All past art gets integrated into contemporary art and design. There’s a lot of impressionism still being painted today, it’s just rarely seen in a gallery setting. But hang out on Behance and you’ll be completely overwhelmed by it.
Same with music, Disco may be dead as a genre, but not as influence, or even sampled content. And Classical has never died, it’s just mostly relegated to movie soundtracks. Even poetry is thriving, just in the form of song lyrics.
The best thing about living in this era of social media is the sheer amount of new art I am exposed to, and educated about. More to love, and then more to explore historically.
Sorta agree, though as a poet and a songwriter, I don’t think song lyrics are really the same thing at all as poetry.
It’s great for consumers, if one can withstand the overloading. It’s not great for creators, however. I struggle a lot with what I can do creatively and what anything I produce can mean in 2017.
I read the whole thread and would like to voice an opinion on things I think haven’t been said…
Music and art, by themselves, should be differentiated from the industries that capitalize on them. Before the recording industry existed, musicians supported themselves by providing a live experience of music, obtaining small economic gains in return for their services. But, as there wasn’t any other means to experience music, these people had to provide those services constantly. I think we all know what happened afterwards the first recording studios were created, as they possessed expensive technology the general population didn’t had access to, so only a few acts had their work recorded, published and distributed.
I’m certain that there are other aspects to it, but this contributed to the ‘No.1 Hit’ phenomenon, which exists until today. Which basically means that the higher an act is on a sales chart, the more important it allegedly is. I’m not sure if it was always like this, but the music industry is a pushing industry. So, people with the deepest pockets get the broadest media coverage, because they pay for it until the majority of the population has become familiar with their product. That’s why you don’t hear about all the amazing music that is being created today. The economic interests behind the music industry play it safe when selecting what products to sell. And who can blame them? Consumers have always favored hype and fads since The Beatles. It’s a different issue that some modern and widely spread trends don’t resonate with an individual’s soul and body.
Great unknown artists are creating, studying, experimenting and working on their craft at all times. That leaves very little time to build the infraestructure needed to support themselves financially. But the smart ones have already figured it out and they are touring on an almost daily basis; returning to what used to be done a hundred years ago. So, the next time you see or hear about a non-local act playing a small gig on your city, go check them out! You might find yourself surprised!
The reason is a lot simpler. Music has been getting progressively worse since the mid 1990s because popularity started being measured by accurate automated methods, instead of by DJs who projected their own tastes onto the charts. Link
So we’re basically back in the 1950s where teenybopper bubblegum music rules, because it’s what most music listeners really want, whether we snobs like it or not.
Because it’s what most music listeners have been brainwashed into wanting, you mean.
But the malaise goes much deeper that what is on the Top 40.
Two things strike me about the modern (more esoteric) music scene-rather, two extremes can be found.
On the one hand, we have tons of retro acts and copycats (even tho weirdly enough only some genres are seen as worthy of such ‘honors’), including but not limited to all of the various metal bands and their superspecific subgenres. These artists are almost wholly lacking in any sort of authentic inspiration, preferring to go purely by the numbers. Any time I try to listen to them I am struck by how empty and uncompelling it all is.
But the group I truly abhor more than the is the whole “hipster indie” scene, where black is white, freedom is slavery, and good music and musicianship is to be avoided in favor of crap chord progressions, “lo-fi” production values (including ye olde dreaded compression), and last but certainly not least, atonal off key singing. The poster child for this has to be Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, which for some bizarre unfathomable reason is very highly regarded in a lot of circles despite exemplifying every single one of these abhorrent “trends.” Apparently this all sprung up as an ironic reaction against the “old-fashioned” notions of what made good music good, or something (perhaps precisely as a commentary on how hard it is to innovate anymore).
But I’m not sure at this point if any of these bands have much of an alternative. Put simply (got to get ready for work), the whole 1960’s–>1980’s period [choose your own endpoint] of innovation and such definitely has to be seen as a historical anomaly. I keep hoping that a group of bands somewhere will spark a new musical renaissance and sweep away all of the copycats and hipsters in one fell swoop, but there simply isn’t any more significant room to innovate anymore, it pretty much has all been done.
Yes, and we’ve also never yet experienced a “normal” situation with respect to the recording industry, as the technology and society’s relationship to that technology has changed so rapidly. There are people alive today who remember a world before commercial radio, and there are millions alive today who remember listening to 78s on non-electric Gramophones. And even to this day, with the rise and almost immediate obsolescence of iTunes and now the rise of streaming, I’m not sure we’ve settled into a normal yet.
