Originally Posted by thewave46 (Post 9504197)

To continue biguc’s thought on a tangent:

A lot of the initial potential and discovery of a new thing leads to a surge of creativity. When Dylan picked up the electric guitar, when the Beatles decided how to push the limits of studio recording, those reframed what was possible in music.

For movies, it might have been the emergence of the blockbuster, or the advent of computer-generated effects. By changing the limits of possibility, it allows the potential for something new and something timeless.

But, either the product becomes so cheap and democratization means sheer quantity of choice will simply prevent a consensus of ‘popular’ from emerging again (see: music industry), or it becomes so expensive that in order to make a profit, one has to aim it at such a huge market as to neuter a lot of the creative potential (see: Hollywood).

Which comes to another point about limitations. Our previous limitations of how we could receive media (radio, TV, theatres) allowed a consensus to form with respect to popular. When combined with our relative cultural homogeneity, things that spanned a culture were possible.

Or, the limitations of what we could do led to creativity in filmmaking (think not showing the shark in Jaws and letting the audience fill in the blanks for much of the movie) that ended up with much more timeless films.

So, maybe a shared cultural narrative may be a very 20th century idea in North America. I could be wrong though, and am open to the possibility of being surprised in an unexpected way.

Originally Posted by thewave46 (Post 9504197)

To continue biguc’s thought on a tangent:

A lot of the initial potential and discovery of a new thing leads to a surge of creativity. When Dylan picked up the electric guitar, when the Beatles decided how to push the limits of studio recording, those reframed what was possible in music.

For movies, it might have been the emergence of the blockbuster, or the advent of computer-generated effects. By changing the limits of possibility, it allows the potential for something new and something timeless.

But, either the product becomes so cheap and democratization means sheer quantity of choice will simply prevent a consensus of ‘popular’ from emerging again (see: music industry), or it becomes so expensive that in order to make a profit, one has to aim it at such a huge market as to neuter a lot of the creative potential (see: Hollywood).

Which comes to another point about limitations. Our previous limitations of how we could receive media (radio, TV, theatres) allowed a consensus to form with respect to popular. When combined with our relative cultural homogeneity, things that spanned a culture were possible.

Or, the limitations of what we could do led to creativity in filmmaking (think not showing the shark in Jaws and letting the audience fill in the blanks for much of the movie) that ended up with much more timeless films.

So, maybe a shared cultural narrative may be a very 20th century idea in North America. I could be wrong though, and am open to the possibility of being surprised in an unexpected way.

Originally Posted by biguc (Post 9504151)

Being nostalgic about movies reminds me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mniOdBXH2Yk

Ah the '90s: when every movie had a way out of place and way corny rap track in the credits.

Acajack said he misses movies with good soundtracks. I for one don't. I'd deliberately rupture my eardrums if we still had to listen to that Aerosmith song from Armageddon, or Celine Dion's Titanic song, every time someone turned on a damn radio. And don't get me started on Will Smith. Nobody's going to the wild wild west, asshole.
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Originally Posted by acottawa (Post 9504731)

I don’t think any nation state had a shared cultural narrative until the 20th century. Regions or even villages had their own songs, poems, traditions and often mutually unintelligible dialect.

To this day, many European countries (Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Poland) can’t agree on which supernatural being brings children gifts in the winter or on what day.

Originally Posted by Acajack (Post 9504730)

Titanic had a powerful song, which was used a musical leitmotiv throughout the movie, but that's not what I had in mind in terms of big time soundtracks. The same goes for Armageddon.

I am talking about movies with multiple songs, and where the music is almost like a character in the movie.

And I think you need to back further into the very early 90s and the 80s and even the 70s to find that.

Movies like Grease, Mermaids, Dirty Dancing, Saturday Night Fever, Ferris Bueller, Top Gun, Flashdance, Footloose... there are too many of them to mention.

Movies that had kids humming or singing the songs in the hallways and the schoolyard.

For my kids' generation they did try to capture that with High School Musical and Pitch Perfect, but that's about it. And I'd argue that boys never really got into either of those much, in spite of the fact that they were decent efforts.

And the proof is in the pudding: those "recent" forays into music-oriented movies were already 5-10 years ago.

