EyeShotFirst said:
Ryan McAvoy said:
DuracellEnergizer said:
I've decided to say that the 21st century is the worst era in human history, as I hate most of the movies, music, slang, fashions, technology, celebrities, etc, etc, etc. made in the last fourteen years.
In purely musical terms it's the worst for sure because since about 1990 no new music has been invented and I suspect there will never be anything new ever again for the rest of human history. Rap was the last earth shattering advance to happen in music where you could honestly say “Wow I’ve never heard anything like that before!” and that's it folks… sorry. It's been almost a quarter century now and based on that I've concluded that there is no more, all discoveries have been made.
With space travel, we will go to Mars, then outside our solar system, we'll invent FTL travel, we'll colonise other worlds!... but musically I'm afraid the human race reached the pinnacle of it's evolution about 23 years ago.
(This pessimistic appraisal of the situation, from a former music blogger)
I'd say it's been longer than that. Music hasn't advanced much at all in the last 40 years. Sure, we got fancy gadgets, and people like Pink Floyd played with them, but you strip it down, it's still not different than what came before. Jazz died when it turned into nonsensical phrases of pure soulessness. Rock died when guitarists became the only focus. Blues hasn't had it's moment since Muddy Waters played with James Cotton. Folk music remains the same, though I won't knock a genre for keeping it's integrity. Electronic music hasn't advanced too far. Really, about the only difference from Deadmau5 and Kraftwerk is the ease in which things are done now. Country hasn't been right since the 60's. If you count anything after to be good, it's because they emulated the past.
Movie soundtracks are the closest to classical we'll ever get, and even they have lost their flare.
Music has gotten far too easy to create, and as long as the normal person can bob their head to it, they don't care if it blows their mind. People these days don't want Dark Side of the Moon. They just want the same ol stuff.
I agree with the gist of what you say but I still think the late 80s is the last creative peak (Not the early 70s).
Sure, despite it's utter awesomeness, late 70s Punk can be written off as nothing more than a remix of ideas that had been well worn by 60s American Garage Rock and 50s Rockabilly, and acts like The Stooges and Patti Smith had laid down the complete Punk template years before 1977. Also the Electronic era of the 80s could be said to have been a reheated version of the work of Kraftwerk, Pete Townshend and Walter/Wendy Carlos. As well as the vast experimention with synthesisers going on in the Prog Rock and Disco movements throughout the 70s.
But with the late 80s you get Rap, Sampling and Rave/Dance (The latter two, I omitted from my above post, whoops) that sound like nothing else before. Sure there were inspirations from the past for these forms of music but they were nothing more than vague sketches. The late great Gil Scott-Heron had spoken over records in the early 70s but it is worlds away from Public Enemy and NWA. The Beatles had done (Almost unlistenably bad avant garde) sound collage experiments in the late 60s but these bare no real relation to the catchy Pop music from sample-created albums like '3 Feet High and Rising' and 'Paul's Boutique'. With Dance I'd conceed it sounded a little less 'fresh' than the other two, you could trace it's roots to Disco and to the Electronica of Kraftwerk but even Kraftwerk weren't experimenting with the pure hedonistic Dance beat until the late 80s.
EyeShotFirst said:
Do I think music is dead? Absolutely not. It's just harder to find good music than it used to be.
I think the oposite might be true in an odd way. In the 90s (When I was in my teens) the charts were awash with pretty decent Pop and Rock music. Good enough that I did little digging into the underground or into the past, it wasn't really needed. It was only from the late 90s onwards (When most chart music had become almost universally drab, awful and corporate) and armed with this new internet thingy that I was forced to go find music for myself rather than wait for the record companies to dish it out. So in that way it was easier to find the goodies when the top layer of drek was bypassed. There are many huge Pop acts around now that I keep seeing on posters, who get movies made about them and are always in the papers that I have never heard a single song by because I've checked out of that machine a long time ago. The internet allows me and the kids today to find anything we want from any decade in seconds, it's easier than ever to find good music.
