Sunday, September 1, 2019

Music: Where The Hell Is It Heading To (Twenty Years After)? - An Anniversary Essay

Music: Where The Hell Is It Heading To (Twenty Years After)?
An anniversary essay

Introductory note for those who expected more reviews and got this instead: Please do not worry, more reviews will be coming pretty soon. This essay took me about a month to write and, to a certain degree, explains why the reviewing conveyer has slowed down to a temporary standstill. Among other things, I needed to get this out of the system before I go any further, because certain ideas work better in the context of a systemic explanation, rather than being chaotically spread across a hundred different texts. Your thoughts, objections, additions are very welcome here as comments, although I would kindly ask to refrain from on-the-spot emotional outbursts and read the entire text carefully if you want a discussion — keeping in mind that none of the ideas, complaints, or generalizations herein are intended to be individually offensive or derisive.

Prelude: A Slice Of Personal History

ʽThere must be some way out of hereʼ,
Said the joker to the thief.

As hard as I myself find it to believe... it was twenty years ago today, not a day less, that a certain young (and, frankly, quite inexperienced) music reviewer had decided to take on the world (or, at least, the particularly inquisitive part of the Internet) and lay down his general perspective on the evolution and then-current state of popular music — flatly, but ambitiously, entitled «Music: Where The Hell Is It Heading To Today?» As you can still see from the dusty comments, the essay provoked a small, but fairly strong outburst of criticism; much of it was well-deserved at the time (admittedly, the author was but 23 years old and had about one year of Internet writing experience), but some of the remarks, more likely, just reflected different mindsets and angles of view — or could be ascribed to an involuntary noble retort of optimism against the authorʼs crude pessimism.

Today, I shudder at the thought of even reopening that web page, much less rereading its contents or rewriting its shortcomings — but not because I no longer sympathize with its main points; rather, I just cringe at the obviously naïve and at the same time pretentious ways in which they were stated (a flaw that the essay, of course, shared with all my early reviews, arguably forgivable for a beginner, though that is for the readers to decide). A lot of things happened since then — I have opened my eyes and ears to a lot of new influences; have expanded, shut down, reopened, shut down again, rethought, restructured, acquired new enthusiasm for and got bored with my review site / blog; most importantly, like many of us, lived through the end of one era and the stabilization of another. So much has happened in the meantime that it almost seems now a matter of honor to try and revisit that early frame of mind, reassess it, and restate the early, shaky, naïvely arrogant points in light of all the experience accumulated in between 1999 and 2019 — so they could at least cease to be naïve (and just go on being arrogant).

Arguably the single most important thing about that experience is how the rapid evolution of the Internet has solved the issue of availability of stuff. In 1999, since I never listened to the radio out of stubborn principle, my main source for new music was, of course, shopping for CDs — not an easy task for a young researcher with a limited income, fully dependent on the cheap pirate market of the intellectually curious, but financially hungry city of Moscow. Being far more interested in spending money on something like David Bowieʼs Heroes than Radioheadʼs OK Computer (or, even more shamefully, on something like Genesisʼ Abacab than Portisheadʼs Dummy — just to give you a brief example of how it worked back then), it is more than fair to say that I had a fairly skewed picture of whatever was going on in the musical world in the mid-to-late Nineties. The same problem, I imagine, existed for most of us at the time — unless your professional life revolved around music, you were either a live-in-the-present or a live-in-the-past kind of person, and the two of you had a hard time finding common language, largely because you lacked the resources to buy a good textbook for the other personʼs one.

With the advent of MP3s, broadband, file sharing, YouTube, and, finally, streaming, the issue of availability is no longer an issue. You may not know everything, but unless you are wilfully embracing a life of digital seclusion, today you have the ability to know anything you wish to know in a matter of seconds. You can make a blitz-playlist and journey from the Renaissance to the 21st century, from one end of the world to the other, from the most popular to the most obscure creations of any genre whenever you have a bunch of free time (and no matter how much we like to complain about it, we do have more free time now than we used to). This is cool — this is a great opportunity for equality, an exciting invitation for everyone to become an instan­taneous expert in anything. This opportunity does come at a certain price, of course, on which I shall comment later — but for now, let us be happy and just concentrate on its good sides.

I first closed up shop around 2005, I think, then once again around 2007; it was a very difficult time for me, with lots of new responsibilities in my regular life, and keeping up with a regular schedule of musical reviews was getting harder and harder — furthermore, I felt that I got stuck in a rut, and that, instead of improving, my writing was deteriorating. It was time to take a break, rethink some strategies, refresh the brain by listening to music just to enjoy it rather than dissect it, and hope for the future to bring along some changes.

In 2009, as I navigated reasonably well through the personal crisis, somewhat improved my personal career and financial standing, I decided that, perhaps, it was time to try and make a brand new start in the music writing sphere as well — and by "brand new start" I really meant it, since an attempt to re-read and improve some of my early texts quickly made me realize that they should better be shelved as historical curios. The idea was that I should go over everything one more time — but now, in this new era of total availability, I had the opportunity, nay, thought I, a duty to put it all into a larger, much more complete and informative perspective. I shall try to be as democratic and open-minded about it as possible, thought I. I shall attempt to enjoy, analyze, understand, and cover epochs and genres that I gave very little thought before — and in order to correct or justify or maybe even completely rethink my attitudes towards modern music, I shall listen to all kinds of stuff that is being produced today, as long as it claims to have at least a little bit of artistic and intellectual merit. Furthermore, said I, in order to be as unbiased as possible, I shall review all these people in alphabetic order — this way, even if takes me a long long time to get through my A-B-Cʼs, I shall have a reasonably representative slice of everything. (After all, it is hard to imagine all the good bands intentionally gravitating towards the beginning of the alphabet in order to get on the good side of an obsessive reviewer who just might come up with this ridiculous idea some day or other).

It was a good goal, and I felt inspired — it was obvious from the start that this would be a project that could never come to an end within one lifetime, but Iʼm always a sucker for such projects... modest goals are for efficient wimps, ambitious goals are for noble losers. A restart! A reboot! A chance to atone for all the past sins and, with luck, to accumulate a heap of new, juicier, far more sophisticated ones. Except for the fact that I still had no idea whatsoever of how to write about hip hop, I was ready to tackle everything from pre-war urban blues to glitch electronica. Most importantly, with the triumph of Total Availability, I could finally test my earlier pessimistic conclusions on the fate of popular music — letting go of musty biases and making at least a modest bet on the potential of the new millennium. Giving all the different ages of pop a more or less equal chance seemed like the right way to go.

