It's not a curse, although it can be a source of the blues. I'm of the musical scene about ten years after yours, in the late Seventies into the Eighties, mainly. I know there's something about the music we've heard at various stages of our lives that seems more powerful than other art forms - sound, like smell, has such associations in my brain. I think of a live show and suddenly I can feel myself in a shabby club again. A couple of years ago, I had the weird experience of finding a recording of a band in a small club way back in 1979. I had been in the audience (that's me clapping on track 3) and it was a night that changed my approach to music for the rest of my life. The recording showed my memory of a band I had never heard before that night to be very exact - I knew the sequence of songs without reading it. The mind is weird with what it stores, and what it connects to emotions.
I consider myself lucky that I haven't locked into one sound or one period. I just keep finding great music. But I know what is no longer there. I saw Joe Strummer playing with Shane McGowan. Malcolm Owen. Peter Tosh. Toots Hibbert. Fela Kuti. Andy Gill. These were all major musicians in my life, and I've outlived them.
That's the way it goes. In a world of opiates, AIDS, COVID, smoking, boozing and just living, the losses pile up. It's when you're driving distance at night and you realize that the last seven songs on your playlist have been the voices of ghosts that it gets spooky. But then you think of how brilliant they were, and how good their gift to the world was, and you just enjoy it. I like this idea that an 18 year old can sample online music from the 1920s until now and enjoy such a wide range of artists as if everything were fresh - they can jump from Louis Armstrong's Hot Five to Fontaines DC in one smooth sequence. It's ongoing, mutating, evolving - like everything else.
When it comes to Spotify-type algorithms, I'm very misunderstood though. Tech can steer us away from discovery. It's like fish - do a little reading and you can do an end run around the ones who think they can choose your tastes for you.