Time-Bound and/or Time-Less!

What also came out the Simon Reynolds book is the strange alchemy of POP.  People make music in the moment, and sometimes that in-the-moment-music not only totally catches the vibe of the right now, but somehow, also mysteriously transcends the life of the moment, and enters some kind of timeless zone.


Now with "atemporality" it seems everything resides in an endless, accumulating timelessness.  There is a vast archive of moments, eras, that are easily accessed by anyone, pretty much any time.


And you can dip into the archive, discover times and places and sounds and live with them in the moment.


Reynolds seems to value music that is "original" and "innovative" but what's funny, or paradoxical, is that sometimes it's the forward-looking music, the future obsessed music, that seems to "age badly," and sounds like it's bound by it's time.  A good example would be all that synthesizer music of the 80's.  To my ears that music seems so backward and dated.


And again, paradoxically, it's music that is based in some kind of tradition (for example: blues, r&b, country) think early 70's Rolling Stones music; that seems "timeless" to me. The Stones were very much a band of their time, maybe the biggest rock band in the 70's.  They are are rock and roll archetype.  And their music was steeped in the sounds of their forebears - Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Howling Wolf, Slim Harpo.


The Stones weren't really doing anything radically new.  They were kind of channeling that early music through their own British-based, art school sensibility.  But somehow they made that old music come alive in a new way.  And maybe because they were so much of the moment, and so deeply steeped in the sounds of the past that a certain "timelessness" just enveloped them and their music.


At least the timelessness of their music works for me.  What's cool about POP, is that each and every one of us gets to choose our own time-bound and timeless music for ourselves.