 6:01PM
this one's for the vacant: LOOK

oldtobegin:

i don’t have a favorite albert ayler album because i’m an uncultured swine but nobody expects me to know a genre-defining jazz musician. THEY PROBABLY SHOULD but they don’t and i don’t see why the beatles are really any different

personally i think it would be great if music history was taught in schools, like they teach literature, but it isn’t, and this is what happens when you don’t systematically teach kids music and i think that’s OKAY. it allows people to explore art on their own at their own pace and per their own interests. lots of kids just aren’t interested in rock music, or pop music, or music with guitars like that, PERIOD, and that’s OKAY TOO.

why would those kids know the beatles? why would they do independent research to know the names of members of a band that they don’t actually care about? i don’t think that’s shameful or sad. it just means they were raised on some other kind of music, and THAT’S OKAY.

and i feel like that phenomenon dovetails REALLY TIGHTLY with class and race, so all this chest thumping and outrage about not knowing who paul mccartney is makes me nervous and feels wrong to me.

and yes there is a sadness that these kids aren’t excited enough about music to learn about foreign facets of it, but that’s the same as it always was. remember those kids in high school who were REALLY INTO PINK FLOYD but who had NO IDEA WHO FUNKADELIC WERE?

it’s the same thing, except now we can search their hashtags.

Attacking someone for not having heard of someone always feels really awkward and unpleasant to me.

My parents are hippies who strongly discouraged television (fortunately thy had different views on computer games), so I almost never watched TV as a child, and have still never owned a TV. So bumping into “OMG YOU DON’T KNOW WHO SO-AND-SO IS?!?!?! I THOUGHT EVERYONE KNEW THAT!!! REALLY? YOU NEVER HEARD OF SO-AND-SO!!!” is a pretty common occurrence for me.

It does not make me want to rush over and Google So-and-So. It’s not that I might not like So-and-So, or that I hate learning new things. I previously had no context for So-and-So, and now what I know is that they have this one fan, who’s being kind of a jerk about them.
  1. purepopfornowpeople said: I’ve experienced this in grad school. I don’t know as much classical music as my peers and some of them seem shocked when I say I haven’t listened to a composer.
  2. thatmeggirl reblogged this from oldtobegin and added:
    Attacking someone for not having heard of someone always feels really awkward...unpleasant...
  3. chronically-awesome said: The lack of curiosity—about ANY topic—is what I find most disconcerting. I see it all. the. time. Kids as young as 7 or 8 have already decided being “cool” is more important than knowing things, and that those two concepts are mutually exclusive.
  4. bg5000 said: Mike Bathel made a great point on Twitter the other day, saying “The headline for every one of those [20 people who don’t know who ____ is] articles should be “THOUGHTS OF 12-YEAR-OLDS NOW PUBLICLY VISIBLE.”
  5. douglasmartini said: I think it’s interesting more than anything else. It’s fascinating to me what kinds of things “kids today” are into and how different it is than people on “our side” of culture, who feel like we have to know EVERYTHING.
  6. matt-t said: a-fucking-men
  7. notmetaphoric said: Agreed. And is there something about the sphere you blog in that attracts lunkheads or something? I think it’s great you always show them the ol’ what-to-for.
  8. corona--graminea said: Yeah you are definitely right about the class and race thing. It’s a different kind of tragedy that even music fans might not know the black musicians who founded the blues and rock and roll.
  9. oldtobegin posted this
33 notes Source: oldtobegin
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