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I really like all those "evolution of music" compliations and medleys, but I'd really like to see someone really treat it as "evolution" and do a true taxonomical tree, with branches and diversions and divergent musical "species" that merge a few generations later and lines that die off.
It's one of the reasons why I feel frustration when people say they hate a certain category of music when they like a related category, or long for the "good ol' days" of music before "today's kids" started producing such "crap". Many people tend to ignore the interconnectedness of music, the complex musical influences of past generations on the current generation, and they like to oversimplify and box in musical genres when the reality is that it's more of a fuzzy, blended pool with every genre being a "transitional genre" to some other genre and not a "finished" genre, complete and isolated all by itself.
My sister used to give me a lot of crap for liking country music. Then, in her late teens, she started listening to Dixie Chicks. I asked her how she reconciled her hate of country with her love of the Chicks. She said it's because they didn't sound like "country". I pointed out that they're actually a bluegrass band with rock influences, so they're actually more "country" than the country pop of either then-current Faith Hill, '70s classic Kenny Rogers, or even the twangy country of the '50s back when rock & country were so closely related, they had such cross-over superstars as Elvis Presley.
I'm not telling anyone what they should or shouldn't *like*. I'm just saying that music is incredibly rich and diverse and is influenced by a lot of other styles that a lot of people ignore and dismiss in their disdain for whatever style of music isn't the style they prefer. And I think people might enjoy their preferred musical style even more if they had a better understanding of that complexity and diversity in their music, even if they never learn to appreciate those styles they say they dislike.
It's one of the reasons why I feel frustration when people say they hate a certain category of music when they like a related category, or long for the "good ol' days" of music before "today's kids" started producing such "crap". Many people tend to ignore the interconnectedness of music, the complex musical influences of past generations on the current generation, and they like to oversimplify and box in musical genres when the reality is that it's more of a fuzzy, blended pool with every genre being a "transitional genre" to some other genre and not a "finished" genre, complete and isolated all by itself.
My sister used to give me a lot of crap for liking country music. Then, in her late teens, she started listening to Dixie Chicks. I asked her how she reconciled her hate of country with her love of the Chicks. She said it's because they didn't sound like "country". I pointed out that they're actually a bluegrass band with rock influences, so they're actually more "country" than the country pop of either then-current Faith Hill, '70s classic Kenny Rogers, or even the twangy country of the '50s back when rock & country were so closely related, they had such cross-over superstars as Elvis Presley.
I'm not telling anyone what they should or shouldn't *like*. I'm just saying that music is incredibly rich and diverse and is influenced by a lot of other styles that a lot of people ignore and dismiss in their disdain for whatever style of music isn't the style they prefer. And I think people might enjoy their preferred musical style even more if they had a better understanding of that complexity and diversity in their music, even if they never learn to appreciate those styles they say they dislike.
