OFF: Age and taste

[Chris Baker]

Damon wrote:

> that song about some park (what's it called?) that goes...

It's "Baker Street", I believe.

As for musical tastes being formed by age 24, I have difficulty believing
this was a "scientific" study; it has a folklorish ring, like the supposed
French method of determining the ideal age of one's mistress.  And about as
useful!  I'm 39 and yeah, it's probably true for me, but I'd been a stone BOC
fan for nine years at that point.  A person never knows what he'll get into
in the future, I guess, and there's stuff I like now that I would have
sneered at then (Nick Lowe's last album of country stuff is one of my
favorite albums of the last couple of years).

By and large the stuff I went for was hard rock, but I was never a real
booster of the genre as a whole (i.e. I thought a lot of the bands were
shit).  And I found the 80's generated a whole slew of developments that left
me cold, many of which have been commented on here already.  6th-generation
bastardizations of stuff that was second-generation to begin with; I mean, I
liked Aerosmith, but I was not prepared for a wave of bands who apparently
had never heard of anything prior to them, and lacked their songwriting skill
to boot.  Then there was the opposite end of the hard-rock spectrum, the
_____-metal bands (choose your snooze) who represented possibly the greatest
misdirection of effort and practice time ever seen on this continent or
elsewhere.  All the bands that failed to realize that there was a point at
which increasing the tempo didn't make the music "harder" or "heavier"; it
made it geekier.  No contrast, no swing, no songs, no soul, just geeky
dead-end suburban spew laced with pointless time changes and imagery copped
from pisspoor horror movies and cartoon fantasy.

Hey, I'm not talking about the bands that any of *you* like, however!