Real weakness of music today: a lack of trends

Cafe Society
1

A couple things to get out of the way to provide context and negate in advance arguments that don’t apply to what I’m going to say.

• I was a teenager in the 80s. I enjoyed 80s music up to about 1985, and then I fucking hated it. I did a thread before on how music changed midway through the decade. I think pop music was pretty abysmal 1985-1991. I will gladly take the Top 40 music of 2015 over, say, 1987. I’m saying this to preempt the template that we get stuck in the music of our high school days. It may be true of some people, but it’s not for me. In fact, I preferred 70s music at the time.

• I do not think today’s Top 40 is bad on the level of individual songs. It may not be the greatest era of the Top 40, but it’s not the worst. I’m saying this to preempt the template of “Kids get off my lawn.” It doesn’t apply to me.

OK, now to my main argument:

I have seen 70s and 80s music nostalgia shows at Kings Island (70s and 80s) and at a club in Michigan (80s). It’s pretty easy to imagine those decades musically, isn’t it? The reason is simple: trends. There were trends in tonality, instrumentation, presentation, etc., that make the decades stand out. (Obviously, the lines between and within the decades are blurry.)

The trends and sub-genres have names as well: country-rock, punk, post-punk, New Wave, Hair Metal, rap, hip-hop…

And the 90s stand out just as much with Grunge, New Jack Swing, gangsta rap, etc.

I’m going to include everything up to 9/11 as part of the 90s.

After that, are there any trends to speak of? Will there ever be any 2000s nostalgia shows? I think not. Even harder to imagine are 2010s nostalgia shows.

This period has the weakness, of course, of not having good names. You know, it ain’t the 20s or the 30s. We’ve never agreed as a culture on what to call them.

But, as with many aspects of pop culture, including fashion, there’s not a whole lot distinctive going on.

Sure, there have been musical events/big summer songs (Call Me Maybe, Gangam Style, Blurred Lines), and niche genres (dubstep, folky/Celtic-sounding pop), and those are great, and I have enjoyed many of these things. Again, the quality of individual songs can be quite high. But there is really nothing to bind them together.

I think it’s fair to say that no major new genre or trend has appeared since the early 90s with Grunge and harder-hitting rap.

That is not to say innovation isn’t happening. I think the issue is that, with the rise of the long tail, individual bands and artists can innovate, but they do not end up establishing any kind of major trend. Hence, dubstep (or drum and bass) had some songs become big and has its group of fans, but it didn’t become something spread wide across the musical culture.

Thus, when people say music ain’t what it used to be, they are right. There is a lack of feeling something really big is happening or people are catching a particular wave en masse. And I don’t see this lack of trends going away anytime soon.

That’s my take–what do you think?

2

I would say there have been major trends. Pop-Punk and nu-metal, while they existed before the 2000s, have a very early 2000s feel to me. Then there was emo, indie-rock, metalcore (perhaps niche) amongst others. And that’s just rock music. Hip-hop and electronic music might be the most popular these days.

But of course, we can’t forget hipsters. In twenty years time I image the hipster to be the trend people associate with this period. They’ve existed for years, but apathetic teenagers existed long before the 90s also.

3

I see two trends in pop music:

– Unabashed retro sound. Before, if you created something with a retro sound it was more of a novelty, whereas today people take it as seriously as other pop music and without raving as much about its style.

– Dark, almost ambient, hip hop. I intensely dislike this because it is almost always accompanied by a lack of creativity which means the slow, deep drone in the background never changes.

However, it does seem that nearly-edm pop music has not changed much in the past 10 years. It is close enough to 90s dance music to make me wish the trend moved back toward 90s-style.

However, I don’t know if there has been a rock trend since the mid-2000s, except perhaps the fading of popularity of garage revival, but that wasn’t replaced by anything else, just a general decline in the mass popularity of rock in general. But all the hardcore-, pop- and indie- influenced styles created by then have not changed too much.

4

Thanks for the responses!

I’m not sure if the trends you mentioned are really big enough to be remembered–or loved, for that matter.

Is someone in 2030 going to have a cover band celebrating early 2000s nu-metal? Man, I doubt it. I doubt nu-metal will be remembered at all. But Nirvana and other grunge bands will definitely be remembered then.

Speaking of Nirvana, I’ve been listening to In Utero in my car and

  1. Fucking amazing album.
  2. Still sounds like “modern” music to me, as does stuff by Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, etc.

Which is rather amazing. Obviously, it’s a matter of opinion, but can you imagine 50s rock sounding “modern” in the 70s? To the contrary, there was already a big nostalgia for that music then–it was only 20 years in the past but it seemed like forever ago. Big 50s collections were sold on TV, and I had a few of them and listened a lot.

