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Originally Posted by biguc
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.
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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).
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And then—this is my contention—somewhere towards the 1960s the culture simply ran out of ways to shock. Modern art abruptly reversed course and became interested in things like Land Art and Warhol’s practical jokes. All kinds of people continued to do very shocking things for the sake of art, especially in the garish ‘80s—Chris Ofili threw dung on the Virgin Mary, a Russian man nailed his testicles to the Red Square, Ozzy Osbourne bit off the head of a pigeon, Dee Snider (worried that Twisted Sister was losing its edge) filed down his teeth—but the secret was out by now, none of this was stylish but annoying and exhibitionist.
Caught flat-footed were people like Albee, Ginsberg, and Gary. The assumption had been that artists were entrusted with the sacred task of “pushing the envelope,” as Albee insouciantly put it, but they were finding that the culture had gotten way ahead of them. And at the same time—and this was really unnerving to a certain type of artist—the culture revealed itself to be shameless, tawdry, and grotesque in ways that were supposed to be reserved for the avant-garde.
So, in other words, a dead-end—artists simply repeating passed-down wisdom about their expected social role as risqué exhibitionists without really considering what they truly wanted to create.
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/against-shock/
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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.