I would say the other almost forgotten aspect relevant to the chunk of history you cite is sheet music. Sheet music was a big deal back in the day. You can find boxes of pre-radio sheet music at antique stores and flea markets, and one gets the impression of tapping into a long-forgotten industry. There are promos on the sheet music referencing what singer made the song famous in what show in NYC, and so on. So composers and songwriters made money that way, though yes, the performers likely didn’t make all that much, and most ended up completely forgotten. BTW, all those songs on the sheet music are all forgotten today. It makes one wonder what would seem popular and big and trendy to someone in 1910 or 1918. (Also, sheet music remained relevant long after radio became popular, but I was specifically talking about this even older era.)
Right, and as LC Strawhouse says, there were DJs and other powerful tastemakers, and there was a lot of outright payola and other forms of corruption.
Yes. At the same time, there’s just not enough mindshare to go around and give everything good its due. Nor will there ever be again. And I think that’s different than it was in, say, 1967. Sure, if you wanted to keep up, you had to work at it. But in terms of the past, well, there wasn’t much of a past to learn. (That past has increased in our own time with comprehensive studies of blues artists and collections of their recordings, but to the people in the 60s, things seemed so buried that they would literally rip off blues artists [cough, Led, cough, Zeppelin] and think the wouldn’t get caught.)
I’m not sure how “smart” they are (or how “dumb” those are who aren’t doing this) or how feasible a model it is for a lot of creators. I’ve read plenty about artists going on tour and still going broke, etc. And the touring itself can be extremely brutal.
Yeah, you might have seen this thread or participated in it:
I thought the Nataly Dawn/Pomplamoose thing was cool enough back in 2010, when they even were in a car commercial during the holiday season. That’s another study in the limits of fame these days. Maybe her husband (other half of Pomplamoose) will get rich from being a founder of Patreon (though that would be kinda perverse, wouldn’t it?), but they haven’t seemed to have taken flight, money-wise, as a band, despite the rather large amount of attention they have garnered over the years. He even wrote a blog post about their tour and how hard it was for them to make money, perhaps exploding or at least limiting the notion of touring as “the way to do it.”
Yes. I emphasized trends in my OP, as it is “pushing against” something that makes it stand out. Punk and New Wave each pushed against the standard rock and pop of the 70s, and eventually Grunge pushed against the degraded end state of 80s Top 40. Meanwhile, rap was getting harder and harder, and metal was pushed to its logical conclusion by Meshuggah and other bands. But then how to push against Grunge? Grunge was already not as hard or dirty as original punk, and without the context of cheesy 80s music, it probably couldn’t have existed. So we simply haven’t had any trends since Grunge died around 1996 (Soundgarden’s Down on the Upside seems like an appropriate marker). So we’ve had this devolution into the faux pushback you cite, in which various strains of hipsters are just going to be above it all and oh so cool. Don’t get me wrong, there has been many a good tune in the past 20 years and the creative arcs of certain bands has been interesting (e.g., Arcade Fire, which I thought I hated until my friend and I sat down and listened to all their music in order). But it all feels like a series of one-offs and not part of a bigger picture.
I think the creation of the rock beat was the culmination and, in terms of the broad sweep of music history, the endpoint of the popular music aesthetic. That mix of European melody and harmony with African rhythm and sensibility finally sparked and blew up. And the creative changes from 1955 to 1970 are truly mind-boggling. In that time and since then, that beat has been made hard, super-hard, screaming-hard; fast, ultra-fast, thrash-fast; dirty, down-n-dirty, scumbag-dirty; electric, acoustic, electronic; simple, sophisticated, atonal; straightforward, funky, polyrhythmic–and you get the picture. Everything someone might want out of it, in a general sense, has been delivered.
The issue isn’t that innovation is impossible; the issue is that only small-strokes innovation is now possible. Hey, I’m going to write a song in 5/8 time! Cool, but the 4/4 beat is what really appeals to people, so you’re going to be in a niche! Hey, I’m going to use microtones in my song! Cool, but it’s the simple chord progressions that are the most comprehensible to the average person, so you’re going to be a niche too. Doesn’t mean your shit won’t be really, really cool, but…
And we can extrapolate this to all of the arts. I’ve said elsewhere that the problem we have with stories now is that all of the broad-strokes plots and characters have been burned out, so people are forced to focus on smaller differences in order to innovate, but then that isn’t what pulls people in. Same with visual art, same with everything.
There is a third group, which I have a bit more respect for: idiosyncratic hybridizers, with perhaps Kanye West as the most recent exemplar: try to throw together as many (often disparate) genres as you can, and see what sticks together (or falls apart). If it works, we get something like* My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy*. If not…
But I have pretty much resigned myself to never seeing such a revolution again in my lifetime. <sigh>
Thanks, John DiFool, really good article. I think his citations of Hegel and Danto do a good job of setting up the problem we’re talking about. A lot of people in the comments “not getting it.” There is a sidestepping of the actual point that is similar to what we’ve seen in this thread.
I mean, I don’t totally blame people. These are quite uncomfortable issues.