Originally Posted by Acajack (Post 9504728)

I don't think it's an especially North American thing.

France most definitely has (or had this). Actually, for all their problems there it probably remains more intact at the moment than it does in North America.

I am pretty sure the UK and Australia already had this too, though it overlapped quite a bit with the North American.

Won't comment on the rest of the world but I suspect it's a very, very common thing.

It could be that North America is unique in how fragmented it has become, and that most of the world still retains a higher degree of commonality, either within national borders or at least within multi-country cultural "spheres".

Originally Posted by thewave46 (Post 9504810)

Oh, I didn’t mean it was a North American idea. I meant it was a 20th century idea that took on its largest audience in North America. When hundreds of millions of people were culturally on the same page due to mass media. There was more variation within than somewhere like France, but the span of people who lived that common experience was unrivalled.

Play the opening notes of Cheers on the piano at a party and see who perks up. Or people who know the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody. Or how they accent the catch phrase “I’ll be back”.

Originally Posted by Acajack (Post 9504829)

You make me wonder. How did African-Americans react to Cheers? Seeing as there were none of them on show.

Did they watch it just like "everyone else" (sic) did back then? Did they ignore it because it was not relatable, but no one was really paying attention to their feelings at the time?

Or did they enjoy it like millions of Americans did at the time, only to now re-think it and realize that it was a complete whitewash of Boston's reality, and probably or possibly based on racism?

Originally Posted by niwell (Post 9503726)

I played a lot of Sim City as a kid - the original was fun but really got into it with Sim City 2000 where I would try and make things as realistic as possible. Even moreso with Sim City 3000. Of course you couldn't get all the way there (Sim City 4 with lots of fan made downloads was the closest) but I would try!

Originally Posted by biguc (Post 9504151)

It's funny, power has concentrated so much in the movie industry. But musical pop culture has dissolved.

It's thanks to the internet making distribution and discovery easier. It started with indy culture in the 2000s, it continues today. Why would any of us listen to whatever generic pop record labels and radio stations tell us to, when our music players have all the music ever? Why would I give a fuck who Post Malone is when I can get to know Lou Reed, or Bill Withers, or Big Daddy Kane just as easily.

Millennials were pretty retrospective in our musical taste. Zoomers seem to be even more so.

But I do miss the days when people made new music--actually new music. And that's because I miss live music.

Musically, the 20th century will be an anomaly in history. Music changed a lot; every generation could claim a new genre or two. It was all thanks to the advent of recording technology which allowed music to move around the world and become something greater than vernacular culture.

Now we've gotten to the point where recording and distribution is so good that we barely need anyone to actually pick up an instrument. Kids can sit on their computers and not only find whatever they want, they can make just about whatever they like too.

But that's not an environment for innovation. Playing music live is a chance to experiment and discover instantly what audiences react to--it's the same reason comedy writers do standup. As a man danced, so the drums were beaten for him--as the proverb goes. Furthermore, playing in a band is a chance to collaborate and bounce ideas around. You get that same instant feedback. Try getting that from Ableton and Soundcloud.

Originally Posted by jamincan (Post 9504744)

I'm not convinced the data bears this out. Scanning the list of musical films by year on wikipedia, it seems Hollywood has consistently released similar amount of musical films each year with the last two being notably more bare, though I don't think you can draw conclusions from that due to Covid.

As far as blockbusters go, I'd argue Guardians of the Galaxy falls in that tradition of some of those movies, and certainly La La Land. Disney continues to churn out big musicals. There have been a bunch of major biographical films about musicians - Bohemian Rhapsody, notably, but usually at least one big one every year. Film adaptations of musicals continue to be a staple of the industry as well. Give it time and a few will probably endure past the decade as classics of the era just as much as the Disney animated movies from the 90s are to my generation.

