Old fogey opinions on modern popular music amnesty

[ska invita]

You were talking about a theoretical n-dimensional space of musical permutations, as if it had been largely mined.

From its key components of chords, chord progressions, drum patterns, then yes.

And Im not saying we have run out of music, I listen to and love a lot of new music...but dont expect revolutionary breakthroughs on the scale of the last 100 years. Expect tradition forming around what has already been created.

Above all music is a language and the important thing is what is being said

 

[Pickman's model]

From its key components of chords, chord progressions, drum patterns, then yes.

And Im not saying we have run out of music, I listen to and love a lot of new music...but dont expect revolutionary breakthroughs on the scale of the last 100 years. Expect tradition forming around what has already been created.

Above all music is a language and the important thing is what is being said

the thing about revolutionary outbreaks is that they are unforeseen. it's utter bilge to suggest as you do that rhythm has been exhausted. let alone instruments. the 'end of music' like the 'end of history' is something we can easily rely upon to be proved false.

 

[8ball]

From its key components of chords, chord progressions, drum patterns, then yes.

And Im not saying we have run out of music, I listen to and love a lot of new music...but dont expect revolutionary breakthroughs on the scale of the last 100 years. Expect tradition forming around what has already been created.

Above all music is a language and the important thing is what is being said

I think there are good reasons to believe the last 100 years was special historically for the development of music for a lot of diverse reasons, so agree that expecting two of those centuries to happen consecutively isn’t necessarily reasonable.

The future is, of course, unwritten.

I’d also contend that your conception of “key components” is reductive and also incomplete on its own terms.

Agree on your last point.

 

[ska invita]

the thing about revolutionary outbreaks is that they are unforeseen. it's utter bilge to suggest as you do that rhythm has been exhausted. let alone instruments. the 'end of music' like the 'end of history' is something we can easily rely upon to be proved false.

no its not "utter bilge"...we can look at history and with hindsight see what the engines of these revolutionary outbreaks were... they dont come out of thin air...its a material history. And the material for those revolutionary outbreaks is drying up.

i dont know enough about postmodernism to use the term with any confidence but i think we are moving into a really postmodern age when it comes to music, much more so than in the 80s when it was being talked about then.

 

[ska invita]

you might get a new synthetic drug which leads million of people to listen to a new form of music that combines classical chinese stringed melodies with tuned down tablas and FM synths on top <this might sound new, and the scene would be new, but it would still be derivative...it would still be a way of recombining already existing elements

 

[8ball]

no its not "utter bilge"...we can look at history and with hindsight see what the engines of these revolutionary outbreaks were... they dont come out of thin air...its a material history. And the material for those revolutionary outbreaks is drying up.

i dont know enough about postmodernism to use the term with any confidence but i think we are moving into a really postmodern age when it comes to music, much more so than in the 80s when it was being talked about then.

That was connected to my point too (the material history stuff). And agree that the material left over from (or at least the “low hanging fruit” from) the last material changes is kind of drying up.

Like PM says, though, history isn’t over yet. We can only mine the territory we can see, and being embedded in our history as it is right now, we can only see as far as the next hill.

 

[Pickman's model]

no its not "utter bilge"...we can look at history and with hindsight see what the engines of these revolutionary outbreaks were... they dont come out of thin air...its a material history. And the material for those revolutionary outbreaks is drying up.

i dont know enough about postmodernism to use the term with any confidence but i think we are moving into a really postmodern age when it comes to music, much more so than in the 80s when it was being talked about then.

Oh ffs you invoke hindsight against my unforeseen. If you need to use fucking hindsight to look at where they came from don't you think that means they were unforeseen? you do know hindsight isn't foresight, right? utterly fucking pathetic

 

[Steel Icarus]

How much innovation has there actually been though, in terms of sudden shifts into new forms? Not many new movements or genres have just shown up with no antecedents

 

[8ball]

Oh ffs you invoke hindsight against my unforeseen. If you need to use fucking hindsight to look at where they came from don't you think that means they were unforeseen? you do know hindsight isn't foresight, right? utterly fucking pathetic

Bit aggressive - I was quite enjoying the conversation with ska because I’ve had it a few times with people IRL and it’s refreshing to have it with someone who knows something about both music and history.

