I’m not sure if that was the right way to phrase that question.
Anyway, I was sitting here listening to the radio when “Layla” (original 1970 version) came on the radio, and I was thinking about what a great song it was. When I was a kid, this was the kind of music that I more or less thought of as being from my parents’ generation, but that didn’t stop me from listening it. It’s a great tune, as are many other rock/pop songs from the 1960s and 1970s. And I don’t think it’s terribly different, genre-wise, from rock songs that are released today. You certainly wouldn’t listen to it and think, “Wow, that sounds old-timey.”
So, Layla was originally released in 1970, 42 years ago. When I was a kid in the 80s, something released that long ago would have been WWII-era, and there’s no way I was listening to old-timey Sinatra songs or “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” or anything like that, when I was a kid or now for that matter. I realize that some people do still enjoy that genre, but that’s the genre that was popular in the 1940s, and it’s completely, totally different from the genre that was popular when I was a kid in the 1980s. But here we are in the 2010s, and the 1940s stuff still sounds really old-timey, whereas the 1970s music sounds “normal,” for lack of a better term.
If I had a handle on musicology terms or whatever, I might have been able to do a better job with my OP, but hopefully people get the gist of what I’m asking.
My cousin was born in 1980 and go married in 2008. His wedding reception exclusively featured music from the 40s crooners like Sinatra, Dean Martin, etc, etc. Compared to a lot of the shit music I’ve been subjected to at weddings, it was extremely enjoyable.
So while I agree with your basic premise (music hasn’t changed a whole lot since the early 60s), I think that the idea of music belonging to your parents (or even your grandparents) has gone the way of the dodo (or the 8-track, as it were).
Yes, but I’d really prefer for this not to get sidetracked with everyone coming in to talk about how much they love 40s crooners, no offense to your cousin or anyone else. I know people continue to like that stuff, I’m just wondering why the genre of rock/pop has been more or less static since the 60s. (Maybe that’s how I should have phrased my original question.)
If you’re basing your judgment on what you’re hearing on the radio, then maybe. But that only represents a small part of the music being made today, and it’s by no means a random sample of what’s out there.
But since Layla, we’ve also been through punk, and disco, and rap/hip-hop, so it isn’t like there haven’t been significant shifts in popular music since then.
I believe the usual explanation is that the music of the late 60s and the 70s was what the Baby Boomers liked and because they were such a large demographic block, their tastes were reflected in the music of the 80s which influenced the Gen Xers who made the music in the 90s that influences Millennial musicians.
I wish I knew more about music. It would be interesting to see what aspects make something sound suitably 40s vs a rockier 70s sound vs a pop glam 2000-era song. Are there real changes in the musical theory behind the different styles or is it a matter of production? It seems to me that most music nowadays relies heavily on the ice cream chords and so, of necessity would sound similar, but I don’t know if that’s confirmation bias or something else.
IMHO, rap was the last real seismic shift in popular music. Many changes have occurred, but nothing changed the landscape and sound of popular music like rap and associated genres.
I believe I’ve suggested this before on the boards. I think the way our culture changes has shifted, becoming less cyclical and more accretive, largely due to the internet making it easy to access material from different eras. As a result, people have more opportunities to experience things that would have been closed books to them twenty or thirty years ago. The expansion in personal media devices has also made it simple to incorporate such material into an individual style. A few quick queries will turn up music from any era since recording tech became common (and a great deal from before), silent movies, stop-motion monsters, and countless old cartoons–all of which can be stored on a device that will fit in your pocket. My younger friends don’t care if something is old, as long as it’s good.
Musical change is a peculiar thing. It depends quite a bit on where you listen. Pop music is, and has been for some time, pretty much a corporate monoculture, and corporations don’t like change. Once the label competition shook out to the largely pro forma state it’s in today, and the distribution channels were locked down, change could really only occur at the fringes, and it was difficult for it to spread. It does so anyway, of course, but it has tended to do so more slowly and less deeply, because anything that would shake the status quo is hard to get on the radio. It has taken a serious swell in popularity for a new style from the edge–like rap or punk–to carve itself a place in the broadcast ecosystem.