Originally Posted by rousseau (Post 9505169)

Thought-provoking post. Actually, some GenX kids in the eighties were accused of being lesser-than. We were numerically smaller than the previous generation, and there was no denying how epic the sixties were, so our coming-of-age was overwhelmed by Boomer celebration and introspection in music, the movies, you name it. Many of us actively hated what was on the radio and went totally retro. I had Hendrix albums before I moved on to the Jam and the Smiths, and others listened to their Van Halen and hair metal while still acknowledging that Zeppelin and the Who ultimately reigned supreme. We were also leaving the Farrah Fawcett look of the 70s behind, so the new shorter haircuts dovetailed nicely with hip mid-sixties looks. Carnaby Street was an inspiration again, at least for a while.

Yeah, music has normally been communal. I would argue that it was really the advent of hi-fi sound in the late 1960s that shifted the paradigm toward most people hearing music second-hand instead of in the presence of performers. You could produce a decent facsimile of a live sound in stereo instead of merely hearing tinny, trebly AM radio, and the idea of leaving the radio on all day at home or at work became a thing, where previously you'd tend to tune in to specific radio programs at their scheduled times of the day.

What drove postwar modern music from the 50s to maybe the early 90s was the shock of the new and pushing the envelope, either artistically or in terms of social values. You had white teenagers listening to Elvis's "black" music, long-haired hippies, drug-taking layabouts, punk, new romantic gender benders, nihilistic grungemeisters, gangsta rap/hip-hop etc. disturbing older people and providing something for kids to rally around. But there are only so many notes to play, and only so many ways to be angry and confrontational. The atomization of the internet combined with the technical problem of there not being so many new ways left to play the notes or be shocking suggest to me that maybe postwar modern music is mostly a spent force.

An excellent piece I found discussing the tired cliché of taboo-breaking in art seems to be relevant for postwar modern music as well (naturally the timepoints for avant-garde art are earlier than for music).



Time was you got fleeting glimpses of how the culture was going to lurch in new directions from the buzz surrounding the bands coming to your town or appearing on Top of the Pops, but those days are long gone. I'm guessing the last vestige of that dynamic was the blackification of the culture by hip-hop in the 1990s, following which white suburban kids adopted a lot of the idiomatic speech of African-Americans, along with the clothes and music.

Nobody these days is expecting Tame Impala or The National, or even Kanye, to show us what's coming down the pipe. Because the cultural breakthroughs are coming from tech. Which is not to sneer at people enjoying live music, or suggest that it's going away. Maybe we're going back to the communal thing, given that the sale of tickets and merchandise are the only ways to make money as a musical artist anymore. But it seems like the cultural revolution of the West is over, and this is one more manifestation of that (per this).

Speaking of live music, I came across not one, but two masters theses from the 2000s discussing the indie music scene in Hamilton. Don't know if these are interesting to anyone else, but they are to me as a former resident of Hamilton who was on the periphery of the scene as a sometime patron of the smaller music venues in the city at the time.

Indie Rock Subculture: Hamilton as Microcosm
https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstr...1/fulltext.pdf

Steeltown Scene: Genre, Performance and Identity in the Alternative Independent Music Scene in Hamilton, Ontario
https://dr.library.brocku.ca/bitstre...=1&isAllowed=y

Reading these, you can't help but sense how small and inconsequential the indie music scene was (or is?). Five people in a bar on a Tuesday night watching a band from Ottawa on their entirely independently-arranged whistle-stop tour of the southern Ontario circuit? It really was that tiny, and not all that fertile, in retrospect. Though the passion was there for them, even if the future wasn't. I had some good times.

Originally Posted by O-tacular (Post 9504300)

This reminds me of how formerly great movie directors like James Cameron and Tim Burton who once had technological limitations to what they could produce seem to have completely gone off the rails with the advent of CGI and blank cheques from studios. Now they just produce formulaic, vacuous visual fluff with no new ideas.

Likewise I find Instagram has ruined visual art for me, as there is such a huge volume of similar technically good work. It kills novelty, creativity and originality. It makes it soulless.

Originally Posted by biguc (Post 9505294)

At its worst, you got the most memeably Xer genre: rap rock. You could argue that musical pop culture died at Woodstock '99, smothered under a pile of rapey proto-juggalos. The last thing it saw was Fred Durst's stupid, perma-O face. Music sharing came around just when our capacity for innovation had run out.

Originally Posted by rousseau (Post 9503676)

Yeah, no interest whatsoever. I never read comic books as a kid either. Only Mad Magazine.