For a while, things went down smoothly, and I actually liked the obsessive "alphabetic principle" because it gave me a chance — an obligatory duty, in fact — to catch up on relatively obscure, but worthwhile artists, all the hundred-year way from the urban blues of Alberta Hunter to the math-rock of Adebisi Shank, and it also liberated me from rigged weighing scales: clearly, it is much easier to make a grand case for old-time music when your left cup is exclusively reserved for the likes of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan while your right cup contains everything that the latest fads and trends, no matter how corny or generic, have to offer the consumer. And I really enjoyed catching up on many of the developments that originally passed me by while I was too busy savoring the past catalogs of Rick Wakeman, Kate Bush, and Iron Maiden. Andrew Bird, Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, Bat For Lashes, Beach House, Beirut, Black Keys, Black Mountain, Broadcast, Chairlift... these are just a few names out of many that provided me with hours of genuine joy, or intellectual stimulation, or both.

One odd thing that I quickly noticed was that, regardless of the change in strategy, my new reviews for old school artists still tended to attract far more attention than my reviews of 21st century artists, even regardless of their overall popularity or critical importance. Refreshed assessments of the Beatles, Beach Boys, or Black Sabbath catalogs yielded hundreds of views and quite a bit of comments; new reviews of any of the artists listed above, with very few exceptions, yielded dozens of views and very few occasional comments. At first, I did not pay much attention to this, ascribing this peculiarity to the fact that most of the readers, in all likelihood, were from my old fanbase, and that old fanbase had no obligations at all to accept my strategic deviations. "George only writes well about The Beatles, and has no idea of whatʼs been going on since 1975 ", that sort of thinking. Well — okay, maybe I deserved this, maybe I had just painted myself way too much into one corner to have any right to expect that anybody would ever care about what I could say about Aphex Twin, let alone Boards Of Canada. Iʼll just mosey along with the flow and hope that time will heal some of the wounds... for now.

As time went by, however, worse things began happening. I had reviewed a fairly large number of aspiring young artists who came into the public eye in the early or mid 2000s, and since many of them were obviously not going away any time soon, every now and then I had to catch up by reviewing their latest releases — 2012, 2013, 2014... all the way to the end of the centuryʼs second decade. It was then that I began to notice the problem: for many, if not most, of these artists it was hard for me to put their latest record in context because... I did not remember the first thing about what any of their previous albums sounded like. Seriously, I found myself scratching my head, going back to my first reviews of their records — including those that were, quite often, written about with fondness and respect and highly rated — and realizing that, at best, I only have a vague, abstract idea of what that music sounded like. Even a quick re-listen to select sound clips did not always help: it was as if my memory cells were rejecting this music altogether, throwing it out without much ceremony.

There were exceptions: Arcade Fireʼs Funeral had become rigorously engraved in my memory (clearly becoming my favorite album of the decade and one of my favorite albums of all time), and so were a few tunes from Animal Collective, and from Broadcast, and... well, it is useless to concentrate on particularities at this moment, but the important thing is that they were exceptions, and that was precisely what worried me. It is one thing if you are explicitly dealing with memory overload: your mind, densely saturated with past experiences, simply refuses to soak in any more long-term memories because there is no space for them in your aging brain. But that theory came crashing down precisely because the mind did make exceptions for the likes of Win Butler and Trish Keenan. Moreover, going back into the past, the "alphabetic principle" had allowed me to build up some new old favorites that I had previously ignored, and these seemed rather evenly distributed across most of the decades of the 20th century — from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Al Stewart to the B-52s to Luke Hainesʼ Auteurs and Black Box Recorder.

Yet another realization that eventually struck me as I was browsing through the relatively large list of 21st century artists, and found reliable statistic confirmation, is how many of those people were essentially one-shot wonders — so very often releasing a first album that was really, really fresh and exciting, and then retreading farther and farther into self-repetition and predictable mediocrity with each subsequent release. Even my beloved Arcade Fire did not escape that fate: as far as I am concerned, they never topped the consistency, energy, and maniacal inspiration of Funeral (and as of 2019, it is fruitless to expect that they ever will — fifteen years is already twice as long as the Beatles had existed as a creative force). To the best of my memory, this was definitely not the case even with a decade as recent as the Nineties, when you still had artists like Radiohead or Björk expanding their vision or even radically redefining themselves with each new record. Now, on the other hand, it seemed that artists were praised for and expected to just keep on being themselves for as long as possible — I mean, regardless of which Beach House album you personally consider to be your favorite, it is useless to deny that in the grand scheme of things, they all sound very much the same, and are only distinguished by nuances that have as much subtlety as nuances on any given AC/DC album. (On the other hand, it may at least be argued that it took Beach House a few tries to arrive at the peak of their consistency — if you agree with me that Teen Dream is probably their peak — the absolute majority of their peers just blows the entire wad first time around).

And thus it was that step by step, inch by inch, this good will credit provided to me by the good fairy of Total Availability found itself dissipated. Perversely, the more I tried to immerse myself in the active goings-on of 21st century pop culture, the more I became attracted to the music of the Nineties and even the Eighties — decades that I used to altogether despise while living through them. All of those twenty years, set against the experience of the most recent twenty years, now seemed like an endless, unpredictable, and often daring and provoking period of pushing forward boundaries and defying expectations; no, still nowhere near as jaw-dropping when you think of the many wonders of something like 1967, but nevertheless a period when people were still actively busy creating different formulae rather than simply following them. It just so happened that back in those days, I did not like these formulae — first and foremost, because of the triumph of electronic means of production over "real" instruments — but this time, it was no longer just a matter of personal subjective preference. On the contrary: I found that many of the 21st century albums that I honestly, sincerely liked upon the first few listens (and, accordingly, reviewed quite positively) made a quick and total retreat from my memory as soon as the review was finalized — while quite a few records from the Eighties and Nineties that I had scorned in writing were actually alive and thrashing within those memory cell walls, sometimes asking to be extracted and reevaluated from a new angle.

In the end, I panicked. Here are two new albums by Black Lips and Blitzen Trapper, and I know for sure, goddammit, that I confessed to liking both of these bands — I gave some of their records a thumbs up, didnʼt I? I certainly did. But here are these new albums, and my obsessive code of honor demands that I write about them, yet I cannot write about them without putting them in the overall context of their careers... except I do not remember the tiniest smidgeon of information about them, do not feel the slightest tinge of emotion when stupidly glancing at the track listings of their allegedly very best albums. Is it just because my brain is going bananas? But if it is, why do I still remember, so clearly and distinctly, Adeleʼs 21, or Andrew Birdʼs Swimming Hour — a small handful of records released in approximately the same time period? Surely it is not because they are more "old-fashioned" than Blitzen Trapper... in any case, "old-fashioned" hardly ever matters to me: I mean, it is hard to find more "old-fashioned" bands these days than the Avett Brothers or Band Of Horses, but they have the same problem — good guys, good music, worth some friendly reviews, and then... out of sight, out of mind.

