This is a continuation of a discussion that started in the “I Hate Beatles Fans” Pit thread. But we’re still very early in the discussion. Here’s what’s gone on so far:
There was a little more to it than that, but that pretty much brings us up to the present. Feel free to jump in. 
There’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that environment plays a big role in success. There may be various factors such as the state of the economy, new technology, and population fluxuations that influence success. For instance, if you want to be a great industialist millionaire, it helps to have been born in the mid 1830s. If you want to be a computer god, it helps to have been born in 1955.
It seems to me that all of the great rock stars of the 60s were born between 1940 and 1945. I wonder if there’s any connection there.
See, I believe this quote shows something worth noting, but I come to a completely different conclusion than the speaker.
I think what you’re witnessing is selective memory. Sure, a lot of bands put out a lot of music. . . but it wasn’t all good. For every flawless hit submitted to memory, people are probably forgetting 10 subpar songs.
Outside of the 60s, a perfect example of this is Prince. Prince puts out a metric ton of music compared to other artists during his (ongoing) career. Twenty eight or so albums since 1978 (the last being in 2010). Now, certainly that isn’t two albums a year, but he’s averaging just under one album a year for 32 years.
Prince is an undeniably talented musician, but for every Purple Rain or 3121, there is. . .well, everything else. I’ll be the first to tell someone Prince is amazing, but I’ll quickly follow up that they would be better of cherry picking, rather than attempting to download his entire discography (some of it is less than good). For comparison’s sake: Michael Jackson, during the same period (1979 to 2010), released only six albums.
So yeah, I think what you’re seeing is people forgetting the bad and remembering only the good. I may only be 25, but I think back fondly to albums from only a few years ago. . . only to realize, once I listen to them, that they are just terrible, save for a few songs.
Song/album length doesn’t matter to me. As an old person, what matters is (1) understanding the lyrics (and the lyric makes some kind of sense), (2) some rhyme in the lyrics, and (3) rhythm or meter or whatever it’s called when you can tap your feet or bop your head along with the music.
The granddaughters (ages 10 and 12) were watching YouTube videos here on Thanksgiving. The videos had none of the things that are important to me. There was no discernible melody except maybe in a short chorus (there was rarely a “chorus”). There was no rhyming. It’s like the producer/artist took what I just posted and set it to music.
I honestly think that’s why a lot of old folks still listen to today’s godawful country music. It has rhyme, understandable lyrics, and rhythm.
A couple of thoughts: teenagers started having a lot more disposable income (to buy records with) in the late 50s and early 60s, and “playing in a band” became a semi-realistic career path for art-school types who would’ve gone on to more mundane jobs in earlier eras.
I think there are plenty of examples of both.
I think there still are and always will be people who tend to buy and listen to music by the album (and artists who particularly appeal to and cater to such listeners), as well as people who buy and listen to music by the song. And the Internet (as a source of music) makes it easier on both kinds of people. I can go to Amazon, listen to samples of every song on an album, and decide whether I want to order a CD, buy & download the whole album, or just purchase one or two of its songs.
Yeah - electric guitars, more specifically solidbodied electrics, and bigger amps were introduced and refined by then. Changed everything.
I cannot listen to country music. Well, my daughter listens to Taylor Swift and she’s apparently considered country, and it’s actually good. Ditto for Shania Twain. Again, not my style, but at least this music contains some of the above-mentioned.
I’m not too fussy about rhythm or meter. Pink Floyd has a lot of great songs that contain neither. What hooks me is the melody. I don’t find newer songs to have any kind of a melody. I’m not painting everyone with the same brush. I find Lady Gaga, for example, to be pretty good as far as melody is concerned, but a lot of new stuff is just not melodic.
Hell, I’ll take Stephen Foster over most new stuff, especially rap and hip hop: there’s no melody.
The Beatles, on the other hand, were mostly about melody.
In general, there’s a pattern that the greats in a genre emerge when the genre is being developed. That’s because the rules haven’t been codified, and it is easier to innovate with something new than with something that’s been around for years (or centuries).
