Quote:
Originally Posted by lumberjim
I was a late 80's teen, and rejected the pop music of that time and got into Zeppelin and other 70's power rock, and jumped over into grunge.
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(17 days later I still think about it)
"The cool kids like this" is why most of us got interested in what music we listen to. I know it was partly that for me. The cool kids made sure Permanent Waves was the main album played on the speakers where we hung out in 12th grade. They made sure the classic rock station was the station we heard on the bus in the morning.
And there's this weird social aspect to music that we generally don't even realize; we want others to listen to what we listen to, and we want to listen to what others find interesting.
We, as the cool kids (I say that tongue in cheek; we were all in that group), described the uncool music as
gay. (It was what it was back then) But we don't use that word as a insult any more. So why do the cool kids still inform our taste so deeply? IIRC a lot of the cool kids turned out to be assholes, after we learned what people were really like and why. But that's the power of age 16.
And so, I think of "God Only Knows" -- one of the most remarkable combinations of melody and chord progressions ever devised, expressing wistful higher power thoughts about love both poetically and musically -- coming together in one glorious combination, and speaking deeply to hundreds of millions of human souls. Or, as the cool kids told us, and we believed them, a horribly dated song from the 60s that has lost its place in time. Which is it?
We are adults, and now we are free; and I say, we can listen to anything. And we should, because "God Only Knows" is fucking amazing.