Problem set; now, before we move on to the properly analytical part, it may be worth it to include some external observations. One informational web resource that I have always held, and still continue to hold in high esteem is RateYourMusic — an opinion aggregator that is more or less equidistant from "professional critical consensus" (which, as a rule, will put Bono and Bruce Springsteen at the top if youʼre over 40, and Drake and Rihanna if youʼre under) and "full-on democracy" (which, like every true democracy, eventually turns into an empire — our current one seems to be ruled by Empress Taylor and Emperor Ed). RYM, on the other hand, from its early inception and up until now was largely dominated by a community of genuine music lovers, whose tastes can, of course, still be manipulated by the force of trends and fashions, but are, nevertheless, more likely to be formed by independent experience (as is clearly seen from the large numbers of thoughtful and non-formulaic reviews found therein). With the occasional oddball exception (such as the rather surprising abundance of heavy metal fans who often seem to regard RYM as their personal playground), I tend to view RYM as a platform that reflects the average consensus of people who do give a damn about music as art, rather than music as a source for making a living or just a casual soundtrack for daily chores.

Consequently, the following observations about RYMʼs Top 10 (or Top 15, or Top 20, no matter) lists for recent years, really going all the way back to approximately the mid- or late-2000s, may actually be meaningful and deserve at least to be taken into consideration.

1) Very few acts tend to have their output successfully recognized year after year after year. Other than just a handful of mainstays like Kendrick Lamar (see below on hip-hop), artists from this yearʼs Top 10 are not highly likely to be featured in the previous or in the next yearʼs top spots. Interestingly, artists that made a name for themselves in the early-to-mid 2000ʼs, like Arcade Fire or Beach House or Sufjan Stevens, have a higher chance of recognition in the 2010s than artists that first emerged in the late 2000s to early 2010s (like Janelle Monáe, whose 2010 debut even I recognize as a modern masterpiece, but who has since gone down like a torpedo according to the overall RYM consensus).

2) Very few albums from those Top 10ʼs make it into the general all-time chart. As of this moment, for instance (August 2019), the RYM Top 100 includes only 12 records that are younger than 2000, of which, it is important to note, half are hip-hop (Kanye Westʼs My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and The College Dropout, Kendrick Lamarʼs To Pimp A Butterfly and Good Kid, Madvillainʼs Madvillainy, Danny Brownʼs Atrocity Exhibition), three are albums by artists whose reputations were well established before 2001 (Radioheadʼs In Rainbows and Amnesiac, David Bowieʼs Blackstar), and only three are by pop/rock artists that truly belong to the new millennium (Arcade Fireʼs Funeral, Sufjan Stevensʼ Illinois, Interpolʼs Turn On The Bright Lights — though even here the countdown stops at 2005). It is interesting and telling, by the way, that the hip-hop surge is a relatively new development: Kanye and Kendrik have been recognized for a long time, but have only recently been "upgraded" to the Top 20.

3) Rock veterans from Paul McCartney to U2 almost never appear in these recent Top 10s, which is a credit to RYM — at the very least, nobody could accuse the resource of succumbing to the ideology of dinosaurism. However, it is worth noting that every once in a while, if you modify your search to include archival releases, the Top 10s are immediately transformed. For example, 2018 will have Bob Dylanʼs Bootleg Series Vol. 14 (essentially an alternate version of Blood On The Tracks) as #1; 2011 yields the top spot to the Beach Boysʼ The Smile Sessions; and almost each year in between has at least one or two spots occupied by something else from the vaults (most often it is yet another of Bobʼs Bootleg Series, but not exclusively so).

4) Although I do not have enough persistence to verify this formally, it does seem to me that the overall numbers of ratings and reviews for top-rated albums in the last decade (2011 to present) tend to noticeably decrease compared to previous years. If true, this would confirm the often talked-about phenomenon of "audience splintering", i.e. people distributed over specific niches and albums primarily targeted at various interest groups rather than the musical community in general (if such a "community" could even be said to exist).

Now it is time to take these roughly objective observations and try to relate them with my personal experiences — avoiding, if possible, as simplistic a general interpretation as "see, I told you modern music sucks". The point that I would rather argue is that modern music — along with, frankly speaking, many other modern things — is increasingly becoming more disposable than it used to be. Which may, in a way, be the equivalent of "sucks" to people like myself, who have always been drawn to things of lasting rather than passing value; but is definitely not a condemnation on the global level.

The fact that a large percent of music (movies, literature, art in general, you name it) has always been disposable — just think of all the armies of forgotten Baroque composers or third-rate Delta bluesmen — has nothing to do with this point. The only thing that this point argues is that in the past, it made more sense to think of the hierarchy of musical quality as a pyramid, with a well-defined apex reserved for the proverbial Bachs / Beethovens / Miles Davises / Beatles / Björks and their ilk. In the present, I can only really think of music as a plateau-shaped trapezoid — a pyramid whose top has been neatly sliced off (or, more accurately, eroded), so that it no longer appears sharply visible above the oceans of time. In less formalistic and/or metaphorical terms, this means that the current age produces just as much, or maybe even more, good music than any previous one — but significantly less (and I would even argue next to no) great music. Granted, uttering the words "good" and "great" so soon may be qualified as poor form, but bear with me for now, and we will return to this linguistic issue later on.

What are the reasons for such a transition? Paradoxically, just about all the possible reasons that I can think of have something to do with progress. Regardless of all the troubles that we suffer on an everyday basis, regardless of the fact that many of us are depressed and tired and disillusioned in our fellow humans, on the whole it is hard to lodge formal complaints when we have higher technologies, more advanced artificial intelligence, more free time on our hands, better access to intellectual culture, more opportunities for creativity — well, not all of us do, of course, but the overall statistics are clearly on the progressive side here. And let me be fully clear about this: I do not intend to lament about this state of things one bit — only a retrograde moron would. Itʼs just that all good things in life come at a price, and we, too, must be willing to pay ours; trying to swindle fortune is at best dishonest, and at worst fatal.

To make matters clearer, let me run through some of the main reasons why, in my opinion, we have largely been deprived of "great" music, and show how they are tied to some of our finest progressive achievements. First, though, an important Disclaimer: None of the ideas laid out below aspire to being original — many of them are simple enough to have probably been written about many times by other people, but since I have not met any sources that would put them all together, I will simply apologize beforehand for not coming up with bunches of references; this is, after all, not a scientific paper, just an improvised little essay. If you know of people who share the exact same point of view on all these matters, let me know their names and weʼll form our own Lonely Hearts Club or something. For now, let us get straight to business.

