Thanks for this - it's a point I often go on about when people say there's some weird thing going on with people listening to old music now - people have always listened to older music! A few little points of contention: Music hall in the UK had barely even really ended by the 60s, and it was a big part of working class vernacular culture, so it's not strange the British Invasion brought it along. And pre-war music then was no further in the past than the 90s are today, so it wasn't such a throwback. Secondly, I disagree that people only listened to covers and not the originals. Sure, Brian Setzer (in the Stray Cats in the 80s) helped bring rockabilly back to the mainstream, but in fact rockabilly revivalism was a huge subculture adjacent to punk that involved people collecting the vintage recordings, the clothes, the cars etc. I was a teenager then and ended up listening to a bunch of old garage rock and rockabilly because it was so common in hipster culture. And people did go back and listen to old lounge music, jump blues, etc., during the neo-lounge/neo-swing times of the 90s - again, not everybody who listened to the Squirrel Nut Zippers etc did that, but a significant minority did. So I don't think that part is all that new either.
I still look for hooks in my new music choices and generally find quite a lot of them via pop and independently released songs. I think the current number one song by Ella Langley is a good example of a current infectious hook!
Thanks for this - it's a point I often go on about when people say there's some weird thing going on with people listening to old music now - people have always listened to older music! A few little points of contention: Music hall in the UK had barely even really ended by the 60s, and it was a big part of working class vernacular culture, so it's not strange the British Invasion brought it along. And pre-war music then was no further in the past than the 90s are today, so it wasn't such a throwback. Secondly, I disagree that people only listened to covers and not the originals. Sure, Brian Setzer (in the Stray Cats in the 80s) helped bring rockabilly back to the mainstream, but in fact rockabilly revivalism was a huge subculture adjacent to punk that involved people collecting the vintage recordings, the clothes, the cars etc. I was a teenager then and ended up listening to a bunch of old garage rock and rockabilly because it was so common in hipster culture. And people did go back and listen to old lounge music, jump blues, etc., during the neo-lounge/neo-swing times of the 90s - again, not everybody who listened to the Squirrel Nut Zippers etc did that, but a significant minority did. So I don't think that part is all that new either.
Interesting on both fronts. I really didn’t know music hall lived on for that long. When do you think it was really dead?
I still look for hooks in my new music choices and generally find quite a lot of them via pop and independently released songs. I think the current number one song by Ella Langley is a good example of a current infectious hook!
Yes. Great song. Amanda Lambert cowrite
More Lukather solos would definitely be a good thing for us all.
My dad and I went to see Toto, Christopher Cross, and Men at Work last summer and Lukather blew me away