Play it again
A friend of mine who was having a bad day – hair-dryer blown a fuse, missed the bus, unable to find anyone who can supply red diesel Bath – interrupted a very happy and cheerful conversation I was having with another chum the other day about music with the slightly controversial statement that “nothing new is really new”. At first we pooh-poohed her gloomy outlook, but once she’d explained what she meant, I started to realise that she might have a point.
She wasn’t trying to claim that all the new artists out there are simply ripping off retro tunes, but that every new form of music, whether Techno or Death Metal, has been so heavily influenced by musical movements that have gone before that you can almost trace their journey; kind of like figuring out the family tree for LCD Soundsystem or Metallica. In fact, if you take her argument to the extreme, you’d find out that LCD Soundsystem and Metallica were actually related! Although their common ancestor was probably just some caveman banging a couple of rocks together…
Think about every new band that comes along. Most of the time the past influences are hidden in amongst slick production, dance beats or some other modern musical invention, like sampling. Every now and then you get a new artist where the past influences are subtle as a brick. Think about when Oasis first crawled out from under their Mancunian rock. Didn’t take an NME journalist to figure out they liked The Beatles!
So it seems my grumpy friend was right and there is nothing really new out there at all. As a fan of retro music, that’s the best news I’ve heard all week. Perhaps I should ditch my precious collection of vinyl for a few months, and actually start listening to Radio 1!
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