Problem 1: Overload of Opportunity.

Thereʼs too much confusion,
I canʼt get no relief.

Earlier on, I mentioned how the state of "total availability" had completely changed life for myself — and, feeling quite justified to extrapolate this, for the whole world. Naturally, this life changed not only for consumers of cultural "content" (a word that, as we know too well now, Arcade Fireʼs Win Butler hates so much, for respectable reasons), but for its creators as well. With many more people these days having the time and resources to create and, even more importantly, to publish their creativity, the amount of new music produced each month is, I would dare say, comparable to the entire amount of music produced within a decade as late as 30–40 years ago. (Alas, no statistics, but judging by how quickly the "best-of-2019" list on RYM is filling up barely 1–2 months into the year, I am pretty sure I am not far off).

This phenomenon, of course, has been noticed and discussed many times, with the evaluative conclusion being either pessimistic ("who really needs that much music?") or optimistic ("so many new opportunities are opening up for talented people who were previously deprived of them!"). Stuck in between these two extremes, I want to put forward a vague, but reasonable hypothesis that I would summarize as A Dissipation Of Genius. Very crudely speaking, it would suggest that at any given time, there is only a limited amount of abstract potential "greatness" hanging out there in the air, waiting to be activated — and subsequently, the more people are trying to snatch it out in the air, the less they get individually. Imagine a certain amount of chicken feed being distributed for 20 chickens — and then the exact same amount for 200 chickens. You can pride yourself on your increased population, but just how much meat are you going to get off each new chicken bone?

Obviously, this argument falls flat on its face if we object that "musical greatness" is not hanging in the air, waiting to be captured (though I might remark that this is precisely the way in which quite a few musical geniuses had tried to explain their successes), but is only dependent on whatever is contained within each and every one of us: all of us are wonderfully unique, fully self-sufficient human beings, equally capable of magnificent breakthroughs regardless of any cultural, spatial, or chronological circumstances. This would be an extremely attractive, optimistic, seductively idealistic point of view — which, as far as I know, founds no support whatsoever. "Dissipation of genius" is clearly the status quo in modern science, for instance, where Einstein-type personalities are no longer possible for thoroughly objective reasons, and I do not really see why the situation should be any different in arts; just because Art deals with imaginary worlds rather than the real one does not mean that huge competition for building up and enlivening these imaginary worlds should not result in a certain "pettification" of their innumerable variants.

The main problem here is that these days, even if the musical world receives a new artist whose musical ear, imagination, creativity, professionalism, workmanship at the outset are the complete equivalent of a Brian Wilson or a Stevie Wonder, his/her ability to produce music that would have the lasting quality of a classic Brian Wilson / Stevie Wonder album would be handicapped, and not just because of the "Mind Has Its Limits" factor (see below), but because, first and foremost, music is in the ear of the listener, and the listener would have a much harder time singling this new genius out of the immense swarm of competitors — beginning with the simple technical issue of having to spend way too much time and effort on finding and choosing, and ending with the slightly more complex issue of differentiating. Itʼs like, maybe Win Butler and Regine Chassaigne are every bit as talented as Lennon/McCartney; but with such an overload of bands that essentially sound like each other, the distance between Arcade Fire and, say, Broken Social Scene or British Sea Power or whatever seems nowhere near as critical as the distance between the Beatles and, say, the Hollies — so there is always this temptation to lump them all together and say "oh, yeah, Arcade Fire is a good example of 21st century arena-indie-rock, if you like this band you will also like BSS and BSP and .... and ....", or, conversely, "oh yeah, Arcade Fire? same old tired arena-indie-rock shit as BSS and BSP and ... and ... only a person with very boring and formulaic tastes could like all these bands".

On a more formal and more easily understandable note, of course, it has been noted many times that increase in the number of artists inevitably leads to the rise of specialization and niche-based activity — as a rule, creative artists (I am not speaking here of global market marionettes, they will be covered under "Corporate Calculation") are not even trying to appeal to large cross-sections of the population, instead conveniently choosing a certain sub-genre, anything from "dream-pop" to "doom metal", and sticking to it for as long as they are at least able to make a living from their small, but loyally supportive fanbase. This is the easiest explanation for the abovementioned "first album rules, everything after feels decidedly inferior" syndrome: if your appetite demands certain degrees of variety and freshness, rather than "more of the same", this narrow specialization will probably worry and depress you in the same way that it depresses me. (Personally, I have never been able to understand the "more of the same" ideology — if I have one great album in a certain genre and 10 inferior imitations, Iʼd get far more relistening to the great album 10 times than spending these 10 half-hours on inferior experiences).

That said, I can find examples of artists from the past whose albums all "sounded the same", yet still showed a clear trajectory of improvement — AC/DC 1974–1980 and ABBA 1973–77 are two prime examples (post-77 ABBA are distinctly different because of their transition to disco and electropop). Similar examples from the 2000s / 2010s are much harder to come by; the very conception of "artistic growth", where you start out as an aspiring, derivative, but promising disciple and gradually evolve into an artistic giant, has been discarded in favor of the opposite approach — "you have no chance of making it unless your very first statement blows everybody away". Which is only too natural in a situation of miriads of competing opportunities — you do have the same chance as everybody else... but, honestly, this chance is the only one you get. Yes, exceptions exist (in fact, the very small handful of modern artists who, in my opinion, still deserve the title of "great", as a rule, reach their peak after a few tries), but on the whole, the modern world is more keen on following the model of Dire Straits than the Beatles.

In practical terms, say you have just reached the end of 2018 or 2019 and suddenly discovered that you havenʼt heard any new music this year — not because youʼre a particularly grumpy conservative boomer, just, you know, too busy with stuff and other things. So what do you do? Well, you might go to your favorite musical community and say "hey guys, Iʼve missed out, can you give me your Top 10s for this year so I can have a clue about whatʼs going on?" What will happen in the next few hours is that you will be flooded with individual Top 10s that have very little in common — forcing you to either commit to hours upon hours upon hours, or, much more likely, embark on a streaming or youtubian journey of briefly sampling everything so that you can (and will) eventually settle on those few things that match your pre-established tastes, rather than successfully develop any new ones. In other words, the Overload of Opportunity has a very high chance of leaving you locked inside whatever framework you already had — the more choice you are given, the more likely you are to just stick to the tried and true, out of elementary frustration. It certainly helps if you are young and unburdened with any pre-packed baggage, but it does not make your experience any less messy.

