The state of music today

Ultimately though, why does this matter? Look at music like it's literature. Fergie might very well be the musical equivalent of Mitch Albom. Albom is always going to sell more books than Michael Chabon. But whose work stands the test of time? You can always seek out the music or the literature you want, if you're willing to try. I really don't want to see Wilco in a 30,000 seat arena, now or in 2025. Frankly, I don't know any Wilco fan that would, unless there was no other option. People complain that there are no U2s or Springsteens coming up, and act like this is a reflection of the state of music. It's not. It's evidence that music is fractured enough that it's impossible for an artists to have wide-spread, massive appeal. Ryan Adams is a better songwriter than either The Boss or Bono. (I'll grand you that he's not the performer they are, but he's a better songwriter, and at his best, his lyrics make theirs look like the "Best Of" selections in an Intro To Poetry course.) But Adams is never going to be widely popular. And that's fine. He's a little too flaky anyway, and would probably kill himself it he was anymore popular than he is now. The same might be true of Tweedy.

In some ways, saying that music isn't as good now as it was awhile ago is like saying television isn't as good now as it used to be because no show will ever get the ratings that the final episode of M.A.S.H. got. Or that there are no super shows, like The Cosby Show, Cheers, Hill Street Blues or Seinfeld, that have mass appeal. Well, sorry, but Arrested Development, Scrubs, The Wire, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm, LOST, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Friday Night Lights -- all of these are worthy heirs to anything that was on five, 10 or 15 years ago. But American Idol and Grey's Anatomy are the only shows that draw huge numbers.

Springsteen, U2, and some of these other super groups are popular because when they were peaking artistically, there was no alternative. You listened to what the radio played or what MTV showed. Now there are a hundred different ways to seek out music if you don't like Linkin Park or Matchbox 20 or Brad Paisley or Kenny Chesney.

 

As you grow older, you will notice that the music of your 15-25 years (or what you liked at that time) will always be considered by yourself as the greatest music ever recorded.

Possibly all the bands I listed in my previous thread are very similar to the college rock of 1985-1995. It's what I was weened on for 10 years.

Nothing though is more aggravating though than a person saying what another person listens to is terrible. Liking music is subjective and not everyone will like the same thing. Right now I am listening to Drum's not Dead on Napster, and I think it would make decent background music for a film. Not everyone agrees. There are some bands that I cannot fathom that they are listened to by intelligent adults, but who am I to say?

By the way, do you know how Led Zepplin got their name?

 

good comments, king and double d. hmmmm...makes me think of an old Who song:

The Music Must Change

Deep in the back of my mind is an unrealized sound
Every feeling I get from the street says it soon could be found
When I hear the cold lies of the pusher, I know it exists
It's confirmed in the eyes of the kids, emphasized with their fists
But the high has to rise from the low
Like volcanoes explode through the snow
The mosquito's sting brings a dream
But the poison's derange
The music must change
For we're chewing a bone
We soared like the sparrow hawk flied
Then we dropped like a stone
Like the tide and the waves
Growing slowly in range
Crushing mountains as old as the Earth
So the music must change
Sometimes at night, I wake up and my body's like ice
The sound of the running wild stallion, the noise of the mice
And I wondered if then I could hear into all of your dreams
I realize now it was really the sound of your screams
But death always leads into life
But the street fighter swallows the knife
Am I so crazy to feel that it's here prearranged?
The music must change
It's gets higher and higher
Smouldering like leaves in the 1
Then it bursts into fire
Its rhythm grows strong
It's so new and so strange
Like bells in the clouds, then again
The music must change
But is this song so different?
Am I doing it all again?
It may have been done before
But then music's an open door
Deep in the back of my is an unrealized sound
Every feeling I get from the street says it soon could be found
When I hear the cold lies of the pusher, I know it exists
It's confirmed in the eyes of the kids, emphasized with their fists
But the high has to rise from the low
Like volcanoes explode through the snow
The mosquito's sting brings a dream
But the poison's derange
The music must change
For we're chewing a bone
We soared like the sparrow hawk flied
Then we dropped like a stone
Like the tide and the waves
Growing slowly in range
Crushing mountains as old as the Earth
So the music must change

 

The denizens of SportsJournalists.com react to the king's message:

 

But look at the album charts, and both bands are probably in the top 5 all-time in sales.

Looking back, I remember there was a definite, er ... wall ... between pop and album rock up to the early 80s. Relatively few rock bands crossed over with hit singles.

Floyd were one of the first to "tear down the wall," but especially AC/DC and Van Halen helped pave the way for other rock acts like Quiet Riot, Ratt, Autograph, and ultimately the "hair metal" bands to become popular on top-40 radio a few years later.

 

Excellent thoughts all around.

Clearly, the biggest change in the way I consume music today and how I consumed it when I was a teenager is the medium. I listened to rock radio as a kid, DC 101, WHFS, 98 rock in Baltimore. That's when rock radio had a semblance of independence and every station wasn't a cookie cutter Clear Channel playlist.

Now, I decide what I want to listen to with XM. I listen to the indie rock stations and the rap stations to get ideas of what I like. If I hear a couple of songs I like, I usually by the record -- either through iTunes or by CD (every once in a while). The thing is, I'm probably never going to be exposed to something I'm not really looking for, which is kind of disappointing. I'm not listening to the jazz stations or the hard rock stations. Who knows? Maybe there's something there I would like. I don't know, because I'm operating within the genre that I want to listen to.

