You know, continuing the thought from last post, my generation of composers (Downtowners at least) was the "no guilty pleasures" generation. For some reason I associate the phrase first with Anthony Coleman and a subsection of Downtown improvisers, but I remember the slogan becoming quite common circa 1990. "No guilty pleasures" meant that any music we liked, we were going to like openly and use as perfectly legitimate source material and models for our music, whether it was cartoon music, easy listening, C&W, space age bachelor pad music, or anything else. What do kids today think John Zorn playing Ennio Morricone (1986) was all about? Or Eugene Chadbourne doing avant-garde country and western at New Music America? Or John Oswald sampling Dolly Parton and Michael Jackson? Or Eve Beglarian appropriating disco songs? Even one of my microtonal tunes is a surreptitious C&W cover. And the young composers assume people my age will get our knickers in a knot just because they're into film music? They have zero sense of history. I feel insulted on behalf of my entire generation. If they need us to be the old fogies telling them they can't do that, we will not oblige. We already won that battle for them.

(Meanwhile, in my experience, those same young composers turn up their noses if we mix genres, say, use a trap set in a notated piece. They're the ones with prohibitions.)

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