Well, that’s also part of the problem. When I was younger I had lots of friends who would clue me in when they found something awesome to listen to. Now most of my friends are also old farts. “Hey, remember when we got wasted and went to that Eels show?” “… Not really.”
Be the change you want to see in the world, Pogue.
Or, I mean, I guess you could just give in to the old fartiness, rumbling out strong and deep at first before slowly dissipating in the atmosphere of your own past life, leaving naught but a lingering irritation in the nostrils of humanity as you pass into nothingness.
The choice. . . is yours!
Oh great, now you had to go and drag Gandhi into it. One thing I’ve got in my favor is access to KEXP on local public radio, though I guess just about everyone does through the internet. But I hear a ton of music that I don’t imagine I’d ever hear anywhere else. But the difference is, I would have had to go out of my way not to find awesome new music in college and on into my twenties. But in my forties, well, I’m not exactly going to music festivals. I could, I guess, but I’d feel like a poseur. Anyway, point is, I have to work harder for it, and I don’t have as much spare time as I used to. Yes, yes, excuses, blah blah. Things just ain’t like they used to be, man. Just like music!
I dunno, I kinda think it ain’t changed all that much sometimes…
Okay, I’ll stop :)
Kindly replace the word “a penis” with “metal” and it more or less conveys my reaction. You might have me confused with someone else, that’s not really my thing.
I mean I’d consider the majority of that stuff to be more classic rock emulation than terribly heavy metal, but I drew from what I knew to prove a point: lots of folks still playing and creating music just like whatever it was you grew up digging, even if you don’t want to find new horizons to explore ;-)
Oh I’m sure they’re out there, I just have to work harder to find it. And I don’t like to work harder. I have a job that expects me to do that.
That is because everyone is now hiidden away in niche music appealing to niche crowds. This encourages musicians to increasingly cater to a smaller audience into that sub-genre. Which limits their appeal, but guarantees continued, repeat patronage by fans of the niche sub-genre.
It’s actually a discussion I’ve had with my gf a lot; she’s a much bigger music buff than I am, believe it or not :)
I think we’ve more or less lost any kind of centralized musical identity as a nation apart from a handful of extremely broad crossover artists.
Lots of little things feed into it. The slow death of radio. The rise of personalized musical experiences like Pandora and later Spotify. Suggestion algorithms and niche-market music blogs. The transition of MTV from daily provider of what is hip to listen to to Reality TV Network #47. The slow death of record stores as a medium at all, much less a gathering place.
I got to ride the transition between those worlds in my formative middle and high school + college years. In middle school in the late 90s/early 00s, everyone still jammed to the radio in their bedrooms cuz CDs were pricey and most folks where I lived grew up poor. MTV’s “TRL” (Total Request Live, a sort of daily TV broadcast version of Casey Kasem’s old countdowns) was required daily viewing. By high school we’d moved from mix taps to mix CDs and were slinging mp3s back and forth via Napster and Kazaa and Limewire. Radio was going south, CD stores were closing, and Metallica were really pissed at the internet. MTV was starting its transition in earnest. But there were still some core larger “patterns.” The rise of pop punk, emo, screamo. The falling away of gangster rap and boy bands and single female pop. By college had rolled around, no one I knew still bothered with radio, MTV had relegated music videos to MTV 8, filesharing was ascendant, Youtube and Pandora were making strides, and blogs like Pitchfork were beginning to crystallize as tastemakers.
I mean, again, a handful of global media superphenomenons like Taylor Swift, Kane, Beyonce, etc. have managed to remain cultural mainstays, but pretty much everything else is meme-driven and painfully transient. “Gangnam Style” didn’t herald the rise of K-Pop, Stranger Things’ Survive-penned soundtrack didn’t establish synthwave as The Next Big Thing, and most new artists’ five minutes of fame only last so long as their latest stunt music video is trending on twitter.
Which is. . . pretty weird. I feel like a lot of older folks can definitively point to, say, the years they were 15-20, and say, “This is what was popular music at that time,” and you can see natural ebbs and flows and evolutions and revolutions and craft a nostalgic soundscape that perfectly triggers the memory centers of the brain of anyone who lived through that era and had ears.
Nowadays? It’s all so fleeting and meme driven and segmented and disperse. Which is awesome, insofar as that flowering of hyper-niche patronage-driven music culture that @Navaronegun has lead to an explosion of sustainable, creative music in virtually every genre and style you can manage. . . for the select few who’ve opted to follow it.
Like, I don’t necessarily outright mourn for the future children of the world who might never know the transcendent joy of having a “Bohemian Rhapsody”-esque superhit come on the radio a decade after its release to join them all in a perfectly recollected, drunken chorus rendition of its high points . . . but I do kinda suspect it’s a very time-limited experience.
Also, I feel like a lot of these niche bands are just re-hashing stuff that has already been done. Retro versions of musical trends that have come and gone. Even if rock isn’t quite dead if you know where to look for it, is it evolving anymore?
I mean I did post a bunch of guys who were pretty straight re-hashers. I listen to a lot of more adventurous and avant-garde stuff, too, but at a certain point I’m just devouring this thread ;-)
True, but it also leads to me digging my niche and you yours. I used to like metal when it would be tinged with the blues or funk, frinstance. Not anymore. I can just go my North Mississippi Allstars or whatnot. It’s not crossover or popular appeal I miss. It’s that the subgenres, by their nature and structure, seek “purity” within their self-definitions. Because of how they are patronized and rewarded. In fact my tastes never or rarely veered towards the popular.
I’m not picking on your list, just in general much of the more underground stuff I’ve heard in recent years has been treading old ground.
My girlfriend and I certainly fall into this trap. She made reference to it once, “can we get out of this music bubble right now? Play something different.” That kind of stuck, so now it isn’t uncommon for us to play outside the bubble, somewhat.
Even when we turn on the radio it is the same issue, we go to the channels we like, which plays the music we know, which repeats the cycle.
If I don’t know about X, how can I post about X?
Oh hell yeah. Great punk band. John Doe came and played a little acoustic set at my local summer festival, I was so stoked!
Thank you.