Well, in my neck of the woods kids are just like they were in 1990 - same type of people, same clubs, same clothes - not exactly the same but pretty much.
You appear to have a misguided idea of how change happens. In art, innovation is almost never a sea change. It’s almost always an incremental change. While one paradigm (good god, I hate that word) is dominant, there are always several groups running around trying to subvert it in different ways. When one successfully does, you can usually easily point at its predecessors. E.G.: when noise rock happened, it was certainly different from what came before. However, you could still point back at Can, The Velvet Underground, Suicide and Eno being their precursors. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
Mass level popularity on the level of the Beatles or Elvis isn’t going to be happening anymore. The world of taste doesn’t work that way, and has been shifting away from it for 25 years at least. By the time I was a teenager, there just wasn’t a monolithic culture anymore. I don’t see why you’d think one would spring up today.
Your complaint about rap/metal not changing is ludicrous. If the band isn’t popular enough to penetrate your fogey bubble, they don’t count? Sorry, you don’t get to be the guardian of good taste for the kids any more than I do. I’d bet you didn’t play either of these types of music. Hell, crazy metal guitars don’t even have the same number of strings as they used to. I’d provide links, but it seems you’d just dismiss them as not being important enough for you to consider.
Enjoy your lawn.
Aww hell, I can’t resist a wall of links. Here goes. Remember, I’m old, so the kids are probably listening to crazier things than even I know about.
Dan Deacon - Okie Dokie
This man wires together disparate hardware to get the sound and performance he wants. He and friends re-invented the player piano in order to do things like Bulld Voice. I was honestly surprised by him when I found out about him in 2006. The closest thing to him that came before was Aphex Twin, and Deacon has a decidedly different attitude and sound. Here’s him operating his early rig on a local T.V. show, and here’s a clip of a more modern rig of his (pre player piano). Nobody performs that way live, not in the 60’s, not in the 70’s, not in the 80’s, not in the 90’s. He doesn’t crowd surf, he doesn’t stage dive. He sets up his equipment on the floor in front of the stage, and has the crowd press in.
(This is spoilered, because Bob Log III has a LOT of NSFW words for the fans live, and one is shot in a public restroom)
Bob Log III is a guitar genius/one man band. Not only is his shit perfect, but he rocks all day, every day. Sure, others have played the blues, but none make it rock in a modern way the way he does. All the same, he certainly puts off a lot of rock and blues purists. Being a one-man-band, he has the ability to do stops and changes that would be literally impossible for even a well-oiled band like James Brown’s band to do after the thousandth take in the studio, much less live.
And well, the best example of the changes in metal over the last 20 years would be Dethklok. They’re a semi-fictitious band, but Brendan Small is well informed of the changes in metal over the last 20 years. It’s not like Metallica, it’s not like Ratt, it’s not like Napalm Death or even Queensryche. To be honest, if pressed, I could probably play any of those bands guitar parts for a cover band. I could maybe play the bass part from a Dethklok song if they turned it up enough for me to hear it. (links all spoilered, because, NSFW)
I Ejaculate Fire sounds nothing like Dokken, but George Lynch wishes he played those solos.
Mmm, cookie monster wants COFFEE.
Seriously, metal is kind of crazy in a way it wasn’t before. It’s embraced its own silliness to survive.
If your complaint about Dethklok is that they’re not a “real” band, the real bands I hear from the metal shows on the community radio station are either far more extreme and/or complex. Kids have been paying to have these metal shows on for 25 years, at least, in my area. The shows are directly supported by donations of the listeners. However, the sound has changed, and the old shows were surpassed by the new ones that played the newer meta styles.
Even stogy old surf rock has had it’s hair pulled. Daikaiju has taken it to more complex, crazy places.
If your complaint about any of this is that it is derivative of art that came before, tough. Your heroes learned from someone, and their heroes learned from someone in turn. It’s when we reach the limits of what our teachers have to teach that we progress. It’s never by leaps and bounds, despite how it may appear to the viewer.
