PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Old music is killing new music…

It taught me how to live on no money...that was truly an advantage later in life.

When you went to college Harv, what was it, a 4 room schoolhouse?

(On topic portion is bolded.)

The perspective here is many sided. Kids listen to what their parents listened to until an age that they were able to start forming opinions, tastes, likes and dislikes... Also remember that everybody has "old" music in their life. For the bulk of us here that would be Beatles era. It is also geographical. I had no idea who Hank Williams and Bob Wills were until my 30s. Country music was simply not in our house. Early life I heard polka and waltz. Then big band (which I live to this day. Benny Goodman, the Dorsey Brothers, Les Brown, Glenn Miller...). That got me into big band jazz with a be-bop flavors, which of course leads to Parker, Dizzy... and then Miles Davis. And so forth.

Grade school years tend to see you in school with kids from the same neighborhood. In those years (the 50s for me) people lived with "their own kind", so everybody I knew was some kind of European flavor.

Before I went into the service, I didn't know I had an accent. I met soldiers from Virginia, Texas, the Southeast states and always thought "Man you talk funny" until I asked a guy from Alabama "Do I have an accent to you?" When I was stationed in Oklahoma for my last 10 months of duty my country music education began, and I LOVED it! There was a club in Lawton that had nothing but country bands, and I was there 4 nights a week. Now, just shy of 50 years later, I can appreciate the "old country vs new country" debate.

I can share this quick story too. In 2010, here in Ohio, I met a beautiful and extremely talented woman named Rachel Brown. She played in a band that was classified as Americana but her love was country. In fact she does a Patsy Cline tribute now as one of her acts. I learned about country and folk songwriters from her. For example, I had no clue who Townes Van Zandt was. I knew my Motown (Berry Gordy. Smokey! Yes!) and big band writers (Cole Porter! Yes!) but that deep down country and roots music was foreign to me. We hung out a lot for about 4 years until we had a falling out and parted ways, but that education was of more value than I can say.

So in my 70 year old mind and ears, yes "old" music is much better. The vulgarity, racism, sexism and overt anger in rap music has no value to me, with lyrics containing the same racial term that white people get shot over.

So here's a question to "rap" this post up. What do you remember as the first song that was any kind of rap? The first I can remember was Frank Zappa doing Dinah Moe Humm on the Overnite Sensation album. There was also spoken verse in I'm The Slime. That would be 1973. (I have SO much of his work!) I also consider that Zappa was a pioneer of Art Rock with those CRAZY arrangements he wrote that almost nobody could play.