 

[killer b]

How much innovation has there actually been though, in terms of sudden shifts into new forms? Not many new movements or genres have just shown up with no antecedents

I'd say from the mid 80s to the mid 90s there was a series of real step changes in electronic music forms - acid house, techno, drum & bass in particular - which all sound pretty alien to what came before. We've not seen that kind of white-hot creative turnover since IMO.

 

[Pickman's model]

Bit aggressive - I was quite enjoying the conversation with ska because I’ve had it a few times with people IRL and it’s refreshing to have it with someone who knows something about both music and history.

I was coming back to tone it down but there's no point now. The thing about music and history is that as ska points out there is a material history, so there is a connection to the mode of production. And as the mode of production, capitalism atm, falters, different drivers will come forth. Migration is another driver, as new and previously unconnected cultures and aspects of cultures come into contact. It's simply not the case that the end of music is nigh.

 

[8ball]

I'd say from the mid 80s to the mid 90s there was a series of real step changes in electronic music forms - acid house, techno, drum & bass in particular - which all sound pretty alien to what came before. We've not seen that kind of white-hot creative turnover since IMO.

This was a technologically influenced change, and we have had some big changes in the access to means of production and distribution which society is still catching up with.

We also have the difference in that we were lucky to grow up while so much great stuff was being shoved in our face. You really have to go looking for good new stuff nowadays. We’re in a time of flux, but the fruits of change aren’t apparent imo.

Plus, we have seen the death of “the charts”, which has been liberating in many ways but also means a lot of young people are discovering stuff that is new to them while not being actually new, so the drive for novelty doesn’t feed back into the market in the way it once did.

For example, I was chatting online a while back to a 20 year old who had gotten massively into the Ink Spots and similar via streaming services.

 

[Pickman's model]

How much innovation has there actually been though, in terms of sudden shifts into new forms? Not many new movements or genres have just shown up with no antecedents

The emergence of new forms as you say leaves a trail. Only for most people the trail is invisible to sometime after the event. Music doesn't operate in a vacuum so ancillary forces must operate to spread the new form - in the last century radio, TV and the music press etc, social media now, who knows in the future. The role of the music industry in fostering or suppressing music needs to be explored,
.

 

[Spandex]

example, I was chatting online a while back to a 20 year old who had gotten massively into the Ink Spots and similar via streaming services

Yesterday evening as I was walking home a car went past full of youngsters banging out some music, going wild to it.

When I was their age it would've been a rave tape or somthing blasting out. They were playing Hot Chocolate's You Sexy Thing.

To me that's a played out disco tune from the past. To them I guess it sounds new. Great tune.

 

[Steel Icarus]

Yesterday evening as I was walking home a car went past full of youngsters banging out some music, going wild to it.

When I was their age it would've been a rave tape or somthing blasting out. They were playing Hot Chocolate's You Sexy Thing.

To me that's a played out disco tune from the past. To them I guess it sounds new. Great tune.

Well yeah, I hadn't even heard of The Chameleons until a couple of years ago, didn't really listen to Sonic Youth until a few years ago

 

[rutabowa]

Grime is 100% old fogey music ffs. It is mainly done by tubby guys in their 40s. Okay late 30s.

Drill is fairly old too by now but is def more widely listened to by kids than grime. In london at least.

 

[killer b]

Yesterday evening as I was walking home a car went past full of youngsters banging out some music, going wild to it.

When I was their age it would've been a rave tape or somthing blasting out. They were playing Hot Chocolate's You Sexy Thing.

To me that's a played out disco tune from the past. To them I guess it sounds new. Great tune.

When I was their age we were jamming to Hot Chocolate too - I remember this remix being everywhere for a few months in the late 90s...

 

[8ball]

Grime is 100% old fogey music ffs. It is mainly done by tubby guys in their 40s. Okay late 30s.

Drill is fairly old too by now but is def more widely listened to by kids than grime. In london at least.

Basically if your gill slits have closed you’re too old and need to shut up.

 

[Knotted]

or complex time-signatures is another sign of trying to escape the limitations.

Then there are the limitations of instruments. Computers/synths etc have given us 50 good years of new sounds, but theres a limit to frequency ranges, and thats been pretty much hit.

Yes there are still possibilities for novel combinations of sound to be put together, but the possibilities of music aren't infinite.
And from a theoretical point of view something may sound "fresh" but still be derivative.

The same goes for painting for example. Only so many colours, only so many forms, before you end up repeating styles and getting away from novelty and into traditions.