In the 60s, rock was developed enough so that a lot of people were working in it, and still new enough that the things they were doing were brand new.
If I am not mistaken, the only real way to make money in music today is touring and doing concerts. That is where the big bucks come in, and why the big name artists do those 11 month tours world-wide.
In the 60’s, the money was made with those record albums. Thus, the more albums you could churn out, the more money you made. This would make doing one album after another after another a wise choice from a financial standpoint.
In the process, you had a lot of very talented, young artists churning out song after song in their prime. Considering many of them died young, it was probably good that they were cranking out an album per season.
I do recall buying an album from a group, only to hear the newest alvum would be coming out in a few weeks. It wasn’t uncommon for me to be buying one or two albums per week, just to try to keep up with the groups I liked, let alone buy albums from new groups. BTW, buying two albums was a lot of money for a kid my age back then.
My (wealthier) friend Tom would buy dozens of albums per week (from lesser known groups) and barely had time to listen to them all before the next batches were coming out. But Tom had a great ear and thanks to him, I was turned on to lots of groups I probably would never have heard of if it weren’t for his high budget spending at the record stores.
yes music was better then. it was something in the water.
for modern music i like 60s rock (or things done by the same musicians that started playing then).
maybe part had to do with the recent electrification of the guitar and smaller organs (the instrument not any of the musicians). people worked hard at it because it was new.
there were lots of great musicians, production quality was high considering state of the art electronics (intricate music was done the hard way back then).
there were super groups (the term got started with Supersession, LP with Bloomfied, Kooper and Stills) some were short collaborations Derek and the Dominos, Blind Faith and were long lived groups like Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Cream, Emerson Lake and Palmer.
it wasn’t just music in the 60s but tightly tied to a broader culture. maybe the musicians tried extra hard because of it.
Youth driving culture never happened before the 1950s. There was a hint of it in the flappers of the 1920s but adults controlled the spending.
Teenagers became a distinct culture in the 1950s. You can tell because adults went straight into hysteria. We look back at the decade as passive and conformist and naive but they saw gangs and beatniks and rancid music and movies destroying their world. (Not to mention that the schools we think were so great were totally failing youth, with books asking Why Can’t Johnny Read?" Don’t get me started.)
Anyway, that meant that youth had an identity for the first time, they had money and power for the first time, they were hungry to get visible and influential, and they had no competition, nothing to hold them back, an infinite world to expand into. Everything was possible. All the old rules were thrown out the window. Except that most people liked the old rules, which meant that an establishment culture existed to rebel against.
All cultures changed in the 60s. There were new waves in movies, and literature, and science fiction, and fashion, and art. Having rules to trash stimulates better art than having no rules at all. Having shockable people makes for better art than when anything goes. (IMO, of course.) Rebels with a cause make the best art, which is why the best recent art has come from groups that traditionally had been oppressed and were released: Jews, blacks, women, gays, ex-Communist countries, Asians, and now Arabs, in approximate chronological order since the 1950s.
Music of the 60s is a piece of this bigger cultural movement. Everything came together for music to burst open. Technology helped a lot. Long playing records, stereo, hi-fi equipment, cheap electric instruments, FM radio, tape recording, multi-track recording studios, all the stuff that mostly didn’t exist before WWII was now in every home and studio. Clubs could reach teens rather than only adults. Television made groups visible and accessible.
So cheap and open and ubiquitous. It would have been weird if music didn’t blossom during the 60s. And it’s not strange that stuff since has had a hard time competing. It’s all incremental because the culture hasn’t provided a similar opening for a huge burst of creativity to set the past aside. Supposedly, the Internet is allowing new forms to grow in new niches. But that’s at the point where music was pre-Elvis. All potential, with no big name to explode it. Can that happen today? I’d argue yes, but the whole point of a an explosion of new is that nobody can see what it will be until it happens.
That is one great post there.
Yes! Very interesting, and it makes sense.
I would say that much of the music of the 60s and 70s was “better”. Rock was relatively new and had a lot of social tension to draw from with Vietnam and civil rights and all.
