I believe that this is a significant facet of OP’s thoughts. Unless I’m in our car, in which we only have AM & FM radio, I either listen to internet radio or stuff I like on Youtube. On our car radio, at best I can listen to “classic rock”, broadcast as though all guitar-based hard rock had stopped being produced at the end of the ‘90s.
On the other hand, when I listening to some sort of streaming, I can find the kind of guitar-based stuff that I like, and it’s stuff that most people have probably never even heard of, and recorded in the last 20 years.
GuanoLad, I could have written what you did myself. Can’t agree more. While there was a lot of crap in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the music was still not as commoditized as it has been the last 20 years or so.
When you add in auto-tune, digital audio workstations, and the disappearance of albums as a listening experience, the music experience is not what it used to be. The sales model is not favorable to the artists OR the listeners. The shared culture of those generations (“The new Zeppelin album releases on Thursday!”) is gone.
Regular readers know that I’m a fan of Boston (the group). Tom Scholz accomplished a lot by making the first album HIS way, basically as songwriter, performer, engineer, and co-producer. That was extremely uncommon at the time and very technically challenging. Nowadays, many artists and producers can do the same thing fairly easily using DAW, but they often lack the underlying talent to produce something exceptional…or even interesting. Synth here, cut and paste here, sync the voice here.
OK, end of another old man rant. Gotta go drink an Ensure.
I’ve gotten pickier and pickier in my musical tastes, in preferring acoustic instruments played with as little amplification as possible. Even in acoustic music, it is easy for grops to get into amplification arms races. We’ll never be successful - and some might say we aren’t that good, but when my string band plays at assisted living venues, the audience is actually hearing our instruments and voices. Which I prefer.
In the US, maybe, possibly killed by old guys who refuse to listen to anything produced after 1995.
But it is alive and well elsewhere, here are three bands playing rock written after 2000 and played by people who weren’t even born in the “good old days” (and yes, they are furriners and female-driven, hence my remark above).
I didn’t like a lot of the late seventies and eighties music when it came out (I was born in 1964). There were exceptions, of course. I’ve always liked Dire Straits, U2, John Mellencamp, and a few others. New wave and synth pop didn’t do it for me. When I was in high school my favorites were Zappa, Dylan, and The Who. I prefer the “alternative” bands of the nineties to most of the eighties bands.
I think the math checks out. I read an article once that says musical tastes solidify around age 24. So if anything you are more open-minded than most, continuing to like new music until you were 30!
Literally every generation has said the same thing the OP did.
It is a simple fact that there are more people making and distributing music than ever before. You can find new music of any variety under the sun on any number of streaming services or Youtube.
If you want straight-ahead 70s-style rock, I promise there are bands out there for you. If you want more experimental instrumentation, it definitely exists.
What we don’t have is the explosion of FM radio and local college radio stations putting out whatever the DJs liked. Instead the algorithms really want to push whatever will keep you listening. That does tend to lead to some pretty repetitive dreck. But you don’t have to be slave to the algorithm.
I’m picturing baroque-era composers talking trash about those durn kids like Haydn and their new fangled “orchestral” music, and how god blessed the harpsichord players!
QFT and I think that you can add to that the fact that white boomers had a near monolithic stranglehold on culture for far longer than most generations. They got to declare their music the only real music and drowned out dissenting voices.
some of us still care. I literally just wrote on my calendar this morning the release date of the next Michael Monroe album because I don’t want to forget to buy it. He’s not new, but he still makes good rock music.
Still nothing like the memory of skipping school to walk to the mall and buy the Iron Maiden album like I did when I was in high school. And while I still get excited about such things, my friends don’t, so I don’t really have that shared experience. But I think all of that is not the same as saying the music itself isn’t good. And @peccavi glad you mentioned the Warning—they are a fantastic new-ish band, you just don’t get to hear them on the radio. But then, who’s really listening to the radio anymore?
Some British professor just put out a biography of The Yardbirds, though it has as much or more on the whole British R&B/rock/psychedelic scene as on the group itself, which seems to have had no discernible personality.
I knew the hits, I knew the groups that made it big, at least in America. British Invasion rock was my thing, over American rock pre-1967. And I knew less than 10% of the names and songs he refers to.
His selection of contemporary articles repeatedly makes the point that the wild popularity of groups at the time was based almost entirely on their live club acts. Little to none of that ever made it to record, because live recording was still primitive and the British record-buying audience wanted commercial pap. There was only one audience, few radio and television shows to showcase talent, no huge arena gigs, and too many teen beat magazines catering to younger kids.
I was thirteen when The Beatles hit Ed Sullivan. Their music grew into new territory every year, perfect for me and my contemporaries. But a new crop of thirteen-year-olds appeared every year and by 1970 bubblegum music and soft treacle had taken over Top 40 in America.
That cycle appears over and over again in music. Interests develop and congeal, and so do the sounds, which are continually supplanted by other sounds. Nevertheless, being able to hear 10% of a very small music world fits into a head better than being able to hear 100% of a world a thousand times larger and more varied. One was the sea you swam in and took no effort; the other needs deliberate time, effort, and curation. Is the reward worth for the work? For some, sure. For many, probably not.
I was pretty suprised when I learned that this wasn’t a band I had never heard of from the 1980s and instead was a band I had never heard of from 2010.
Good grief, I totally disagree with the premise of this thread. Look, I love the music of the 70s and 80s — at least some of it. I love classical music and opera — some of it. And I also love music of today — some of it. There’s tons of great music being made today, just as there was in every era.
I love the Dope, having been a member for decades. But the one thing that annoys me is the regular appearance of a thread disparaging current music.
