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(Credits: Far Out / Patti Smith)
Growing up, I revolted at adults telling me the music I liked wasn’t as good as that of their “heyday”. Hence, I feel passionately about defending generational divides within the art form.
It was lazy, reductive and, not to mention, entirely wrong. All good art, whether it was Patti Smith in the 1970s or Wolf Alice in the 2020s, engages with the world around it, and that’s ultimately where true greatness lies.
That being said, as I creep ever closer to cynical adulthood, I feel the worrying habits infiltrate my listening habits. My outright dislike for the TikTokification of music has put anything remotely chart-based in exile for me. Which is unfair, because even in the swathes of commercial pop music, something innovative and engaging always exists.
I don’t want to dampen the spirit of whatever generation comes after me by freezing my taste in the period of my adolescence, I want to remain open minded and optimistic about the future of music. Because music will always prevail through whatever bullshit inevitably comes our way in the minefield of modern society.
But look, there is no doubting that my counterparts, who herald the music of the 1970s, have views rooted in validity. It was undoubtedly a decade brimming with artistic greatness and gave way to music that to this day remains increasingly important and innovative. Take Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On for example. Released in 1971 and arguably the greatest record of all time, it feels brutally relevant to the modern world and will likely remain so for another 50 years.
That was in a decade that gave way to the likes of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and of course the previously mentioned and always great Patti Smith. Smith was an innovator of that decade and a stalwart in a scene occupied by fellow greats. She made a name for herself by pushing songwriting forward and right to the very edge, finding new ways to fuse poetry and rock.
She had the sort of artistic sensibilities to be a perennial pioneer, with a finger firmly on the modern pulse. But in 1988, when she was asked about the next exciting artist, she felt compelled to leave it to the kids and leave her heart firmly in the decade in which she prospered.
“As far as having a favourite group, or anything like that, I already had that in my life,” she explained, “I had Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison, and Bob Dylan. For the amount of feeling and passion and commitment I had, those were my people. All these new groups and new people belong to a younger generation. They didn’t have The Rolling Stones when I had them.”
Smith taps into a flip side to my argument. The idea that passing fandom onto a new generation doesn’t equal snobbery. It doesn’t mean a dismissal of all things contemporary. Instead, it means putting faith in the following generation, trusting them to consume art with the relative care and respect to keep music moving forward.
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