I concur – for the life of me, I cannot get anything out of rap, or techno. For the most part, it all sounds the same to me.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there – it only means that I don’t get anything out of it.
Humans tend to think of themselves as rational in deciding how music sounds. I submit that we are more like a partially-filled glass. We are filled with all the sounds we’ve ever heard, and all the things we’ve experienced.
If you play a piece of music for two different people, it’s like pouring ingredients into two different partially-filled glasses – the reaction depends on what was in there before.
How do you think the average person 200 years ago would react to the music of the Beatles? Some might enjoy it. But I think most of them would get less out of it than people alive today. (I was born in 1959, and I can remember when adults mostly agreed that the Beatles ‘couldn’t sing’. Hell, Louis Armstrong, as great a musical mind as this country has ever produced, hated bebop – my brother played me a live recording where a 55-year-old Satchmo played a parody of a bebop solo, conveying his comtempt for these kids who ‘couldn’t play’. This didn’t mean that bebop was a sham, nor that Armstrong didn’t have any musical sensibilities).
IMO, whatever music sounds like 200 years from now, two things will be true:
It will sound different than it does today; and
The people alive then will hear it with a different perspective than we would if we were alive.
And let’s not forget the ultimatly ephemeral nature of human culture. Sure, some day, thousands of years from now, humankind might have created every song that could possibly be created… but how would we ever know? Someone in 3542 might compose a song that is, completely by coincidence, exactly identical to Beethoven’s Ninth, but since all records of Beethoven’s very exsistence (to say nothing of his music) were lost in the great Potato War of 2904, everyone will think it’s brand new.
I’d also wonder if there’s a limit to the amount of music that human culture as a whole can retain and ‘keep a hold on’ before it becomes to big to keep a handle on. If a particular tune has been written already, but is locked in a digital archive in the Library of Earth where no-one’s even looked at it in seven thousand years, and then somebody comes up with the same tune again, isn’t it really, in a sense, new music?? Just a thought.
If you squint-up your ears right there has never been such a thing as a completely original piece of music. Everything has a precedent.
FWIW, listening to recent contemporary pop music if you’re over 35 is likely to give you a queasy case of deja-vu (or deja-ecoute ?) This has probably always been the case.
