Changes

20 years and Music.

It’s amazing how much music is out there. Equally amazing is how teens feel about music. When I was their age (after walking 6 miles up hill, both ways to school, in the snow without shoes because they didn’t exist) people were labelled as music type. There was the pop lover, the metal head, the tree hugging hippy and the raver etc etc. These poeple only listened to these styles of music. The genres of music still exis but the labels on the listener have lifted.

When I first started teaching I would ask my students what type of music they listened to. At first a few would reply, “everything”. And I mostly didn’t believe them, until I noticed that more and more students were responding this way. I would look at their Ipods and sure enough, they listened to EVERYTHING. From the Beasty Boys to Van Morrison to Abba to Zappa to Aerosmith to Taylor swift and so on and so on. And it would be little clusters of songs by those artists, not full albums.


So it got me thinking. If this is how they relate to music, so freely able to accept “what sounds good” and not what type/style of music it is, are they going to be responding and acting the same way to current events, politics, race, sex, business and marriage when they realize their place in the world? Because that would be cool.