After taking in Paul Morleys ‘Pop! What is it Good For’ documentary, he reminds me of the over used question ‘what was the first record you ever bought’. This is a common method of introducing the intelectualisation or sentimental celebration of popular music, a kind of watershed moment in someones life in which before there wasn’t pop and after there was and nothing would be the same ever again.
However is this question still relevant to a generation of twenty somethings and younger?
When asked for my first record I always draw a blank, I sincerely cannot remember the first record (or more likely CD) that I bought from a shop with my own money. I clearly remember listening to cassetes of Micheal Jackson, The Beatles (and more significantly The Muppets and Nelly the Elephant), as a young child either through my dads record player or my chunky brown plastic fisher price cassette player. Yet my failure to determine my entry point into the world of Pop music leaves me feeling a fraud, that this is irrefutable evidence of my disinterest of Pop music and that really, i know fuck all.
Yet for me, and also people of my generation i feel, this watershed moment never really existed. As a child of the early 80s, Pop music and popular culture in general had already established itself within the masses. As my parents had allready grown up through the sixties with Pop music, i was surrounded by the sounds of Pop from conception.
Maybe this question is more relevant for my parents as during their childhood Pop music was still finding its feet.
Also as my grandparents were not advocates of the birth of the teenager and the subsequent emergance of Pop music, my parents did not spend their formative years with the sounds Pop with saturate our ears today. Therefore they can recognise their watershed moment, the moment when for them Pop music began to exist.
So, surely the importance placed on the question ‘What was the first record you ever bought’ should remain with them, so i wont have to keep justifying my interest in Popular music
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