How did my mom go from owning such a wide range of Rock n Roll records from the Beatles to Black Sabbath to devoting her ears solely to Celine Dion? Living in the land of oldsters and hipsters (some people are both), this question ultimately pervades every aspect of existence in Tampa Bay. Issues of marketed generation norms, like older people being more mild mannered and set in their ways and younger people experimenting with sex and drugs, maintain arbitrary divisions between age groups and sonic preferences. Generalizations of "Summer of Love" 1960s are quickly ripped to shreds by records by bored mutants like The Stooges. Their self titled record in 1969 and Fun House in 1970 destroyed notions of singular cultural experience by being nasty and unlearned instead of nice sounding and well trained. All that to say, history has never been as cut and dry/black and white as we are led to believe (likewise our present continues to be very complicated).
All my life I've heard things like, "now that John Lennon could sing" or "Eric Clapton knows how to play real guitar music" or other such flapdoodle. Those statements assume a right or correct way to sing or play guitar, and other musicians being inferior or getting it wrong to do something else. Iggy Pop's snarling vocals and Ron Asheton's unsophisticated, immediate and exceedingly raw approach to the guitar challenged these notions of perfect technical skill as the ultimate goal in music.