Bottomline: there is such a thing as "too much choice" — something you will probably disagree with me upon if you yourself happen to be a Young Creator (because what Young Creator would ever admit that whatever he/she is creating may not necessarily be a good thing?), but probably more likely to agree with if you are an Experienced Consumer. There is also such a thing as "lasting artistic value" — one convenient way to justify the relative lack of great albums today is to declare "greatness" a completely arbitrary social construct, typically pushed upon us by elitist boomer critics for their personal gain... but personally, I prefer to uphold a more respectful attitude towards humanity rather than promote a conspiracy theory about how the only reason why Sgt. Pepper and Dark Side Of The Moon still receive their top billings is the corroding, zombiefying influence of a bunch of white-haired Rolling Stone types on the people at large — even intelligent people. Nope; some things are simply built to last, and the majority of records produced over the past 20 years are not any of these things.

If you generally agree with this point, you might still ask, "well, yes, there is a tremendous lot of good music produced today and practically no great music; why exactly is this a bad thing?" Here I would stress that it is certainly not bad per se; in fact, if thatʼs the way it is, it is probably part of the natural order of things, and hardly a better reason to become depressed than, for instance, waves upon waves of political shit that surround us on all sides. But it can become bad — or, at least, potentially harmful — in a fairly typical situation where people, driven by the natural curiosity to explore first and foremost what is going on in the present rather than focus on the past, take this trapezoid model, rather than the pyramid one, as the default setting. Contrary to what certain new-fangled post-modern schools of thought tell us, hierarchical structures of artistic achievements in which Shakespeare carries more value than Claire McCarthy (and perhaps, sacrilegious as it may seem to some, even more than Tom Stoppard) and the Beatles carry more value than Carly Rae Jepsen have their use even today. We need our Einsteins, our Orson Wellses, and our Hemingways — we can certainly cope with the fact that the world has restructured itself in such a way that it is almost no longer capable of producing them, but it would be inexcusable, in my opinion, to forget — and criminal to deny — that at certain points in time, it used to have that capacity.

Problem 2: Corporate Calculation.

Businessmen they drink my wine,
Ploughmen till my earth.

From the discussion on how social justice and increased opportunity have contributed to devaluing artistic "content", let us now turn to the discussion on how the same devaluation was assisted by progress in the spheres of technology, sociology, market research, and anything that has to do with improving the financial / popular status of both the artist and the industry behind the artist. This is a subject where left-leaning, liberal-minded people might find more common ground with me than on the previous point — though, in all honesty, I have also read quite a bit of conservative thinkers complaining about the exact same thing.

We music lovers have literally been raised on all sorts of educational stories about tough battles between Commercial Greed and Artistic Interests that are as old as the musical industry itself, and, in fact, go all the way back to the ages of traveling minstrels and court composers. From this point of view, there is nothing new under the sun here: the art of balancing between saying what you want to say and saying what others want you to say is essentially the same now as it was 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago. Yet there have also been certain new developments, I fear, which may have stifled true creativity in ways that were only vaguely hinted at in the past century.

The first thing that needs to be said is that some time ago, the much-maligned record industry wasnʼt all bad. Yes, we are well familiar with countless stories of artists being swindled out of their money; of stupid and harmful "commercial" decisions undermining the integrity of the finished product (wrong album covers, wrong track listings, poor choices for singles, misleading marketing strategies); of blackmailing strategies that pushed artists to sacrifice their identity in favor of endorsing the latest commercial fads. We do, however, have plenty of examples of industry bosses, including relatively big ones, who were clearly driven by other factors as well. All of them had to make money, but some were also willing to take occasional (or systematic) risks — and this is why, despite all the justified criticism, we also have plenty of good things to say about such people as Ahmet Ertegun, David Geffen, Jac Holzman, and many others. At the very least, we remember them as outstanding individuals who could often make erroneous or egotistic decisions, but could not be directly accused of not loving or not understanding music and not wanting it to develop and progress in any way possible. And that is even without mentioning the talent scouts — from John Hammond to Gary Gersh, we once had a small army of talented people whose line of work actually involved finding people with musical talent (and, sometimes, ensuring that their talents would be allowed to evolve without too much tampering).

While I cannot vouch for certain that todayʼs record industry has been completely deprived of people of vision, it is somewhat telling that I intuitively view it as having become completely depersonalized — more of a well-oiled algorithmic system in which individual opinion, taste, and strategy no longer matter at all. How many talent scouts or industry bosses do we even know by name, and how many of them have been known to willingly take risks and experiment? The very size of the labels — with the majority of commercial brands now united as The Big Three — implies that individual responsibility has been reduced to negligible proportions. Marketology is now dominated by rapidly advancing statistic algorithms; very soon, big data-based machine learning will be generating optimal strategies that will be followed to the letter since they are strictly-scientifically aimed at maximizing profits at the expense of population majority. "Risk taking" is no longer an option — not because the major labels can no longer afford risks (they most certainly can), but because they no longer believe in taking risks — which may both have to do with "The Mind Has Its Limits" (see below) and also with the perceived uselessness of this strategy: why entrust something to the clearly fallible hunches of the individual mind when you have perfectly viable recipes generated by rigorous analyses of tons of data?

Naturally, in this situation it would probably make more sense than anytime before to put oneʼs trust in the small communities — little indie labels whose purpose has always been stated as putting art before money (at least big money). Even those of us who have not lived through that time, or, like me, spent it behind the Iron Curtain where the situation was altogether drastically different, can easily read up on the emergence of a sharp line between the major commercial labels and the small independent enterprises that began to take shape around the New Wave era and became particularly flashing in the Eighties — back when the "masses" were happy enough listening to Bon Jovi and Asia and Kim Wilde, whereas the "culturally refined" people (mostly college students, of course) could find solace in the indie underground and college rock radio and Sonic Youth and whoever was still interested in keeping music socially and artistically relevant, progressive, and at least vaguely "dangerous". Even after the much-mythologized event of how "Nirvana sold the underground out", the distinction between mainstream and indie persisted well into the Nineties and the early 2000s: I remember distinctly and perfectly well how each of my "modern music sucks!" invocations on the early Internet was immediately repudiated by a dozen remarks of the "nah, youʼre just not listening to the good stuff! you have to be on the active lookout for the good stuff!" variety. And to a large extent, it was true — I could complain about the Backstreet Boys or Mary J. Blige, and people would counterattack this with MP3 gifts of the Flaming Lips or Wilco, and it made me shut up for a while.

