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1 year 8 months ago
- Posts: 1774
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By that logic, by that logic, by that logic, a song from 1950 can't be retro because there is music in 2013!
I can tell a movie from 1950. The film stock, the wardrobe, the cars, the makeup, the special effects, everything about it is unlike the current style.
What you are saying is like saying that a phone booth is not retro, because it is only six years old (because I saw one in 2007 and it still worked.)
Imagine you are a person who had no knowledge of music, historically or currently. I know this will be difficult, because you have a lot of trouble empathizing or taking yourself out of your own head. But try. Imagine you are such a person. Maybe you have lived in Amish country your whole life. Now, imagine that from that situation, you come into modern mainstream society and you wish to learn all about music. You visit a prominent music theory teacher or a well-regarded music critic. He has you sit down and takes through all the history of recorded music. You listen to it all and you take notes about when different songs and styles were in the public consciousness (because you are studying to be a decadologist, of course.) You understand jazz and electric blues and honky tonk and folk and countryand country & western and gospel and rhythm & blues and rock and rock & roll and metal and punk and rap and hip hop and industrial and grunge and r&b and techno and all the subgenres in between. This extensive education of popular music takes three years. You have learned when each of these styles was first popular, when they had revivals, the most important examples of each, who were the major players, etc. It is now 2016. But you never heard Gangnam Style. Technopop music, as in 2013, is still popular. (I don't know if this will be the case. But remember, we are "pretending." Your teacher finally gets around to playing Gangnam Style for you. Can you tell the difference between it and a newer song that is also techno pop? No, you cannot. It's time as a fad is long gone, yet it is still in the mode of current music. There are still many other things that are very similar to it. Yet there is nothing like a phone booth or cassette tape still being used by many people. That is The Difference.
Nobody by any logic said anything that could be construed by a non-psychotic person to mean that Gangname Style is retro. Yet you came to that conclusion that somebody was saying something equivalent.
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