If there were interwebs and cell phones back then.... most would have been too average looking to make it....... And I wouldn't be able to gloat about how great my band was...
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Are you not glad?
- Thread starter comatosedragon
- Start date
I sometimes answer "Yes" to questions like that, just to see if the person who asked it doesn't understand either.
Indeed. The world would've become dumber quicker.
That's the problem. Too much breadth leads to not enough depth. Remember when you intimately knew every song in your small music collection?
Now I have a wall of LPs and CDs and I'm lucky if I've had time to listen to them once. I have no interest in going online and streaming even more music.
Before the internet and "smart" phones we had to actually learn how to do stuff. If you wanted to learn a song you had get your butt up and go somewhere to buy the album, 8 track, cassette tape, or sheet music. Then again you could wait around all day until the song came on the radio so you could record it for yourself on your crappy little tape recorder.
If you wanted to know if you could plug two 4 Ohm cabinets into your amp you had to look up the specs in the manual that came with it, or find someone you knew that could tell you. Or then again you could just hook them up and hope that nothing blew up in the process. There were music stores in most small towns where you could buy the best strings they kept in stock.
There was also the infamous land line telephone that you could use to call all of your buddies together to jam. Or you could burn a half a tank of gas running all over town tracking down all of your band mates to let them know about an upcoming gig...
If you wanted to know if you could plug two 4 Ohm cabinets into your amp you had to look up the specs in the manual that came with it, or find someone you knew that could tell you. Or then again you could just hook them up and hope that nothing blew up in the process. There were music stores in most small towns where you could buy the best strings they kept in stock.
There was also the infamous land line telephone that you could use to call all of your buddies together to jam. Or you could burn a half a tank of gas running all over town tracking down all of your band mates to let them know about an upcoming gig...
You'll get to that point someday too, after you gain experience and a sense of history. In the meantime, enjoy reveling in every passing fad as if it's something new and exciting.
I find this resonates with me. If you take the time to communicate with a younger person about the internet and the state of things you would not feel so 'alienated' from it all. They're making their way through a world that was certainly not created by them. Just as we were back then. Times haven't changed so much as 'shifted'. You are never too old to learn something and while technology changes people sure haven't.
Sorry, I'm not exactly a wordsmith but there is my two cents, by gummy. Now go git me my corn squeezins.
- Oct 7, 2000
- 18,619
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- Endorsing artist: Musicman basses
Most of the people I know who were in their teens 50 years ago had internet.
Oh wait... that was LSD.
Sorry.
I'm grateful that I know a world without the internet. I feel it gives me an appreciation and an edge some people may never understand.
Oh wait... that was LSD.
Sorry.
I'm grateful that I know a world without the internet. I feel it gives me an appreciation and an edge some people may never understand.
Oh please. Complaining about technology--especially its corrupting influence on youth--is as old as technology itself.
The internet is a tool, no more no less. It can be used for good or for ill--just like the printing press, the radio, and the television. It is not going away (until the electricity goes out).
Get over it.
The internet is a tool, no more no less. It can be used for good or for ill--just like the printing press, the radio, and the television. It is not going away (until the electricity goes out).
Get over it.
Not necessarily. Of course it varies, but if I buy say 2-3 albums in a typical month, I can totally keep up. Before the age of the internet I'd buy less than that, simply because the volume of interesting material that would reach me was a fraction of what it is today.
Well, the internet has been around since the '90s...pretty sure it is disqualified as a "passing fad" !
I'm in my early--OK, mid-50s, and I completely agree. I love that I have access to so much great music now. When I was growing up, it was a tough slog to find good music if you didn't dig what was on the radio (which I often--though not always--didn't).Meh. I recently turned 40 - my childhood was entirely analog but I do not miss those days at all. The internet has made it so much easier to discover new artists, it's never been a better time to be a music fan. In my teens, you'd have to watch or listen to broadcasts by genre (sometimes only once a week) to hear new tunes and potentially discover new bands, picked according to the interests of the host and/or his/her team. You'd have to take guesses when buying tapes / CDs because you only heard one or two singles, at best. Tapes and CDs were much more expensive then, too, taking into account the lower cost of living back then. Another big plus (for me, at least) is that you no longer need to clutter your house with CDs, tapes, and vinyl records to have a huge music collection. Now with the internet, it's an all-you-can-listen-buffet, 24/7. Artists from around the corner or around the world, that you would have never heard of otherwise are now just a click away. The only limit is your curiosity and the time you're willing to spend following different leads. More and more artists are marketing their music directly to the audience this way, too, which I think is the way ahead.
I agree with you about TB's sometimes ridiculous obsession over gear, but on the flipside, a lot of valuable info can be found here - more power to the consumer. Back in the old days, you'd have to go by what sales personnel would tell you at your local store, or a teacher (who sometimes worked for a music store, too), or the sometimes biased and limited knowledge of another guy on your block, or at your school, who played guitar. If you lived in a rural or semi-rural area with only one music store and you had no musicians in your family / circle of friends, as a beginner you really were at the mercy of that store in terms of the advice you'd get about gear. New and seasoned musicians alike have now access to much more data to make informed decision on equipment. Yes, the all-too-frequent tort/flats/j vs p/4 vs 5/best underwear for metal threads can be annoying, but it's easy enough to just avoid them.
I don't think having a presence here and playing in a band or writing music are mutually exclusive options either. I think most groups are represented here (although probably not equally), from bedroom/basement players, to semi-pros, to full-time pros. Nobody rehearses/writes 24 hours a day.
Anyway, that's just my 0.02$
And on a selfish note, being able to spread the word about your punk/etc. band's next show in the late '70s and the '80s via something like Facebook would have been fantastic. No having to run around posting flyers, hoping they didn't get torn down or you didn't get in trouble for violating some obscure rule. And with today's equipment, we could have documented all the shows in a reasonably high quality way, rather than setting down a boombox and hoping you got something remotely listenable on the cassette. I have virtually no live audio from the best band I've been in (we lasted from '85-'88, late college and post-college). Overall, I'm pretty happy about the digital revolution.