Music through the 80s tended to get more and more commercialized until 1991 when Nirvana and Pearl Jam marked a major shift in music style. But for all it’s “angstiness”, 90s music simply didn’t have the cultural backdrop that music of the 60s had.
I also think that having to purchase and physically own vinyl LPs (later CDs) made music more “tangible” somehow. There was no downloading hundreds of MP3s to listen at your leisure. You had to save up money and actually buy a record at the record store. It made people more selective I think.
There is good music in every decade, but I don’t see people listening to Arcade Fire in 50 years like Led Zeppelin or the Stones.
Fry: Wow. I love you guys. Back in the 20th century, I had all five of
your albums.
Ad-Rock: That was a thousand years ago…Now we got seven.
-Futurama
That might may be so. But I’m not talking about ratios; I’m talking about the quantity of good music.
Sure, there was a lot of crap in the 1960s, and I listened to a lot of it. For about two and a half years back then, my favorite song ever (as I mentioned in the other thread) was the Cowsills’ “The Rain, The Park, and Other Things.” (I YouTubed it earlier today to see if it was really as bad as I remembered. It was worse.) So what? We don’t have to listen to that crap anymore unless we really want to. And we generally don’t, because there’s this huge pile of great music from that era to listen to.
That great music may be the tip of an iceberg, with the underwater part being all the crappy music, but I’m not concerned here with the size of the iceberg, or the ratio between the tip and the rest - just the size of the tip, and most specifically whether it’s bigger or smaller than the tips of the analogous icebergs from the decades since.
Thanks, guys. This is my area of research (popular culture in American society) and I think about it all the time, so I love the opportunity to pontificate.
Plus, how many of us used to sit around and go through each other’s albums and 45’s, borrowing and lending, and bitching if something came back with a scratch or with the sleeve wrinkled or (gasp) missing?
If all your music is on an iPod (or whatever gadget the kids are using), you’re missing a little bit of that shared experience.
Which is probably the same experience we missed when instead of gathering with the family around the piano (or the radio), we went to our rooms and played our records.
Is Outliers the one where Gladwell also talks about the importance of having a LOT of practice? It seems to me like there may have been more opportunities for new bands to perform live in the past than there are today. From what I’ve read a lot of '60s rock bands had early paying gigs at parties, weddings, and other events in addition to playing at bars and dance clubs. I grew up in the '90s, and most events and many bars and dance clubs had DJs or even piped in music instead of live bands. This may be easier on the attendees – I’d rather hear familiar, professionally performed, recorded music at a wedding than the groom’s stepbrother’s cousin’s garage band – but this makes it harder for new bands to get experience playing for an audience.
In Hype!, the documentary about the rise and fall of the Seattle grunge scene, the point is made that in the late '80s/early '90s a lot of big name, or even medium name, acts didn’t bother doing shows in the Northwest. The big cities in the region weren’t all that big, and it was geographically far enough from places like LA, Chicago, and New York that it was easier to skip the Northwest while on tour. Seattle is home to a large university so there were plenty of young people around who wanted to go out and hear music, and since there were few opportunities to see well-known bands there were more opportunities for rising local bands to play shows. As a result it’s possible that many Seattle bands of the era gained experience/skills more quickly than they would have in other cities, thus leading to an unusually good local music scene.
That said, it seems like a lot of people in this thread are taking “music” to mean “rock music”. There are other genres of popular music. I personally hate most of them, but there must be plenty of people who hate rock music. There’s a case to be made that rock music has been in decline for at least 10-15 years (and arguably much longer), and it pretty clearly is no longer the dominant form of popular music. If, like me, you prefer rock music then a lot of contemporary music is going to be disappointing. But if I loved hip hop or dance pop or other currently thriving genres I might feel that popular music has never been better.
I think it’s the naturally increasing jadedness that’s different as time goes by.
Most new musics are one way or another regurgitations of what has been and inevitably it gets harder to come up with anything that sounds fresh and new/original without getting overwrought or repetitious.