I made a deliberate attempt to understand dance music. Just to shut up my younger friends. And to wring some enjoyment from those night club nights.
My experience has beer analogies.
Dance was a new world. Free of preconceptions and prejudice. I hadn't listened to music that way since I was fourteen. Not hearing styles or genres or fashions or fads, but just the music itself. Judging it as music and nothing more.
I've been listening again to some of the music that stoked my love of dance. I find myself, no matter how hard I try not, labelling it. By beats, or style. The wonder has gone. It's no longer just great music. But breakbeat, hip hop, jungle, trance, thumpy thumpy. Something in a box. Not just something great.
I don't want beer to end up like that for me. I want to love a beer without imprisoning it. To retain my teenage wonder.
That's why I say this: St. Bernardus Abt is not a Quadrupel. It's a fucking amazing beer.
Interesting post. I always thought the best dance music transcend genre, a bit like the best science fiction / fantasy / horror writing. Not sure how that applies to beer though.
ReplyDeleteI was a college radio station programmer so I know what you mean. I've fought it. On the way back from NNY the other day I put "Give Em Enough Rope" into the car's CD player telling my daughter this is the best first song in music hist.... BAAMMM!! ...ory. Let the volume wash over you. Yes, it's like the Arctic Monkeys without the clever puns and rhyming slang.
ReplyDeleteAmericana music is the best, and all beers get old, unless they are sometimes accompanied bya bourbon on the rocks.
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