I do not know precisely when and how it happened — apparently, grumble grumble, some of the representatives of our cuddly Generation Z may be to blame — but somewhere along the line, the very concept of indie as something radically good and exciting, as opposed to the stupid, boring, and predictable mainstream has completely lost its sheen. And it goes way, way deeper than the trivialization and cheapening of the term alternative that already took place a couple of decades ago. Back when alternative rock, evolving out of the cradle of college rock and grunge, began to feel like alternatively commercialized rock, losing its grit and ultimately turning into bland monstrosities like Nickelback, people still found the strength to reject it in favor of something fresh and different — dream-pop, electronica, hip-hop, you name it. It seemed as if the opposition between "commercial crap" and "genuine art" would still be able to survive, even if it had to be at the expense of bluesy rhythm sections and distorted electric guitars.

The first signs of this alarming nivelation of the difference between market-approved and market-resistant, the way it seemed to me, appeared around the late 2000s — about the same time that I once again resurrected my reviewing schedule — with the nostalgic Eighties boom. I thought there was nothing inherently wrong with this: after all, the new emerging musicmakers were precisely the Eighties generation, and they must have been inspired and energized by the sounds of their childhood much like Paul McCartney had drawn inspiration from the British music hall ditties of his childhood. It was a bit alarming that much, if not most, of that nostalgia somehow ended up centering on the popular sounds of the decade — all of a sudden, synth-pop and electro-pop were being dusted off as if we suddenly had this consensus that the Eightiesʼ greatest musical achievement was getting people to do stupid futuristic dancing. (Rude hint: it wasnʼt). But then again, said I, British music hall circa 1950 wasnʼt exactly the epitome of musical progress, either: we all grow up with what we hear on the radio (well, used to grow up), so if you happen to be subconsciously motivated by mullets, fishnet gloves, and Casios rather than hard-to-generalize underground attributes, you only have regular human nature to blame for that.

The problem is not that the nostalgic Eighties boom happened, and not even that it somehow refuses to end (even if itʼs long past its bedtime, and I am not yet seeing distinct signs of Nineties nostalgia replacing it). The problem is that the popular, critical, "institutional" acceptance for Eightiesʼ mainstream has somehow mutated into the same kind of acceptance for many other, if not all, forms of popular music that had earlier been deemed "uncool". Appreciation — among the young, allegedly ought-to-be-rebellious music lovers — has risen for everybody from Bing Crosby to the Carpenters to Barry White, though, interestingly enough, this sudden affection for middle-of-the-road artists has largely evaded arena-rockers: Hall & Oates may be easily granted immigration visas into the consciences of todayʼs youth, but Foghat and Black Oak Arkansas are about as welcome there as a destitute Mexican in Trumpʼs America. This latter is also a part of the accompanying trend where quintessentially "rock" music loses its cool, partly because bands like Nickelback did so much to uphold the genreʼs reputation, but partly because "rock" is so often associated by millenials and Gen-Z-ers with their boomer (grand)parents and, therefore, has to be rebelled against according to natural law of generations.

Itʼs all fine and dandy, youʼll say, but where does corporate calculation actually enter into this? Well, arguably the worst consequence of modern generationsʼ (note that I am talking about the best representatives of these generations — smart, active, musically curious people) readiness to embrace the kind of music that their parents typically scorned is that indie and corporate music-makers have, to a large part, become indistinguishable from one another, to the point that the old opposition no longer has the same viability in 2019 as it had fifteen years ago. Because if you are young and smart and if you want to listen to music that will piss off your old and allegedly not-so-smart parents and if it is pretty much the same music that corporate culture was pushing upon the world thirty, fourty, fifty years ago... hey, happy times!

A particularly painful example, in my mind, is what happened to Adele. I really liked 19 when it came out and, while it wasnʼt absolutely-totally great, it seemed like a reasonably fresh and independent take on the female singer-songwriting persona. I loved 21 when it came out — here was actually one of those cases where the second album blew the first one out of the water because it improved on each of its aspects — catchier songwriting, more epic feeling, better mastery of diverse styles, and strong self-confidence stopping well short of annoying narcissism. Once 21 (deservedly) became a mega-hit, however, the industry caught up with Adele, and in between 2011 and 2015 she became part of the system: a veritable army of producers, external songwriters, and imagemakers spinning all the necessary wheels to ensure that the ball keep on rolling. (Just for the record, I think that ʽRolling In The Deepʼ is a great song and ʽHelloʼ is a piece of glossy shit, so that we should know where we all stand; for the same record, I can still remember most of 21 by heart, whereas 25 is completely gone from my heart and mind).

Is this a typical story? Of course — "selling out" is a classic term that we have always used, and continue to use for, say, the likes of Eric Clapton, or Aerosmith, or all those progressive rock bands in the 1980s. The difference is that, to the best of my knowledge, nobody ever describes the difference between 21 and 25 as "selling out". In fact, nobody ever describes anything any longer as "selling out"; the term has officially been retired, because it implies the existence of an invisible, but actual wall between two different musical camps, which is no longer there. Imagine, uh, letʼs say, Olivia Newton-John doing an album with, uh, The Clash circa 1978. Impossible, right? Now skip right ahead to 2015 and we find (former) indie darlings Flaming Lips doing an album with Miley Cyrus, literally one of the symbols of corporate commercialism. Nobody is batting an eye (well, actually, the album was so crappy that everybody had to bat an eye, but the very fact of such a collaboration hardly raised any outcries — because how dares anyone but the most elitist prick in the world say that a teen pop queen / sleazy shock diva is somehow "inferior" to one of the most inventive and daring art rock bands of the past three decades?).

Importantly, I am not saying that commercially-oriented, market-calculated music is incapable of having artistic value. "Daring", "experimental", "challenging", "rebellious" music has always lived side by side with "safe", "conservative", "traditional" music — in fact, the former owes the latter its existence, since nothing can be called "daring" unless you have a proper comparison basis. There is nothing inherently wrong with liking Olivia Newton-John (to whom I myself am quite sympathetic), or even with liking Miley Cyrus (who I couldnʼt care less about). There may, however, be something wrong about failing to, or intentionally refusing to admit some kind of border between these types of music. And there is everything wrong with mistaking one of these types for the other, which is exactly what modern corporate culture has been trying to get us to do — as far as I can tell from numerous debates with my younger friends, with a far greater degree of success in the last 15 years than in any previous period in its history.