The world is a finite place - its the sales p

I read this after listening to six different versions of the folk standard Hares on the Mountain. This version by Radie Peat & Daragh Lynch is much the same as the Shirley Collins and Davy Graham version here. If you wrote them down there wouldn't be much difference. Except all the little subtleties regarding how the singer and guitarist approach the music. So I think that's a formal way of looking at it and there's more to it than that. Even then with a formal "notes and beats" approach, I think you might be surprised by how large the possibilities are.

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While I'm here and this is a related gripe to the above - there's lots of fogey complaints about aggressive autotune and I feel that's something that we just need to get used to. But the subtle autotune that you wouldn't notice is taking away some of the little variations that make up music. I feel that's a bit of a shame. Interesting Adam Neely video on this here.

 

[killer b]

While I'm here and this is a related gripe to the above - there's lots of fogey complaints about aggressive autotune and I feel that's something that we just need to get used to. But the subtle autotune that you wouldn't notice is taking away some of the little variations that make up music. I feel that's a bit of a shame. Interesting Adam Neely video on this here.

Overdriven autotune is fine. It's just the sound of modern pop music so is irritating to the ears of the over 40s.

I think the whole 'get used to it' thing probably applies to it's more subtle uses too though tbf.

 

[Knotted]

Overdriven autotune is fine. It's just the sound of modern pop music so is irritating to the ears of the over 40s.

I think the whole 'get used to it' thing probably applies to it's more subtle uses too though tbf.

I think we're already used to the more subtle uses though. It's not as if we'd notice them anyway. Most pop music is very precise anyway and that's the aesthetic since the 80's and autotune is fine for fixing the vocals most of the time. But I worry that bluesier styles of singing (eg. Aretha Franklin's) are being killed off. I feel there's a need for a bit of return to the rough edged and I suspect there might be a backlash to the precision aesthetic around the corner.

 

[killer b]

Well maybe, although rough edged music and bluesy singing exists and thrives outside of commercial pop music as it is - some of that will no doubt periodically find itself growing in popularity to the point where it shares some of the pop charts with the shiny stuff - but there's been numerous backlashes against smooth commercial pop music over the decades, all of which have either quickly faded or been absorbed. I don't imagine this would be any different.

 

[Knotted]

Yes I agree with that. I guess Amy Winehouse would be a good example of a backlash against smoothness whose sound then got reabsorbed. But it's these backlash moments I live for.

 

[killer b]

I thought I was a big fan of Winehouse, but I tried listening to Back to Black recently for the first time in a few years and it sounded pretty bad - the production rather than her voice, but...

 

[killer b]

In fact I'd probably go so far as to say Winehouse's musical legacy is mostly pretty terrible - a pole for bellends to gather round saying 'this is real music! this is TALENT', she ushered a load of awful bluesy music hall singers into the charts, and probably bears some responsibility for electroswing.

 

[Knotted]

It's not great is it! Deliberately retro but maybe you just can't completely recreate that 60's sound.

 

[BigMoaner]

the only music worth listening too was between 1996 and 2004. here to help.

 

[Pickman's model]

the only music worth listening too was between 1996 and 2004. here to help.

so now you just sit and hear the house creaking? it's still worth listening to music in 2021

 

[smmudge]

When I was a teen I was very discerning, and against any sort of chart music really. I turned 10 in 97 and having spice girls and Britney spears marketed directly at you leaves its trauma.

But as I've grown older, I do actually like listening to chart music now. Not the bland stuff obviously. I think as songs are often now "by" the producer, featuring a singer, rather than ostensibly by the singer, has given chart music more credibility for me.

 

[krtek a houby]

When I was a teen I was very discerning, and against any sort of chart music really. I turned 10 in 97 and having spice girls and Britney spears marketed directly at you leaves its trauma.

But as I've grown older, I do actually like listening to chart music now. Not the bland stuff obviously. I think as songs are often now "by" the producer, featuring a singer, rather than ostensibly by the singer, has given chart music more credibility for me.

Used to be fascinated by charts. Whether it was TotP, NME or Hot Press. It really mattered that Dolphin Discs best selling album was Ride On or The Unforgettable Fire.

And then, gradually all that faded away.

Listened to a station (until it became a bit more mainstream/corporate) that would happily play Britney alongside RATM (all expletives included). Something quite agreeable about that.