All in all, you might want to learn a lesson from what is now a very old song, and Kill yr Idols.
Yeah, a lot of this thread seems to be like arguing that humans are basically just prokaryotes because there’s an evolutionary chain connecting us and we didn’t just spring full formed out of the aether.
Mass popularity is still here - witness Gangnam Style - which, of course, is nothing innovative because youth culture is dead.
Yes, zombies shuffle along at a slow pace.
Lot of people don’t seem to know what the words ‘radical’, ‘minimal’ or ‘minor’ mean.
I didn’t say it didn’t change, I just said the changes are negligible - look it up.
What? Are you mad ? That’s the best example of the lack of change that you could present me with. And no, having a few more or less strings doesn’t count as a big innovation 1) cos it isn’t that important 2) because it’s old hat.
Including the experimental stuff that you list, and Sonic Pensioners - nope nothing new.
So, you got nothing?
Because I already knew what those words mean. If my examples have predecessors from 20 years ago that they haven’t made innovations on, gimme examples of them. In fact, give me one example of the innovative youth culture you hold so dear. I’m pretty I can use it to illustrate that youth culture shuffled along then at the same zombie pace it always has.
Any change he has heard of doesn’t count because it is just like something that happened before.
Any change he hasn’t heard of doesn’t count because it isn’t big enough to be “youth culture”.
Here’s the real question: did youth culture ever really exist? Or was it just a marketing creation that made products easier to sell? We want to ignore the fact Pat Boone was the second biggest act of the 50s (besides Elvis) because that doesn’t fit our notions of teenage rebellion. A lot of teenagers in the sixties were crew-cutted kids who supported us being in Vietnam, but those kids got written out of pop history because that doesn’t fit our “never trust anyone over 30” narrative. And even if they were, why do we assume edginess in your personal life means edginess in your musical tastes? There are many racist people who loved R&B and jazz; Solomon Burke remembered playing a concert booked by the Klan! And there were many countercultural icons (Dylan, the Byrds, Keith Richards, etc.) who absolutely loved country music, which in the 60s was only supposed to be loved by hippie haters. So just like what you want to like, and don’t care if your "youth culture " loved it.
Absolutely it was zombified 20 years ago. Fuck me if grunge wasn’t pretty much Black Sabbath with a few tweaks - they said so themselves. I was in bands, I had the style, it was nothing new.
You still didn’t look up ‘radical’ yet.
Youth culture *burn *your dog …
That being said, I have to admit I’m jealous of the ease with which Youtube/Guitar Hero/Amazon have helped the whipper snappers develop well rounded musical knowledge/taste…
Took me decades to develop a working knowledge of artist outside of the contemporary top 40 play lists. Each new discovery was like finding a pearl after opening dozens of oysters that was yours alone.
I think that’s a fair statement. Grunge was less about being “something new” IMHO than it was a rejection of over-commercialized late 80s hair metal and a return to a more raw, garage sound of the 60s.
I would agree that rap and electronica are new and distinctive in that they are a departure from traditional guitars and drums based rock.
As for “youth culture”, I would say that I agree with you that it’s “dead” in the sense of being a form of counter-culture rebellion that shocked the older generations. As another poster pointed out, much of that came out of the “don’t trust anyone over 30”, civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam protests narrative of the 60s.
Since about the 70s and 80s, “youth culture” has simply become a marketing campaign that target the tweens, teens and twenty-somethings demographic with various clothes, music, films, tv shows, electronic gadgets and other products. The actual music and clothes and whatnot change, but the business model is still the same. Make people under 30 feel like they are special and empowered and on the verge of making great changes in the world with their hopes and dreams during the best years of their life - and by the way, here are the artists, clothes and smartphones that define those hopes and dreams!
Yes, there always has and always will be a “youth culture”. It’s just not as important as we want young people to think it is.
I think LCD Soundsystem best describes this phenomenon.
