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[wombat]

I just heard Green Day on The Colbert Show. OK, yeah, I am so out of it that I never heard them before, big surprise.

I kind of liked them. What should I do about it? Should I better buy the new CD since the song they played was from that and maybe it's not the same as all the rest or what?

That lead singer though... you kids need to get your weird haircuts off of my lawn, or something.

[CortJstr]

I just heard Green Day on The Colbert Show. OK, yeah, I am so out of it that I never heard them before, big surprise.

I kind of liked them. What should I do about it? Should I better buy the new CD since the song they played was from that and maybe it's not the same as all the rest or what?

That lead singer though... you kids need to get your weird haircuts off of my lawn, or something.

I'm not a huge Green Day fan but I have their singles and whatnot. I wasn't aware they had a new album until I saw Colbert. Their last album, American Idiot, was a rock opera intended to be listened to straight through. It was really well received critically but wasn't quite my thing. You'd probably like the single, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, though.

Oh, and just FYI, he's 37. I'm not sure if that makes the haircut thing better or worse.

[wombat]

Oh, that is old enough to know better.

I'm going to try to forget that you told me that they made a rock opera, which is on the face of it even more annoying than the haircut, while at the same time remembering not to buy that album.

[littlefallsmets]

I am basically anti Green Day because they started out as a self-consciously simplistic pop-punk band, graduated to the big money by recording a bunch of shitty prom theme-type songs and now that they are older and trying to be Significant, they are attempting to half-heartedly write about Significant Things but... like... they're a lot less annoying than their contemporaries and the people who later attempted to duplicate their schtick so it is hard to be too pissed off that they are successful.

I dislike Green Day but not actively so, if that makes any sense.

It's not like Fallout Boy on the Today Show where the audience definitely needs to be chemically castrated while the band is beaten to death by *****s.

Maybe vampire *****s.

[wombat]

See, I am trying not to think about any of that. I heard a song, I liked the song. Can't life be that simple? If I had heard it on the radio and not seen the haircut, maybe. Sigh.

But see, what was nice about it, in fact, was that it was just a song. Nothing fancy about it. 

[pmcd9]

Sometimes a song is just a song.

[Toaster]

I was thinking about American Idiot the other day, and it made me realize that sometimes when we are young, we like things that maybe don't possess too much intrinsic artistic merit, and even if we develop good taste later in life, we cannot deny that those early not-so-good works were hugely influental to our development.

On a similar note, I was looking through one of my old Dilbert books recently and I could not bring myself to laugh or even smile at a single one of the jokes. Scott Adams is just kind of a hack, but I know that I had the exact opposite opinion at one time.

And I was thinking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I just don't understand why anyone would ever watch that show, but at one time I didn't understand why anyone would not watch that show. I just... would not enjoy sitting down at a hypothetical table with Buffy Summers. You know the episode where Anya made an alternate timeline, and Buffy was grumpy and had a scar? I like that Buffy better now.

So, yeah, sometimes I can't tell if I'm having opinions, or if I've simply become a bitter misanthrope.

[littlefallsmets]

I tried to get into Buffy as everyone told me "you would love it, Mike" and... upon discovering that I would have to watch every previous episode three or four times to understand what the hell was going on, I quickly gave up on that project. This seems to be a pattern with me: watered-down-nerdy pop culture explosion comes along, everyone tells me to get into it, it turns out to require weeks of homework to find out what the hell is going on, I end up watching a cartoon or a cooking show instead.

Name your deep-emersion television show and I've basically gone through that pattern.

[wombat]

You know, though, sometimes old things don't work anymore because the culture has moved on and the context is so different. When Dilbert started, it really was edgy in comparison to other newspaper comics, but now we have so much else that's so much more out there that when you go back to the old ones, they seem laughably tame. And I just happened to watch the first few episodes of Buffy, which I had never seen before, and my thought was that I was really sorry I hadn't watched it back then. I'm sure that at the time it was the only thing like itself and it must have seemed amazing. But watching it now, it was no big deal.

This is the problem with being groundbreaking, once you've broke ground everyone else can follow and you're not special anymore.

[theinevitable]

A bunch of my female friends have big girl-boners for Buffy and I hate it. Ughh.

[Toaster]

Wombat, you make an excellent point, that I had not thought of. It's similar to a half-formed thought I had while reading Sherlock Holmes, that I had seen the same kind of story hundreds of times before, and when I figured out that it was on CSI, I realized that I was reading what amounted to Gil Grissom's great-grandfather. Except many times better written, and a hundred years earlier.

So yeah, context is important.

Education.

[wombat]

Oh yeah, Sherlock Holmes is a perfect example. That kind of story had basically just been invented so probably every trick he played in them was new, but now, we've read a hundred years' worth of it. I'm glad I read them when I was a teenager, because there is no way to read them with fresh eyes unless you are like twelve years old so you just don't have that much experience of reading yet, you know?

I was thinking after I wrote that - because this started as a thread about music - this doesn't seem to happen with music? Perhaps because if you listen to, like, The Beatles for the first time, you're well aware that they recorded in a certain period and we're more aware that music comes in historical periods?

[theinevitable]

I think it also tends to happen with music, but maybe that is because I have read too many books about music. I have always felt a certain pleasure in knowing "a lot of bands sound like ____ or do ____, but these guys did it first." I always like playing something really out there and saying "guess what year this came out!"

People are not normally as interested in the answer as I want them to be, though.

I am really interested in the different ways mediums (saying "media" here feels wrong, because of the way people use "the media") are appreciated. Based on both things like "it is much harder for a static visual image to make you want to puke than a loud noise," and things like "people think of literature as having more legitimacy as an art form than pop music."

I also get accused a lot of paying too much attention to context and not enough to the work/piece itself.

[Victoria Waterfield]

I was thinking after I wrote that - because this started as a thread about music - this doesn't seem to happen with music? Perhaps because if you listen to, like, The Beatles for the first time, you're well aware that they recorded in a certain period and we're more aware that music comes in historical periods?

The reason it doesn't happen with The Beatles is that they are objectively awesome.

[Ben-San]

Buffy's a pretty good show for a couple seasons. Basically if you have a lot of time to waste there's worse ways to waste it than downloading some Buffy starting from the beginning and watching it until it stops being interesting to you.

This might be early. Doesn't mean it's a bad show or you're a bad watcher, just didn't click. That can happen sometimes.

I like American Idiot. I also like Kilroy Was Here, Operation Mindcrime, and The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. The point is I like narrative albums. I don't think American Idiot is as good as Ziggy Stardust but it's a pretty good listen at.

Edit: Also Imaginos.