But the music of the 90s seems like yesterday, and I think one reason is that there haven’t been any big shifts to usurp its modernity.

5

How much have you heard of emo, posthardcore, and metalcore that HowSoonIsThen referred to? They have definitely changed since the mid-90s (if metalcore even existed back then) and are still around, with the latter two incorporating a lot more keyboard and dance elements than they did before.

There are already bands that are more influenced by American Football and Manchester Orchestra than any 90s acts. Some even call this “emo revival”, while of course others don’t like that three letter word to refer to anything that’s not 80s or 90s hardcore.

ETA: I guess this ties in with the decline of rock, because if you haven’t heard the new posthardcore it is because of the decline of rock, because otherwise you would have heard it and that may have influenced your opinion.

6

I don’t know. I’ve listened to the station “Octane” on Sirius XM, which is a lot of “hard rock” that all sounds the same (basically a variation on Nickelback and/or Theory of a Deadman) and sounds ridiculous, actually. Without hits.

I’m talking about Top 40, however. Stuff that’s actually popular–otherwise, it can’t be a major trend, can it? E.g., folk was genuinely popular in the 60s with the Kingston Trio, then Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Today, it still exists but is a niche genre. We can talk about trends within that now tiny genre, but they are not the big trends whereof I speak.

I may have heard some of it.

I will also listen to “Liquid Metal,” which is the death metal, etc., station. Stuff on there sounds the same as Meshuggah’s 90s stuff (including Meshuggah’s newer stuff). I can’t really discern any advance. I can’t really tell the bands apart either. I like some of the songs, but again, no real trends. And that’s a niche genre as well.

7

You don’t think the recent popularity of alt-folk/roots/newgrass-type music is enough to qualify?

8

Debatable.

It doesn’t have much to do with quality. I’ll take the Lumineers over any hair metal band. Sirius XM right now has an all-hair metal station. In 2030, are they going to have a station featuring just the Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, and their ilk? I doubt it.

9

The internet has made it so much easier for people to find their niche, I think this leads to a lack of uber-popular trends in favor of niches that each have become incrementally more popular in their own space. But I would say this is opposite of a weakness. Why would you want a watered down/appeal to the masses trend over innovative and ever-changing niches? It’s boring when all the bands sound the same.

10

The mid-to-late 90s correlates exactly with the rise of the internet and the loss of dependence on MTV and FM radio being the sole gatekeepers of music trends. This fragmentation results in a very low likelihood that 2 particular people will have a shared background and awareness of the same music.

I don’t think the 00’s and 10’s have lacked trends, but any trends are now not universally aware to such a fragmented listener base and varied unconnected media pipelines.

11

I agree.

Niches are great, and they’ve always existed, though I think it’s awesome that they can positively flourish these days.

That’s not something that makes the world worse. But it is something that weakens pop music. Because “pop” means popular. It’s not just the content of the music but the fact that it’s new and shared by the collective.

I think it’s good that people can, say, talk about 60s music as a thing. The Beatles, the Stones, yeah man, I know about that. Having a mainstream also empowers the niches, gives them something to contrast themselves against. Punk only made sense because it was pushing against something else. The same thing with grunge.

I think people in 2030 are going to look back on this time and maybe say, “Do you remember Taylor Swift? She was pretty popular.” Maybe pick out a few other artists, certain big songs maybe. But I think it’s mostly going to be pretty vague in the mind. Whereas the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s will still stand distinct.

The trouble is, once you lose the distinctness, it’s hard to get it back. Right now, I think the long tail and the difficulty of monetizing music in the age of the Internet puts music in danger of becoming something like poetry: something people do as a hobby without any hope of reaching a large audience.

12

Yep.

13

It’s hard to guage what we will look back on as a trend in music 20 years from now. Nu-metal was really cool in the early 2000s, but now it’s used in film and tv as shorthand for “this guy is a douche”.

I agree with the OP and actually read a story about a group of scientists proving that pop music now has less variation in terms of pitch, tone, beat or whatever else they use to measure music than 20-30 years ago. Which is why every song sounds like Taylor Swift singing over a rockin’ / hip-hop beat.

I suspect 20 years hence, people will remember various Mumford bands much in the same way we remember Dave Mathews Band or Blues Traveler. Something that every white college kid loved at the time, but seems dated and pretentious years later.

14

Running out of ideas + Decadence + Big Business = Genrefication.

These musical classifications are not really genres. If they were then the Beatles created at least a couple of genres every time they made an LP.

