• 9 Posts
  • 209 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle
rss













  • Research has shown that adolescents exhibit higher levels of open-earedness

    I feel like this reasoning is a bit fallacious. By definition, ALL music is new when you’re young.

    Sure, as a guy in my 50s, my typical shuffle playlist has like 30% of songs on it from when I was a teen, and another 30% or so from ages 20-45. But that’s because my musical tastes have grown somewhat steadily, but I haven’t stopped listening to stuff I used to like either. By simple statistics, the “variance” in my music selections has to go down over time, since I’m not discarding old music from my collection. Some kind of “regression to the musical mean” has to happen as you add more music without removing old music.







  • Plenty of decent country before the 1990s. Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Ray Charles, the Statler Brothers, Mel Tillis, Roy Clark, John Denver, Willie Nelson. Later country artists with pop sensibilities like Kenny Rogers, Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Reba McIntire.

    I’d argue that Roy Clark ranks as one of the most talented American guitarists/banjoists of the 20th century, easily in the same class as Jimi Hendrix or Prince.

    Today, look for specific types of country music (e.g. Bluegrass) to find more authentic stuff, or just bite the bullet and listen to stuff with different genre labels like “Americana” and “Folk”. A lot of good modern country music ends up in those genre classifications because the marketers can’t figure out how to fit it into the stadium country ecosystem.