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Dec. 1st, 2020 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
totientLong ago I was a huge Depeche Mode fan. Enough of a fan to go see them at the Forum in LA -- a terrible concert venue, especially for a band that's really not so great in concert -- and enjoy it anyway.
Then I found a whole bunch of other music, and Depeche Mode stopped doing much new work, and they fell out of my rotation, and then into the bin of music I mostly avoided, or was embarrassed about having been a fan of. They pretty much stayed in that bin for most of the last 25 years, even when I was listening to other 80s emo music.
And then Johnny Cash covered Personal Jesus.
There's pretty much no better way to give emo some gravitas than that. Some time has also winnowed out the chaff, as it does for anything really. The illusion of things improving with age -- antiques, art, architecture, maybe even wine -- is just us discarding or using up the worse examples and preserving the better ones. It gets easier and easier to appreciate what's left.
And so I'm back to a bit of pride, when it came up in a random mix, to be able to recognize Strangelove at 0:01 when the first actual note is not until 0:08.
Then I found a whole bunch of other music, and Depeche Mode stopped doing much new work, and they fell out of my rotation, and then into the bin of music I mostly avoided, or was embarrassed about having been a fan of. They pretty much stayed in that bin for most of the last 25 years, even when I was listening to other 80s emo music.
And then Johnny Cash covered Personal Jesus.
There's pretty much no better way to give emo some gravitas than that. Some time has also winnowed out the chaff, as it does for anything really. The illusion of things improving with age -- antiques, art, architecture, maybe even wine -- is just us discarding or using up the worse examples and preserving the better ones. It gets easier and easier to appreciate what's left.
And so I'm back to a bit of pride, when it came up in a random mix, to be able to recognize Strangelove at 0:01 when the first actual note is not until 0:08.