Classification is a way of excluding and limiting, rather than inclusion or description in our world. If I like Nu-metal, I probably am distinguishing that from other kinds of metal that “suck”.

We are a bunch of haters, because the music is not worth loving. We and the industry are in denial of this so we make up lots of names to demonstrate that there is really something out there.

There are great artists but the genrefication/hater/audience splitting syndrome gets in the way of them being known widely. This has been happening since the 80s. Each of these artists is so isolated it rarely makes up any kind of “movement” or genre.

15

You just tossed off a couple of bands and dismissed this. I am not sure - I have seen this roots approach take hold and emerge as a vital part of the music scene today. Similar to the ukulele - in your terms it is at best a quirky niche. But there is a huge, ongoing ukelele “trend” still playing out.

When we all paid attention to a small handful of stations/channels, the variety had to happen within that context, and every conversation about music was about the songs coming over those channels. Now, if someone wants to focus on ukulele music, there are a bazillion ways to do so, and it will never hit the radar of a “pop” music channel.

Pop/EDM/new R&B has been a big low-pressure system, sitting on top of Pop music for too long. But part of the reason is because folks who want to access other types of music can do so without needing to upset the Pop status quo.

16

Well, there was a stretch in the early 2000s of white guy rappers and rap-like acts that were clearly trying to be rap, but drew a lot of influence from heavy metal- bands like Limp Bizkit, Everlast, Kid Rock, Linkin Park, etc…

I don’t know if I’d call it a trend, but it was definitely quite a thing for a while there.

17

Lol, yeah.

I saw that. I think it comes down pretty much to counting the number of chords in a song: more chords equals more sophistication. I saw a graph, and I didn’t really buy the analysis.

I don’t agree that all songs these days sound the same. If anything, there’s a lack of a strong, unified style.

I think the Lumineers have some awesome stuff, but they have been doing it for awhile. Mumford makes me want to puke.

18

I think we forget how recently how much music was really new in sound. Rock and country, new in the 50s, with their progenitors (R&B, hillbilly, etc.) themselves being quite recent before them. Pop music as we know it today was created during the lives of a substantial percentage of people now living.

In the 50s, in the form of rock ‘n’ roll, you had a big wave in which the trend was for everyone to participate in quite similar tonalities, instrumentation, etc. Then people could push outward and against that in the 60s. In just a few short years you went from “The Twist” to “Purple Haze.” Pretty mind-blowing, really. Hence:

Nice point. They were able to really work the very, very rich figure-ground relationship of pop music to good effect: deliver what was expected to some extent while push against that and outward at the same time. And so did many other 60s artists, creating a fascinating maelstrom of change.

The thing is, you can only push outward from the ground of rock once. It’s like the rays from a light source losing lumens with the square of the distance. Without an original trend that people follow closely (such as rock in the 50s) to push against and diversify from, you lose the feeling of actual diversity. There’s no more ground, so the figure can’t impress. And yes, you get classifications that don’t feel like genres.

Well, “metal” itself is a classification, no? I recognize the truth of what you are saying, which is often the case. But sometimes there is something new to name, and giving it a name allows people to enjoy. “Hey, there’s this new music from Brazil called bossa nova,” etc.

I go back to the figure and ground thing. It’s as if the industry (and individual artists, too) are trying to spit out figure after figure without there being any ground.

An extreme example today would be poetry, in which any notion of modernity or avant-garde-ness or anything has dissolved into nothingness. There’s simply no ground at all. One would be hard-pressed to tell a 1960s poem from a 2015 poem, aside from mentions of current events, technology, etc. The same thing is pretty much true of contemporary art (and I love contemporary art).

Can the same kind of thing happen to pop music? Oh hell yes. I think that’s where we are headed.

I think this is true. Another thing is that supply vastly outstrips demand. People simply don’t have enough time to ingest all the music being made out there.

19

Indeed. And I think that’s how people are going to remember these things, if they remember them at all: There was kinda this sorta thing going on, oh, 15 to 20 years ago…

20

Well the biggest place that is over-genred is metal: Can you call metal a genre when there are ten or more subgenres? (Doom, Stoner, thrash, folk?!, speed, black, prog, hair, nu, old school…) To me it is the ne plus ultra of what I was trying to say. To me that’s decadence, a sign it’s coming apart.

I realized after writing that if I listed my idea of the great artists from 1980 to today someone would say “Yeah you’re one of those (fill it in) fans. What does it have to do with me?” I know these artists are the inheritors of the beatles legacy (Of following through the tradition of original striking beautiful rock based songwriting) and that Springsteen and petty for instance are most def not, not not. But what can you do? It’s hard to ferret it all out. I’m objective to me, but to everyone else I am subjective.