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favourite bath-time listening atm = french radio london (223.936MHz) - to minimise the effect of dj drivel and lyrics and people actually saying/singing stuff - oh and to marvel at the seamless segueing between m-o-r Ipanema-girl-lite bossa nova to Parisian punk.

was musing this morning as shuffle was on, that very little from the past ten years or so seems to register in my head as a 'classic'.


Stuff from before I was born seems to automatically qualify and plenty from my youth makes it there.

So I'm wondering if there is less produced than once upon a time, or this is a psychological phenomenon, that we canonise the past, idolise our youth and dismiss the present?


Anything that qualifies from the last ten years or so?


If anyone says anything by radiohead I will apply to admin to have your accounts removed!!!!!!

I don't think music can mean as much to you in your 40s as it did 10, 20 or 30 years ago


Nor has enough time elapsed to put newer releases in context. Just because you thought something was classic in your 20s doesn't make it so 20 years later


Plus of course how we listen to music has changed - 20 years ago, you taped or bought a cassette of some albums and lugged them around with your walkman and played the F*** out of them


the 6th word in your post says it all...

maybe so, there are certainly albums I listen to now that when I'm honest to myself I think are far better than much of the stuff I listened to when younger, but they struggle to elicit much of an emotional response any more, unless I'm a few sheets to the wind at any rate.


Do I take it this means you think there are classics, that classics from the past aren't necessarily so or FILE_NOT_FOUND?

But music means so much more to your younger self because it speaks of other places, times and people. The future is out there and you are off to discover it


Now, you can barely find the time to cook for yourself in between keeping bairns happy along with work pressures and domestic chores (in your specific case, chores is too small a word for "the project" but the point stands)


You know more than you did then. You can forget about all that on ocassion, but for much shorter spells.


And that's all ok really. You still enjoy music more in your 40s than the previous generation did (generalisaton alert)

I guess that associative thing can be a two-edged sword.

I can't hear the B52s or the Stone Roses without a summer of '89 madeleine moment.


Most anything I buy these days I listen to with 3 screenfuls of c#/sql/python in front of me, it's most dispiriting!!

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Peckham's own Serafina Steer. I guess Joanna Newsome comparisons are inevitable what with her harp and all, but she treads different paths.


This song made me chuckle and was heartwarming both at once

Disco Compilation


I'm sure her ode to hipster hatred 'Ballad of Brick Lane' would appeal to woody.


"I don't know why I'm heading to brick lane

I hate it there like everybody does"

serafina's album The Moths are Real relly is a gem!


Anyway, got the new National album yesterday and have given it a couple of spins.

So far it feels like a familiar pair of slippers. It doesn't hit the heights of Alligator and High Violet, but it's early doors as High Violet was a slow grower indeed.


Also got my hands on The Violence by Darren Hayman and the Long Parliament.


I guess a double concept folk album about the witch trials of civil war essex won't be everyone's cup of tea (it may feel many with dread) but it really is a wonderful thing from the beautifully produced packaging complete with contextual hitorical sleeve notes.


And the music stands on it's own, Henrietta Maria, a love song from Charles to his wife, a love that literally tore the fabric of the nation in two, is a thing of haunting beauty. Sufjan Stevens would be the closest touch point I can think of.


"I cut the british isles in half so you could pray/


did anyone fall so slowly in love as you/

paint my face white/

paint my heart blue/

paint the fields red/

they're bloody for you"

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