No, not some godawful tween movie. That feeling. When I was a kid, 17 held complete magic to me. In hindsight it’s probably because it was such a cusp age. Absolutely anything is possible when reality hasn’t had a chance to bite.
Anyway, I met Egyptian Hip Hop on Friday. They are all very 17. Part hip kids, part hyper intelligent musicians. They know exactly what they’re doing in a ‘what-the-hell-are-we-doing’ kind of way. They were a lot of fun to interview. I say ‘interview’. What I really mean is loosely guided chaos. I’m not going to go on about them now (except to say they’re bloody amazing) because the piece will be up on Dummy Mag soon but meeting them made me think about the internet…
…and how it is changing our experience of music. The music we used to listen to when we were kids was that which we had access to. So, the music of our parent’s, our friends’, the radio, TV. Today’s kids can listen to anything because they have access to everything. They can leapfrog through the top friends of friends of friends of friends to find music in other cites, other countries, other centuries.
That’s exciting and also strange. I like this erosion of time and space but I also find it bewildering. We can reach across decades and seas in nano-seconds. We can bring people back from the dead. We can be profoundly affected by music that would never have even reached our ears had the internet not been born.
Anyways, that was just what I was thinking this morning.
Ruth Saxelby 