Black Dog

A friend at work told me her 12 year old does not listen to current popular music, preferring instead the music of the seventies - Zeppelin, Floyd, etc. So do several of my teenager nephews, so I'm inducing that this is a common phenomena - tired of the same old tired music being mass-produced these days (by computers, I'm suspecting), kids are turning back to the days when rock music was being invented - when talented folks were experimenting with new sounds, new song structures, new wave, when record companies were prepared to ride initial failures to get to the more mature later goodies (Genesis, Elton John, Yes all had rather feeble first offerings), when artists produced an album a year (or more - look at the prodigious Elton collection) - remember those days?

So it's not just the old fogeys like me complaining about today's music nadir - the current audience is complaining too, and doing what I did the other day - slipping Led Zeppelin 4 into the CD player and marvelling at what those "heavy metal" guys did - a song for vocal duet accompanied by mandolin and acoustic guitar only, a song (now legendary) that starts out with vocal and recorders (the kind you blow, not the kind you tape), and a song with the raw energy and excitement of Black Dog. I remember when I first heard Black Dog. It was not awesome - it was awe a lot!

I feel sorry that our youth are not getting the excitement from popular music that we did in the 60s and 70s, even 80s. It really was better back then!