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keith mckenney wrote: > I think a lot of kids come to "creative" music via Sonic Youth & > out-rockers, at least my circle did. Something that occured to me when this thread started is that Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo (and I believe Michael Gira as well) spent time in Glenn Branca's ensembles in the early '80s prior to forming Sonic Youth (and Swans, in Gira's case). So the cross-breeding bbetween academic new music and rock goes way back, though it really seems to have come to a head over the last few years. > It's easy to assume that the younger crowd > (my age, 25 and younger?) isn't versed in the origins, etc...but not > necessarily true. . And I'm not sure how much that matters in > experiencing the music. The only reason I mentioned age and experience with "new music" was because there's often an assumption that people who aren't seriously into that genre either "can't" or "won't" enjoy it. Seeing the reaction at the Scot Ray gig at the Knit was a great debunking of that idea. Of course, it could be that every single person in there, regardless of age, had copies of the Ornette Coleman and Merzbow boxed sets in constant rotation at home, but there was a certain aspect to the vibe in the audience (I can't quite find the word to describe it) that makes me doubt it was a crowd of total converts ahead of time. (There was one guy who had a great "I like this, but I don't quite believe what I'm hearing" look on his face for most of the show.) And hey, I'm 26, so I'm not trying to pull rank with you! > And we see the influence of 100+ years of non-traditional, > challenging music everywhere...in a "post-rock", post-Beck/Sonic Youth > world, a lot of kids may take for granted the ability to make what > ever kind of music/sounds/noise they want and actually find an > audience. That's another thing that occurs to me: after a decade of alternative rock and hip-hop being mainstream musics, I think a lot of listeners' ears have been tuned to more abrasive and unconventional sounds. I know it sounds kind of quaint, but I still remember how different Nirvana sounded next to everything else coming out of a mainstream AOR rock radio station 10 years ago (and no, that wasn't my intro to "indie rock" by any means.) > If you've > never heard Ornette or Coltrane, how can it influence you? Well, there are some people whose influence is so vast and far-reaching that it impacts an entire zone of music. A kid might start a band because he loves Limp Bozkit or Korn, without ever having heard Jimi Hendrix, but you'd be hard pressed to say that Jimi didn't play a serious role in shaping the musical language that the kid is operating in 30 years down the road... Somebody might start a band influenced by Mr. Bungle without having heard Ornette or Derek Bailey... The kid playing Korn tunes on his Ibanez 7-string guitar might laugh at someone like Steve Vai, without realizing that Vai was responsible for designing the Ibanez 7-string eleven years ago... A Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson fan could do an industrial project without knowing about Throbbing Gristle or Einstrunzende Neubauten (or even Skinny Puppy, for that matter...) And so on. Good thread, good thread. --Andre LaFosse http://www.altruistmusic.com