Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Big_Bird]

The thread on the 80s had me thinking. I like 80s music, but I like 70s and perhaps late 60s music even better. But I wasn't around at the time to enjoy it.

If I could have chosen my year of birth purely for musical reasons, I think I'd choose 1955. Then in the late 60s, I'd be able to enjoy Cream, the Yardbirds, Hendrix etc and Psychedelic (did I spell that right? ) Beetles and what have you.

Then come 1970, I'd be ready for the birth of Heavy Metal, and I'd be able to enjoy seeing bands like Sabbath, Zepelin, Purple and Jethro Tull live - and see them all a few times more in the coming decade. There'd also be Cat Stevens and Bob Dylan and all sorts of hippy stuff.

Then, later in the decade, I'd be in London for Punk, and see the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Stranglers and all that.

Then, still in my early 20s, I'd be there for post punk and the New Romantic era that launched the 80s. I'd get to see indie bands like The Smiths and The Fall. In the meantime, there'd be all this fantastic stuff going on with Heavy Metal - Iron Maiden, Judas Priest etc etc, then Metallica and what have you.

And then, when the crap decade of the 90s came in, I'd be getting too old to care about the latest rubbish, and I'd explore folk, Jazz and Classical in its place.

Instead, I was born far too late, and grew into adulthood during this era where there seems to be a serious dearth of inspiring mainstream music.

So which year would you choose to be born?

[RACETRAITOR]

I would say 1949, timed so I turn 18 for summer 1967, the year that rocksteady was created. I'd have to be born in Jamaica for this to work. Then I'd pack up in the fall and move to England to join the new skinhead movement and stick around there until 1969. Then I'd move to Canada and freeze myself in a glacier for a few years until 1976, at which time I'd move back to London for the start of punk. Then, if all goes right, I'd die before the '80s.

[Big_Bird]

[khyber]

I'd be 11 in the 50s but the whole brittish invasion would be lost on me since i'd be stuck on johnny cash elvis and their cohorts. I'd discover pot in my mind 20s and then be ruinously hippie-like until I ended up on a commune in Hawaii where I'd only have to weed the farm and play music for people.

yes.....throw the rocks now: I'd want to live on a commune (well, I should say, I'd like to START a commune: I'd call it "Flake Free"...cause I don't wanna have any flakes).

[krats1976]

For purely musical reasons, I wish I'd been born around 1925... so as to be a teenager/20-something during the big band era. Now there's some good music!!

[RACETRAITOR]

[Slep]

I don't know, i'm pretty happy with my bands right now.
It would have been nice to be musically conscious a couple years ago so I could have seen the Unicorns and Godspeed You! Black Emperor in their hayday, but other than that, i love the bands i listen to.

Plus, had i been born in any other time period, i wouldn't have an ipod to carry around all my music

[RACETRAITOR]

[Slep]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[cwemory]

I always wish I was of age in the early 80s in Manchester. To me it be really cool to be part of the post-punk scene that birthed Joy Division, New Order, the Smiths, and the Fall and to later on in the late 80's be part of the Madchester scene with the Happy Mondays, The Inspiral Carpets, and The Stone Roses (Chemical Brothers too?).
When the film 24 Hour Party People was released, it was basically a revelation of a time and a place that I had always wanted to be part of.

All my English friends (especially the Northern ones) mock me incessantly whenever I talk about this. All to better reinforce the fantasy I suppose.

[VanIslander]

To be born in the twenties, a child with Louis Armstrong and the Blues on the radio, Billie Holiday on the jukebox, then swing music, and a late teenager in the early forties! by then Strange Fruit would have drawn me to the clubs of New York. Beebop of Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, a hip Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Max Roach. Then Ella. Oh yeah. Then when LPs hit in '48 I'd be settling down careerwise and buy recordings of concerts I couldn't go to as often any more, getting ready for Verve records to produce and waiting for Davis and Coltrane to help me overcome a midlife crisis or two.

Instead I had to settle with being raised in a household full of old, old big band and classic music records, playing a brass instrument, listening to Motown on the radio, waiting for eighties pop to fuel my teenage energies, then retro jazz and the blues to save my soul from the deadening rhythms of all kinds of "rock" and modern music.

Classical music and jazz are forms of fossilized music for the mere fact that not many can do what the early greats have done in terms of composition and performance. We live in a multimedia age full of crap. There are few diamonds in the rough. I pretty much shut off intellectually with what passes as "hits" and only connect emotively with ballads as the saving grace of an era I almost wholeheartedly regret being part of, from a musical perspective.

[Satori]

Exactly the same as Big Bird. But I dissagree that the 90s were crap, cause Im into trip hop and house music and electronica. I think most of the 80s were crap and the 90s were awsome. But the second half of the 60s and the whole of the 70s is where my heart is at for sure. I have a 400 record ( thats vinyl kids ) collection of strictly stuff from that era. Sounds awsome on that fat chunky vinyl...

[SPINOZA]

The late 60s and the late 70s were the most "wish I was there" (and decade in between was hardly disastrous musically) eras for me.

The 80s is a decade more appreciable in retrospect than at the time. Any true music nerd knows there's an avalanche of great stuff in the 80s. It's not a matter of opinion. If you don't agree, you don't even know.

But really - the late 60s is my passion - the drugs, the breakdown of pre-WW2 society, the crearivity, the girls with nothing on, Pink Floyd, Stones, Beatles and an immeasurable quantity of subversive acts who I know more about than folks fortunate enough to be around at the time.

("if you can remember the 60s........")

As much as I enjoyed the bit of the 80s I can remember and LOVED the 90s, really I should've been 28 in 1978 as opposed to born in 1978.

But I'm awfully glad I'm not 56. No offence to anyone who is that age, I just don't particularly yearn to be 28 years older. You guys had your fun and it's only fair that you're shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

[Pink Freud]

here. now.