So am I officially old? Have I passed the limit where I don’t understand the new generation?
There is a sort of feud going on between Noel Gallagher and EDM acts, the ex-Oasis guitarist made a mockery of EDM performers, and with his usual wit, he commented on Avicii who was performing at the same festival than his High Flying Birds:
‘I don’t know anything about Avicii. I don’t wish to know anything about Avicii. It sounds like an artist from the Renaissance period.”
‘I don’t know, is it like that David Guetta nonsense?’
‘Don’t worry, I can save [the festival] after that.’
In a previous comment he had declared:
‘Dance music sounds like a walk in the park now. Any fucker can do it – and quite frankly, every fucker is doing it.’
You have to admit that he is funny, plus I share his point of view about the genre, EDM bores me to death, especially when it is played live.
However, EDM artist Van Helden has responded to Noel Gallagher’s attack via Gigwise:
‘Any real musician is going to look at a DJ or an EDM artist and be like ‘What is that and how did that even work in the first place?’. If you’re out there on stage and you’re a drummer, a guitarist a frontman or whatever – you’re a band, that’s just raw talent being exposed on a stage.
With the chemistry going on, that’s just a magical moment. With a DJ or the EDM thing, they don’t get it. It’s a completely different thing – the youth is always supposed to piss off the elders. The youth will always find a way to make sure that their parents don’t like their music. To me, EDM, dance music and DJ culture is just following in this path that we’ve been in forever.’
‘When jazz was brand new, all of the people that first heard it called it ‘cacaphone’ – ‘That’s just a bunch of noise, that’s not real music’. Jazz is the music we’re talking about right now. Jazz now is considered the most musical you can be.’
I agree with the part that the youth is always going to piss off the elders, but is it fair to compare EDM to jazz? From my ‘old’ perspective, I would say NO! and this is coming from a person who does not really appreciate jazz, still, I recognize its endless creativity. EDM on the other hand – and I am only talking about EDM not electronic music which is much more vast – doesn’t appear creative to me, all the acts sound exactly the same with very few nuances, although I have to admit that my experience is quite limited, because I avoid them in festivals… but they don’t strike me as creative, certainly not, it’s always the same boring pounding rhythm that only kids on MDMA can endure for more than 10 minutes.
So I am officially old, kids’ music pisses me off, although I don’t feel like an old woman screaming at youth over her fence.