Listing all quotes tagged music

Sunday, August 22nd 2010

“Y is for Year Zero: Grunge killed hair metal. Acid house changed everything. Punk saw off progressive rock. These dividing-line stories are always attractive, always useful for a while— and then always revised. The grandfather of them all, though, has proved harder to shift— the idea that something happened in the early-to-mid-fifties to mark a change of era and fix a boundary of relevance. The next 10 or 20 years, as the 60s slip deeper into unlived collective memory, will be crucial and fascinating (for historians, anyway!).”

— Current music criticism, from A to Z. I always had some trouble with the myth that pop music started with network television, somewhere in the 1950s, at the time of Elvis’ or Buddy Holly’s first appearences. (via The Null Device)

Saturday, March 6th 2010

“I remember playing with my dad’s CDs when I was tiny, and then at school we’d put our projects on to CD-Rs to take home. But I never really owned any— by the time I was getting into music nobody bought them.”

— An article about the CD revival of the 2020s. (via The Null Device)

Which I’m actually unsure if it’ll ever happen. It seems plausible at first, but unlike vinyl the compact disc is actually quite a sophisticated and unstable media. It’s unlikely many discs will survive into the 2020s, let alone players in good working order (this is why you’ll never see a Lomography-style revival of late 90s VGA digital cameras). I think CDs will instead go the way of the floppy disk or the VHS tape: charming pieces of retro plastic.