The thing is, corporate industry is anything but stupid; it simply took it about fifty years to properly learn how to bottle and sell "rebellion" and "empowerment" to the masses. What used to be, fifty or forty years ago, the playground of cynical, but witty and (at least) psychologically interesting individuals like Andrew Loog Oldham and Malcolm McLaren, has turned into a giant, multi-billion-dollar industry of imagemaking that swallows literally everything in its path, artists and listeners alike, so that they do not even realize that they have been living in the belly of the proverbial whale for years now. Itʼs like the famous Pepsi commercial with Britney, Beyoncé, and Pink — see it still hanging on Youtube and all the people in the comments admiring how it promotes girl power and arguing about who is the hottest of the three... in the end, though, what it really all boils down to is that the Pepsi people want you to buy more Pepsi. (Granted, Cokeʼs ʽIʼd Like To Teach The World To Singʼ wasnʼt much better, but in 1971, they had to assemble a special one-time band to sing it — and who really remembers The Hillside Singers today?).

A long-running gag in my Only Solitaire group is my unabated hatred for Taylor Swift; clearly, though, I do not hate Taylor Swift for being a boring songwriter, and I certainly do not hate Taylor Swift as an actual person (as long as she does not murder any of her ex-boyfriends, which could be a good publicity stunt). All my negative energy towards Taylor Swift (and the like) as a cultural phenomenon revolves around the strong combination of calculation and cheapness of the image that she — or her imagemakers, or her marketologists, or, most likely, all of them working as a single team — is projecting. But no, wait, scratch that. Again, calculated, cheap, insincere acts are as old as pop culture itself. What is new — and what really gets my goat these days — is just how many people whom I would normally consider to be intelligent, discriminating, caring about quality and taste actually go on record confessing their acceptance of, respect towards and (in extreme cases) admiration for the likes of Taylor Swift. Usually in one of two possible variants: the left-leaning / feminist / progressive people admire the lady for doing all the right things ("Tay-Tay has just openly supported LGBT people in her latest video, yay, go Tay! share on Twitter!"), while people who care a little less about politics and issues and a bit more about the music just go "hey, she writes great catchy songs, whatʼs wrong with that?". Score one — a big one — for the corporations. Itʼs clearly been a long, long time since we used to poke fun at ʽDo They Know Itʼs Christmas?ʼ and its dubious artistic values; now all it takes for the big guys is to subtly press a few correct buttons, and presto, we have been taught what real art should look like. And also probably made quite a few bucks for the big guys, in passing.

That said, Taylor Swift has at least never pretended to be anything but a part of the corporate commercial culture, be it in her early country days or in her modern electropop diva guise. But who really did? When I listened to Carly Rae Jepsen and honestly admitted to not hearing that much difference between her music and the usual commercial drivel, people told me "yeah, but the difference is that she is really not a part of the machine — she is doing all of that on her own, whatever she wants". Well... uh... maybe so, and we should technically speak of CRJ as an "indie" artist because... because sheʼd like to think of herself as an indie artist (or something like that, anyway, I have no idea if she ever uses the term). But all the formal attributes are there! You have your army of producers, your army of external songwriters, your synthesized musical arrangements that everybody is using these days, your lyrical subjects of sentimental alienation that are all the rage everywhere. How the heck do you tell the difference?

A particularly nasty endorsement of this barrier-breaking approach would sound as follows: "In the past, we had self-appointed elites — boomer elites, naturally — with allegedly ʽgood tasteʼ, who usurped the public right to proclaiming what was great ʽartʼ and what was not, so that subsequent generations were indoctrinated into believing that The Beatles, or The Doors, or Frank Zappa made great music while Engelbert Humperdinck and Tony Bennett sang disposable crap. Later, the same elites were responsible for putting down disco, synth-pop, new school R&B and other perfectly fine genres because, somehow, things like hardcore punk and Brit-pop and avantgarde and IDM were considered ʽartistically superiorʼ. The time has come, brothers and sisters, to eliminate this fake discrepancy, restore justice to unjustly scorned musical genres and artists, and reject this ʽelitismʼ once and for all. Especially because it had its roots in racism, sexism, and homophobia all along". (That last part is sometimes presented as the icing on the cake — only recently, in all seriousness, I read an article about how the "disco sucks!" campaign was driven by racism and homophobia all along; I only hope that subsequent generations will manage to remember that at least the Gibb brothers were not a bunch of black gay men. Apparent­ly, some modern know-it-alls find it hard to believe that back in 1979–80, somebody could actually dislike disco simply because it sucked).

In propagating this absurdist historical revisionism, people are not simply mistaking black for white: they are unwittingly playing into the hands of the corporate industry that is manipulating their feelings and making them feel as if, by "rectifying" the history of art in this way, they are actually doing some important thing for The Cause. Thus, "rock" music, which used to be perceived as flying provocative and rebellious colors by default, is now increasingly viewed as a rudiment of conservative, sexist, racist forces — who knows, maybe this is the way it is today, but it definitely was not that way in the sixties or seventies. "Pop" music, on the contrary, is being promoted as the gold standard for empathy, tolerance, unification, even psychological depth — which, again, is perfectly fine for the music industry, which has always found it easier to deal with more predictable and malleable "pop" artists than the generally rowdier "rockers". It may be argued that the original rise of "poptimism" in the early 2000s was a natural process, a healthy counter-reaction to the over-the-top expansion of "alternative rock" in the previous decade. But in the end, the "poptimistic" approach played right into the hands of people who would be perfectly happy to have your brains turn to mush, to have your sense of history completely atrophied, and to have your perfectly natural and admirable drive to do good in this world reduced to not forgetting to buy tickets for the nearest Ed Sheeran concert (okay, low blow, but within a text this large, it is hard to finish each paragraph with a tasteful banger).

To be fair, of course, music of the past 15 years cannot be reduced to just a general amalgamation of mainstream and indie values under a banner of pop commercialism. Overload of Opportunity guarantees you a good chance that every single day you can have easy and unconditional access to plenty of stuff outside the system — electronica, hip-hop, death metal, even straightforward pop music that simply refuses to play by the rules. But the overall influence of the system seems to me to be far more alarmingly overwhelming than it used to be, and the technologies with which it spreads this influence far more advanced and subtle than they were at any time in the past. Not that we should be too surprised about it — after all, progress is progress, and it is naïve to expect its fruits to be limited to just the good guys as time goes by.

Problem 3: We Have It Easy.

None of them along the line
Know what any of itʼs worth.

