Are Oldies Really Goodies?

This is something that people I know in real life have heard me complain about a lot, especially of late because I've been watching Kerrang! TV at night, and they seem to fall prey to this very often. My problem is this; do we continue to glorify older bands like Nirvana and The Beatles because they're actually really good, or because they're old and one of them's dead?

Now, don't get me wrong, the various fan clubs out there, I'm not saying that bands like that were terrible. What I'm saying is that I'm not sure they deserve this iconic status they've been given, as if every single thing they've written was like angel song.

Both Nirvana and The Beatles (as my example bands for this post) have quite obviously been influential on the development of music over the years, but that, to me, doesn't mean the same thing as musical brilliance. Because my nana is a massive Beatles fangirl (she has a clock that is just their faces and no numbers which really confuses me because I can barely tell the time as it is), I've grown up with them being played at every special occasion the family's had over the years, and I do love the song She Loves You. I've heard a fair amount of Nirvana stuff because, if you watch Kerrang! TV, you can't get away from Smells Like Teen Spirit and Heart-Shaped Box, and the Nevermind album is on the jukebox at work so the hipsters come in and pick their 'favourite song' off it and then run off. They're alright bands, they have produced some good songs, but is it really necessary that we hail them as gods just because they're old and there's a tragic-hero type involved with them?

Again with the 'but they've been so influential on music' point. You don't have to be brilliant to be influential, you just have to come up with something that works and other people can build on. When we were developing language, someone had to come up with that basic idea of 'subject verb object' (if you're an English speaker) for someone else to then build on that and go 'hey it sounds even better if we put some possessive pronouns in here'. Syntax maybe isn't the most fun or beautiful thing in the world - unless you're me, who gives standing ovations for German sentence structure - but it is nevertheless important for you to build the rest of the sentence on. Does that make sense?

With my 'tragic hero' point I keep making, I'm not trying to make light of Kurt Cobain's suicide or any other celebrity's death - it's more something like the opposite. I feel like the way people treat Kurt killing himself is like it's something that never happens to anyone else, or at least isn't as important when it does. No. Kurt killing himself was a terrible thing to happen. All the hundreds and thousands of people who've killed themselves whose names you'll never know are just as tragic, but you don't see that much media saying how much they matter to the world, do you? When John Lennon was killed, yes it was John Lennon, but it was also a man getting shot, which happens so much these days, and yet nobody seems to care as much. I don't see what makes them any more deserving of reverence than any of the faceless victims out there.

I don't blame people for automatically assuming that old bands are brilliant purely because they're old, because we're basically taught to do that by everyone else around us. The place you're probably most likely to hear Nirvana when you get to the age where you start actually paying attention to music is likely to be either on an album your parents own, in which case you can assume they're going to like the band, or on a music channel, and on music channels they can never ever just say 'and here's Smells Like Teen Spirit', they have to go full-on 'ICONIC BAND WOW SO LOVELY CREATED LIFE ON EARTH WORSHIP KURT COBAIN MMMMM BEST MUSIC'. Obviously, that's likely to leave you with this subconscious idea that that's exactly how you should see them.
It's a problem I have myself, I've just realised, with The Cure and The Smiths. I really like them, and when a friend of mine who went to Reading and Leeds (I WANT TO GO THIS YEAR) last summer said they'd had the chance to go and see The Cure perform and turned it down to see Crystal Castles instead, I went mental. Why? Because, as far as I was concerned at the time, The Cure were a staple part of British music and it would be sacrilege to not see them when given the chance, because they are The Cure. The same goes for The Smiths. They were good, and I like a lot of their songs, but there's also a fair few of their songs that are actually quite boring, but we say we like them anyway because they're part of our heritage. Like grandparents. Not all of them 'did something during the war', but you still generally have to respect them anyway, because they're your grandparents.

So that's my rant. I'm not saying they're not good bands - I keep repeating that over and over, but I know that if this is going to get any response it's going to be off people who will try to take any opportunity possible to interpret this as me mindlessly slamming 'TeH bEsT bAnDs In TeH wUrLd' - but I'm saying that, as music is an art, and therefore its quality changes from person to person, you can't say that they're universally brilliant. However, because it's been ingrained into the core of my being by GCSE and AS essay practice to always try to argue both sides, that also means that no band or artist is universally unimportant, and nobody has the right to say so - not even me, no matter how much I might like to pass my opinions off as fact, and especially not you.