However–and this is where it ties into my earlier point–the distribution channels aren’t locked down anymore. It’s easier to escape Clear Channel’s grasping claws now, if you’re motivated to do so. Independent musicians and small indie labels still don’t get radio play, but they don’t need it as much as they used to; new niches have opened up for them. They’re starting to have room to experiment, and new ways to spread their changes. The flip-side of that is that our increasingly eclectic culture and access to broader musical variety will keep most, if not all, of those changes from becoming as pervasive as the “sound” of previous eras.
I’m too lazy to Google the link, but I read an article recently where some group did a study of thousands of pop songs from the last 50 years. Apparently they found that in terms of quanitfyable measurement like number of chords, prequency range, pitch, (however they measure music…I’m not a sound engineer), they found that current music is actually measurably less diverse than music in the past. IOW scientists have found that old people are right! Today’s music does all sound alike!
Annecdotally, I feel like pop music (at least what you typically hear on the radio) is starting to sound like a homogenized blending of dance, pop, rap and rock. It’s a lot of Maroon 5, Coldplay, OneRepublic, Katy Perry and so on featuring Gym Class Heros, Jay-Z, Kanye West and Bruno Mars (often remixed by David Gutta or Benny Benassi).
As usual, electronic dance music is just on the verge of being, but not quite, the “next big thing”. Although my mom does like my Moby cd a lot.
There was indeed a seismic shift in popular music over the period of the late 1950s to early 1970s, when rock music was invented and most of its major genres were established. It was something very different from the jazz inflected popular music that had predominated for several decades before (and the rise of jazz, in the early decades of the 20th century was itself a similar seismic shift in taste). When I was a teen, in the late '60s and early ‘70s, my peers and I had very little interest in our parents’ music: Sinatra, Benny Goodman, or whatever. Now I have teenage children of my own, and they and their peers are quite as much interested in The Beatles and The Doors (etc., etc.) as they are in contemporary artists (but still not really Sinatra or Benny Goodman, I think).
There has not been another such deep shift in popular musical tastes since the '60s. Punk certainly was not one: it was in fact more a sort of nostaligic attempt to revert to the simplicity and passion of early rock and roll, after the intellectualized excesses of '70s prog rock. Rap/Hip-hop represented a rather more radical musical innovation, but it still got assimilated into the general framework of rock, and did not break the mold in the way that early rockers like Elvis, Bill Hailey and Chuck Berry did.
I dare say that one day there will be another revoution in popular musical tastes, but they do not happen all that often, certainly not as often as every generation. (It may have something to do with the wake of major wars and major demographic shifts.)
There’s a large element of subjective experience here. Music from the 1970s sounds “normal” to you because it’s the music you listened to during your musically formative years. There’s a lot of evidence that people’s ability to mentally adapt to “new” forms of music neurologically calcifies around their late twenties and thirties, much in the same way your ability to instinctively pick up a new language deteriorates during your teenage years.
Here’s an example from my own experience. As someone whose formative years took place mostly in the 90s, I found even as a child, everything recorded before 1980 sounded “old,” somehow, in a way I could never really articulate. In contrast, the music of the 90s and the aughts felt new and vibrant and revolutionary. In my subjective experience, it felt like pop music pretty much stayed the same between 1950 and 1980 - which is, obviously, patently untrue from a compositional or production standpoint, but you don’t intellectually grasp those subtleties as a 12-year old. All I could say was that the alternative rock I listened to “felt” different from any of the oldies that came before it.
Again, this isn’t to say that music itself has not evolved appreciably - as I noted, it clearly has. Each successive generation has added new styles, new instruments, new beats, and new vocal timbres. But regarding our individual perception of music… well, we are all ultimately the musical products of our teenage and college years. That’s when our biological receptiveness to new music is highest, and when we have the greatest wherewithal to experiment with different musical forms. Because my personal peak of musical receptiveness lay in the 1990s, I can intuitively parse out differences between music recorded in 1993 vs 1995 vs 1997 in a way that I find difficult for, say, music recorded in 1960 vs 1970. (I can do it now, as a reasonably well-educated adult, but it requires me to actively think about stuff like vocal styles, popular beats, and dominant production “sounds,” rather than just feeling the 1995-ness of a song.)
In a nutshell: 1970s music will always sound “normal” to you, just as 1990s music will always sound normal to me. And the kids growing up now will feel the same way about the music of the 2010s - they will spend their lives wondering why everything sounded the same before reggaeton and dubstep upended the musical tapestry.
