There’s a minor discourse online right now about Billie Eilish, the ascendant generation Z pop star, not knowing about Van Halen, which I guess was a band? I’m told they were around in the 1980s?
The end of canon has been one of the more interesting outcomes of the internet splintering tastes into a million little subcultures. Other people have written well about why preserving and forcing the canon on younger generations is a foolish pursuit. In an age of unlimited, instantaneous access to everything, every individual listener is making their own canon, and that’s far more democratic than the old way of a music writer telling you that you have to reckon with The Doors.
The real question is: how are you supposed to interact with the canon in 2019? I’m firmly an “old millenial” at age 32, but I have a lot of the same biases and blindspots. I can’t name more than 2 or 3 Led Zeppelin songs and frequently confuse them with Pink Floyd. The Sex Pistols are real boring to listen to. I can’t appreciate vast swaths of 80s music. And these are willful blindspots: I have no interest in subjecting myself to hours of The Doors just so I can say I understand why I don’t like it. Why do that when there’s a new Discover Weekly playlist every Monday on Spotify?
In the past, you got into the canon because you had an older sibling that subjected you to their vinyl collection, and in search of that “big brother coolness” you aped that taste and it made you seem more mature amongst your friend group. Along the way you developed a sincere appreciation and palette for that stuff. When I was growing up, you got into the canon because you were on message boards and forums and every once in a while someone would revere Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Townes Van Zandt and Napster made it so you can check them out. Sort of.
In 2019? The death of the forums and the rise of social media and direct messages means that you don’t often enter conversations with people you don’t directly choose. Spotify algorithms and playlists push artists directly to your phone, ensuring you will never want for music discovery every again. The only surefire way to lead people into the old canon is when new artists wear their influences on their sleeve. HAIM leads people to Fleetwood Mac. Greta Van Fleet leads people to Led Zeppelin. No one is working in the Van Halen space.
I have a bias against a lot of old music that I can’t really explain. For a self-proclaimed music geek, expressing that I don’t really like classic rock is disqualifying. But that’s why the death of canon-thinking has been thrilling: it allows people to be their true selves and have their purest taste. Maybe that’s also enabling people to remain ignorant; but ignorance has existed even before we had to listen to only what was on the radio at the time.
None of these classic rock boosters would give the best hip hop artists the time of day and only reluctantly caught on when ignoring it didn’t seem tenable. When you look at old frozen-in-time snapshots of music nerd culture, such as the novel HIGH FIDELITY, there’s a tension in the taste where their interest in black music stopped at Marvin Gaye and Miles Davis. Canon didn’t make people more reverent of greatness, didn’t make people work harder to understand things. It just gave people the same foundational taste.
It’s hard to explain what I find lacking in classic rock. The culture writer Shea Serrano took some heat from the film critic community for saying he didn’t really like old movies because he could tell they were still figuring some things out, and that even if they had, newer movies usually did it better. That applies to some of what I listen to, particularly anything with synths. All New Wave falls under this for me. But when it comes to guitar music, it feels lifeless and dead for a few reasons:
I identify with the overriding emotion in a song more than the rhythm, vibe or technical brilliance. People sometimes refer to this as playing with soul, but my head works entirely from a lyrical perspective. If I don’t hear verbal hooks, verses that end on heavy hitters, or choruses that stay with you, I don’t remember a song. A lot of classic rock either doesn’t prioritize words and mix them to be secondary to guitar. If they don’t, they’re so far deep into writing abstractions about mythology and fantasy that I can’t possibly relate to it. I’m supposed to listen to “Kashmir” and get struck by lines about “Secret elders of the gentle race” and shit? That’s soul?
A lot of the music of this era has been completely sanded down by commercialization. If I put on classic rock radio, all I hear is the default soundtrack of dumb movies, commercials and Dad Radio. It’s all music i’ve been vaguely aware of for decades because it’s a persistent background noise that never leaves. You never have to seek it out. So it’s been rendered inert and completely without edge. I will never have the context of hearing DARK SIDE OF THE MOON in 1973. “Money” is just a song from a scene in Mark Wahlberg’s THE ITALIAN JOB.
When listening to music feels like studying, I do not want to do it. The only time I can really absorb these bands is at the gym, where my mind is partially occupied, so I’m not constantly bored by the act of studying a band’s music. But studying is what I have to do to even parse what makes this music classic. Because it’s so ubiquitous and part of the default sound of the world for decades, I can’t just listen to it passively until my ears perk up. I’ve been listening to it passively my whole life. There is no discovery now, just scrutiny of something solidified into the mundane.
So sorry to Van Halen. Sorry to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Scorpions, AC/DC, Bon Jovi and what have you. Congratulations on all you’ve done in your careers. I’m sure your estates will continue to pull in money for all eternity. I will only listen to your music if it comes on underneath the next GM or Olive Garden commercial.