It's kind of interesting to live through a seismic shift within an industry, and in the last three years, we're getting that in music. The big record labels are slowly dying away. Music is being marketed differently. Artists are taking different paths to achieve their goals. I don't know if Arcade Fire or Wilco or Ryan Adams really WANTS the sort of worldwide appeal some of the big pop acts of the 80s and 90s wanted. But I guarantee they're being heard by the audience they were intending. I was reading something in Rolling Stone where Linkin Park's lead singer said he wished he wasn't on a label any more, because there's so much more freedom. Labels are so panicky to make money that they're taking more and more from concert and merchandise revenue to make up for the loss in record sales.

Radiohead's little experiment with "In Rainbows" will prove to be an interesting study in how bands can circumvent record labels and still make money. Sure, Radiohead is better off than, say, The Dears, financially and can afford to take the risk. But if it works the way Thom Yorke wants it to, it could rattle the cages at the labels even more.

 

I noticed that as well.

It does reinforce that radio does not always equal what is being listened to or what is liked.

 

I suppose this has been mentioned, but the lack of any consensus on music today is one byproduct of the fact that we have very little in the way of collective culture anymore in anything.

Take something as simple as the music you might hear at a high school basketball game. It's as if I never left high school. You still hear Welcome To The Jungle, Enter Sandman, etc. The only current song that ever gets thrown in the mix is Soulja Boy (and it's ubiquitous).

Most of those songs are freaking 20 years old. When I was in high school, we didn't pump Incense And Peppermints or Double Shot in our speakers at a game, we played whatever was contemporary for us.

But with the total fragmentation of our collective culture, there is no contemporary for anyone. I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily, but it does alter or even prevent a generation from having any collective cultural experience.

American Idol is a notable exception, and I think, almost a backlash to the dearth of a collective culture.

Because of all of this, when it comes to entertainment, nostalgia runs rampant. Nostalgia fills the void our lack of collective culture no longer fills. Though no one intends it to be that way, our collective death-grip on nostalgia rots our collective culture even further. Why listen or buy a Built To Spill album when you can save your dough for the day Led Zeppelin gets released on iTunes?

And by the way, I state that opinion with full chutzpah, because I am as nostalgic and as much a part of the problem as anyone else.

I'm tired of nostalgia, For example, I'm dubious about critical re-appraisals of music from "my" era, many of which are borne out of old-fogeyist rejection of current innovations. But because I'm a man of my time and of my age, I have trouble adapting to what passes for a collective culture today. I grew up a traditional collective culturalist, getting my music through traditional mediums like radio and TV. Even independent radio was/is "traditional".

I'd love to peruse the internet to find shit I'd love, but I don't have the time, the inclination, and wouldn't even know where to start. I don't think I'm alone ... I think most of rock culture is much the same.

Instead of innovating, like many in their mid 30s since the rock era began, I'm trying to explore different kinds of music I would never have listened to when I was younger, such as jazz.

 

That's been my issue with radio for the longest time. I understand that times are changing from when I grew up (1980s), and that there's a lot more music available. But I grew up listening to the radio, and if an artist had a good song, I went and bought a tape or CD. There was more variety. Today, radio stations play the same 20 songs over and over, and it gets to the point where I'm flipping stations every other song. Sometimes, I even find myself listening to country or oldies (50s and 60s, which I used to poke fun at my parents about when I was a kid), just for a variety. And when stations do play a new artist, they play the song to death.

Maybe if radio stations would mix up their formats (new song, old song, new song, old song), more people would listen to it.

 

I have noticed a handful of stations doing that with alternative rock.

94.7 the Globe out of DC just popped up and I also can pick up WNRN out of Charlottesville.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNRN

Because of the cookie-cutter mentality of 99 percent of all rock stations, you know there will be an undercurrent of change soon. It's just the way it works.

 

A thought on the "will the classic rock and classic country we still listen to be popular in 50 years?"

Good chance. My 9-year-old daughter, while into Hannah Montana and all that teenybopper stuff, loves a lot of the music I do. She likes Elvis Presley, Pink Floyd, Johnny Cash, Queen and recognizes countless other songs from that era. My 5-year-old daughter is the same way and can't get enough Elvis Presley or Johnny Cash when in the car. When they're teens they'll find their own musical niche, but they'll always appreciate and listen to the stuff I do.

 

I bought my first record as a seven-year-old in 1972 (the 45 of Billy Preston's "Will It Go Round In Circles") and have been listening to music and reading (and occasionally writing) about it ever since and I can't think of a more disposable era for music than this one. Most of the songs and artists on the latest Billboard 100 won't be listened to a month from now, let alone 20 years down the road.

Sure the 70s was bad with a lot of flaccid corporate rock, easy listening shit like the Carpenters and disco (which I probably appreciate more now than I did then) but as someone mentioned earlier there was always a new album by the Stones, Floyd, Skynyrd, Springsteen, Seger and loads of others to get excited about.

I don't think I'm a complete classic rock dinosaur. I really like Pearl Jam, the Foo Fighters, Drive By Truckers, Old 97's and some of the stuff Jack White has done. And this site has pointed me towards killer songs like "Chasing Cars" and "Open Your Eyes" by Snow Patrol and the awesome "Keep The Car Running" by Arcade Fire.

But where's the stuff that'll knock some young rock fan on his ass like U2, Guns, Springsteen, the Clash, Pistols, Ramones, Zeppelin and others did for me? I just don't see it - or more accurately, I guess, hear it.