With Disco Music - Has Your Taste Changed?

[QUINNY]

After 10 months t(h)reading these boards (and even threadcrapping, according to one member, tut,tut), I'm personally surprised that I haven't felt more of an urge to explore some of the tracks I missed the first time around. The Euro/High Energy lovers far outnumber the funk brigade here, so I imagined that I might have picked up on a few records that I most definitely would have unceremoniously dismissed back in the day.
To be fair, I have lots of tracks in my collection that I only gave a cursory nod to when I was DJing. The really funny thing is, that when I drag most of these out or come across them after someone has highly praised their grooves, I still can't hear where the magic lies when I give them a spin. With some, just 15 seconds has been enough to make me whip the record arm off and yelp aaarrrggghhh!! There has been the odd one that's pushed a few buttons, but generally my taste has remained the same.
This either makes me musically 'blind' or confirms that my critical values haven't changed and that I was right in my intial valuation. In either case I guess I could (and doubtless will) be accused of being a stick in the mud, but in my defence, I have come to appreciate many, many types of music since I became an ex jock.

So, where do you stand on this? Do you still basically rave about the same tracks as you did back in the day, or have you been swayed in some other directions?

[Forrrce]

I get the impression that you were not a particularly young man during the disco period, Quinny :D ...so your tastes had, to a large degree, been moulded. It always seemed to me that in a lot of cases, a move away from the mainstream occurs in one's early teenage years, what with tribalism, peer pressure and all that malarky. Therefore, one is more likely to make 'errors' in their judgement. Some records still sound good to me, others don't, but I've found that I tend to be more fed up with tracks that I really liked in my, say, late teens/early 20s onwards as opposed to wondering why I ever liked them in the first place (early 20s backwards). Sure, I still buy records now which sounded impressive on first hearing, I'll play them a year later and they don't move me at all. But on the upside, there are many slow burners - the tracks (or LPs) that were just a little too (or un) sophisticated at the time (or too fast, too slow, too funky, not funky enough, blah...), which make sense a lot later - maybe because that's where your head is at and you just don't realise this later on. My personal tastes have gotten more no-nonsense after years of buying and playing records and DJ-ing - and I've found in my later life that I'm more willing to take records on their own merit and not by the standards of other records, which is something I forgot to do when I encountered tribalism, peer pressure and all that malarky!

[QUINNY]

I get the impression that you were not a particularly young man during the disco period, Quinny :D ...so your tastes had, to a large degree, been moulded. It always seemed to me that in a lot of cases, a move away from the mainstream occurs in one's early teenage years, what with tribalism, peer pressure and all that malarky.

I guess that's a very valid point, although would you believe that I was employed specifically to play Rock disco records in my first club in 1972 (at the tender age of 20). In Southampton's clubs at least, Soul, Motown, Stax and more obscure black music was fairly underground until about '72/73. The club I worked at was just about the first to play so much Soul & Funk (about 90%) and was still limited in its overall appeal. It only took a few months for me to play more of the mainstream soul & funk of the day 'cos I was on a hiding to nothing otherwise, but even the main Soul jock had to play some chart and rocky stuff. Punters generally seemed to have a much wider range in what they'd like or dance to. I guess '73 was the year that turned me onto funk, big time, but even then Glam Rock was heaving and had to be indulged occasionally.
In my early teens I was into The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Cream etc. and before that anything from the big bands of the '30's & '40's and Rock'n'Roll were influences.
My tastes have certainly been varied and widespread and these days I'm more into Modern Jazz than anything else, although I've always been loathed to become a total anorak about any music.
Due to my involvement with music in one way or another since I was 17, I guess I too have a no nonsense attitude to it, something which I must have had for a long, long time.