I would go with this. I think music is evolving explosively given the increased accessibility to other styles and other people via the internet.
However, there is no longer a unified channel - e.g., one local radio station playing rock, or one music video station playing videos - that focuses everyone’s attention and shapes how music is listened to.
Add to that the fact that, as I have said on the board a bunch of times, music (esp rock and hip hop) are no longer the culture-gap driver of rebellion that they were back in the day. Kids don’t shock parents with music anymore - kids shock parents with what they do on the internet a lot more these days.
So music is evolving but there have been no big movements / changes that have pulled attention back from the Internet and onto music again, so we are getting a lot of rehash via the common channels like radio - and all the innovative stuff is happening, but you only know of it if you seek it out.
There’s a large element of subjective experience here. Music from the 1970s sounds “normal” to you because it’s the music you listened to during your musically formative years. There’s a lot of evidence that people’s ability to mentally adapt to “new” forms of music neurologically calcifies around their twenties, much in the same way your ability to instinctively pick up a new language deteriorates during your teenage years.
Here’s an example from my own experience. As someone whose formative years took place mostly in the 90s, I found even as a child, everything recorded before 1980 sounded “old,” somehow, in a way I could never really articulate. In contrast, the music of the 90s and the aughts felt new and vibrant and revolutionary. In my subjective experience, it felt like pop music pretty much stayed the same between 1950 and 1980 - which is, obviously, patently untrue from a compositional or production standpoint, but you don’t intellectually grasp those subtleties as a 12-year old. All I could say was that the alternative rock I listened to “felt” different from any of the oldies that came before it.
Again, this isn’t to say that music itself has not evolved appreciably - as I noted, it clearly has. Each successive generation has added new styles, new instruments, new beats, and new vocal timbres. But regarding our individual perception of music… well, we are all ultimately the musical products of our teenage and college years. That’s when our biological receptiveness to new music is highest, and when we have the greatest wherewithal to experiment with different musical forms. Because my personal peak of musical receptiveness lay in the 1990s, I can intuitively parse out differences between music recorded in 1993 vs 1995 vs 1997 in a way that I find difficult for, say, music recorded in 1960 vs 1970. (I can do it, but it requires me to actively think about stuff like vocal styles, popular beats, and dominant production “sounds,” rather than just feeling the 1995-ness of a song.)
In a nutshell: 1970s music will always sound “normal” to someone who grew up listening to it, just as 1990s music will always sound normal to me. And the kids growing up now will feel the same way about the music of the 2010s - they will spend their lives wondering why everything sounded the same before reggaeton and dubstep upended the musical tapestry.
I disagree. I’d argue that rap/hip-hop is actually more of a departure from the popular music that preceded it than Elvis, Bill Hailey, and Chuck Berry. Rap completely upheaved the role of vocal melody in music, replacing it with rhythm and wordplay, something that continues in popular music today. I mean, it STILL offends people today and challenges their listening sensibilities. It’s a 30-year-old-plus genre and some folks still are not able to make head-or-tails of it. That’s incredible, to me. Rap was far more a departure than rock was, although I will buy the idea that rock spawned more genres.
I’ve said this before, but that’s because the rap community has no interest in declaring any rap album a “classic” of the genre. So the majority of music people listen to is new and there hasn’t been a generational bridge between the beginnings of the genre to the current age (like The Beatles, The Stones, Clapton, and many others did with rock).
My point is that while rap is a 30-year old genre, it’s continuously looked at as “new noise” by a lot of people because the classic albums of the genre aren’t referenced and replayed ad nauseum like the classics of rock music are.
Well, to the extent that it is more of a departure (in musical terms, you may be right), it has not had anything like the same level of influence. It has not taken over popular music and eclipsed everything that came before it in the way that rock and roll did. Sure, some rock and pop artists have taken up some tropes from rap (as some did, a bit earlier, from reggae, for example) but that has not turned them into rappers, and rap proper remains small potatoes compared to rock and all the various forms of rock influenced pop that dominate the charts and the airwaves. However artistically innovative it may have been, rap did not bring about a seismic shift in popular musical taste the way rock and roll did (and the way jazz had done, several decades before).
All I could say was that the alternative rock I listened to “felt” different from any of the oldies that came before it.