When did music stop evolving...?
Musical paradigm burn-out can be a serious issue. Styles get explored. Every nook and cranny gets poked and prodded -- especially over the course of two or three decades...
We're used to the oft-expressed idea that styles and fashions change quickly these days --but I think that's more fantasy than reality in today's world of hyper fine-tuned marketing and market sector exploitation.
In decades past, styles really did come and go quickly. Now, they seem to stick around forever, long past the point of ongoing returns in terms of fresh creativity and vitality.
I think the reality of this hits home pretty hard when we look at some of the "newer" styles like rap/hip hop, punk, and electronica.
Anyone doing a 2009 survey of those fields will find things distressingly similar to the scene in 1999. And, in many ways, and particularly for hip hop and punk but still for electornica and dance, it's not really much different than what was going down in '89... throw in a little heavy handed Auto-Tune, change a few superficial stylistic tics, and it's pretty much there.
And it virtually goes without saying that the same, in spades, can be said of various forms of rock, which it seems to me, has clearly joined the classic moribund forms of country, folk, blues, bluegrass, mainstream jazz, and so on. Nothing wrong with that -- it's a natural progression. It just seems folks don't want to acknowledge that there haven't been two new ideas in any of these fields to rub together in years if not decades.
Maybe it's just that having seen the tail end of the big band swing era in my early years, the explosion of R&B and then R&R, the big folk revival of the early 60s, the Brit invasion, Motown, the rise of folk rock, and then the evolution of folk rock and blues rock into acid and hippie rock, the ascendance of funk and re-emergence of R&B, the first wave of early 70s disco, the rise of the singer songwriters, the emergence of whitebread disco targeted to mainstream audiences in the late 70s, the emergence of punk, no wave, and proto hip hop in the mid and late 70s -- all before I was even thirty years old -- and, I'll admit it, musical change is something that's all but worked its way into my musical DNA...
We're used to the oft-expressed idea that styles and fashions change quickly these days --but I think that's more fantasy than reality in today's world of hyper fine-tuned marketing and market sector exploitation.
In decades past, styles really did come and go quickly. Now, they seem to stick around forever, long past the point of ongoing returns in terms of fresh creativity and vitality.
I think the reality of this hits home pretty hard when we look at some of the "newer" styles like rap/hip hop, punk, and electronica.
Anyone doing a 2009 survey of those fields will find things distressingly similar to the scene in 1999. And, in many ways, and particularly for hip hop and punk but still for electornica and dance, it's not really much different than what was going down in '89... throw in a little heavy handed Auto-Tune, change a few superficial stylistic tics, and it's pretty much there.
And it virtually goes without saying that the same, in spades, can be said of various forms of rock, which it seems to me, has clearly joined the classic moribund forms of country, folk, blues, bluegrass, mainstream jazz, and so on. Nothing wrong with that -- it's a natural progression. It just seems folks don't want to acknowledge that there haven't been two new ideas in any of these fields to rub together in years if not decades.
Maybe it's just that having seen the tail end of the big band swing era in my early years, the explosion of R&B and then R&R, the big folk revival of the early 60s, the Brit invasion, Motown, the rise of folk rock, and then the evolution of folk rock and blues rock into acid and hippie rock, the ascendance of funk and re-emergence of R&B, the first wave of early 70s disco, the rise of the singer songwriters, the emergence of whitebread disco targeted to mainstream audiences in the late 70s, the emergence of punk, no wave, and proto hip hop in the mid and late 70s -- all before I was even thirty years old -- and, I'll admit it, musical change is something that's all but worked its way into my musical DNA...
posted by TK Major at
10:17 AM
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