Assuming that we are on the right track, let us now construct, to the best abilities of our limited imagination, the idealized model of what a perfect modern music band should look like. Their heads are not spinning because of the Overload of Opportunity; their minds are not enthralled by Corporate Calculation; they are young, sincere, intelligent, passionate about music, they honestly feel like they have something new and important to say and they combine it with just a pinch of innocence and naïvety that are so essential for a perfect connection with the listener. Maybe I have just described the Arctic Monkeys, or maybe it was Chairlift, or maybe even (God help us all) Bon Iver, I really have no idea. Maybe it was nobody in particular. In any case, the nagging question is: why does this music, regardless of how closely it matches this ideal, so rarely affect me on an emotional level? Why is it that I typically want so much more — on a purely gut level, no overthinking this particular issue — to empathize with pop music makers from the Fifties all the way to the Nineties, and feel the presence of an invisible line just as we pass the ridiculously mystical number 2000?

If these questions seem meaninglessly subjective and alien to you, please feel free to skip this entire section. It is quite probable that they will seem alien to you if you were born anytime after 1990, and with an even larger degree of probability, they will seem alien if you were born anytime before that and your biggest public fear is to pass off as an obsolete nostalgic wreck in the face of the freshly arrived generations. Indeed, this can be a terrifying feeling — we have all learnt our lesson too well from how "guitar bands were on their way out" in 1962, and it is understandable that nobody wants to feel like a fossil in the brand new age of innovative technologies, progressive thinking, and global leadership.

Not so terrifying for yours truly, since I already have a long history of feeling like an obsolete nostalgic wreck — ever since I was six or seven years old, I think — and am therefore in a nicely quaint position of being able to compare how it felt to be an obsolete nostalgic wreck in the Eighties, in the Nineties, and in the new millennium. Believe it or not, these were three seriously different feelings. The first two were largely egocentric, and based very much on ignoring — intentionally or unintentionally — a lot of the things that were going around simply because they were so different from the kind of music that I was accustomed to. In the back of my mind, I wanted everything to sound like the Beatles, or the Doors, or at least Led Zeppelin, so, one by one, I had to overcome my phobias of heavy metal, punk rock, avantgarde, electronica, synth-pop, trip-hop, all the way to glitch and sample-based music. It was a good journey that I remember with fondness, and I sure wish I could still continue it or go on another one, but the problem is that all those conquests were real challenges — barriers that you had to break down, walls that you had to scale, magic potions, if you wish, that you had to imbibe to let your mind and conscience expand. Alas, itʼs been quite some time since I last faced a true challenge.

One thing, perhaps, that I have always valued above everything else about music was the ability of the artist to break down all possible barriers — go all-the-way-out-there, pull out all the stops, never look back, tear ʼem all a new one, that kind of thing. This is not how it should work in real life, where I always like to see mild solutions and compromises — you donʼt really want to see the world go down in flames. Art, however, to me has always been the platform for tense, strong, radical, exaggerated, hyperbolical statements — musical dramas, tragedies, exorcisms, sacrifices, you name it. The volcanic energy of classic Who, the sardonic nastiness of classic Stones, the sharp-as-a-knife bitterness of classic Floyd — these were always preferable over the soft, lulling, smoothly flowing friendliness of the Grateful Dead, a band that had always avoided sharp angles with the same industriousness as the parents of a year-old toddler. Later on, I learned how to get inspired by the arch-cockiness of Prince, the top-of-the-line sexy snap of early Madonna, the depressed deeps of Portishead, the austere minimalism of the Ramones, the putrefying dirtiness of Motörhead... too many examples to list. Importantly, this kind of 100%-empowering music may be produced in any genre — pop, rock, folk, reggae, R&B, or you could push it back all the way to the times of Mozart and Beethoven, it does not really matter. No prisoners, no quarter, one hundred percent: the blooded stage hands of Pete Townshend around 1969-70 have always been and continue to be the symbolic illustration of what it takes to transcend mere craft and pass into another dimension.

My single largest problem with most of the music from this century is that I no longer get any of that adrenaline rush. Yes, there most certainly are occasional exceptions — the abovementioned Arcade Fire is one of them, or, if you smell "rockism" and demand an example as far removed from old-school pop-rock values as possible, then perhaps Animal Collective would be another suitable case (although Merriweather Post Pavilion, their unquestionable peak, is also ten years old by now). But the absolute majority of positive emotions (I am intentionally omitting overtly bad music, of which I have also heard plenty, from this discussion) could be summarized as "nice": listenable, well-crafted, tasteful, but stopping well short of the line beyond which I could be capable of experiencing bliss, and in most cases, clearly inferior next to artists with whom I was already familiar. Beach House? Nice, but nowhere near as magical as Cocteau Twins. Chelsea Wolfe? Commendable love of darkness, but nothing beats my girl Nico. Anaïs Mitchell? Intelligent, knowledgeable, creative, but if you have the mis­fortune of being a female singer-songwriter with the name Mitchell, you have a very tough association to beat. Battles? Adebisi Shank? Almost amazingly complex and creative math-rock, but still nowhere near the imagery and tension of King Crimson who could achieve far more significant results with far more modest means. And the list goes on and on.

Note that I am not even talking here about innovation (this will be taken care of in the next section); I am simply talking about the capacity to make music that is emotionally moving on a very deep level, well within any previously established musical paradigms. It goes without saying that this is a very subjective area, and a lot depends here on the sequence of accumulation. A younger person will hear Beach House without knowing a thing or two about Cocteau Twins — thus, his/her capacity for being amazed and bewildered will already have been triggered, and the epic dreamy soundscapes of Cocteau Twins might seem inferior in comparison simply because, well, you always have those special memories of the one who took away your emotional virginity. (It certainly does not help that, to a young modern ear, the production on classic Cocteau Twins albums might and almost certainly will seem to be horrendously murky and outdated in comparison to modern standards of sound). But if some of us share at all the assumption that certain types of art can have lasting value, and that "lasting value" itself is a concept that cannot be reduced to conspiracies of old heterosexual white males, this implies that any person with a genuine love for art should strive to take art in context, and be able to empathize with the artistic spirit of any generation — after all, we do tend to scoff at statements such as "I canʼt watch old black and white movies" or "I canʼt read Shakespeare because the language is so twisted and obsolete", donʼt we? (Hint: thereʼs nothing wrong or hypocritical about scoffing at such statements even if you do not watch old black and white movies or read Shakespeare on a casual basis).

Anyway, enough with preliminaries and disclaimers, let us cut to the chase. First, as we have known from at least the days of Aristotle, art in general, and musical art in particular, obviously stems from life — in return, it also influences life to a certain extent, but clearly people have to draw on their own experiences and surroundings to find artistic inspiration for whatever it is they are doing. Accordingly, music shifts and evolves in the same directions as the entire world around us, reflecting the state of society (or, at least, parts of the society) at any given time. Second, it is also no secret that the majority of popular artists, ever since popular art began, tend to come from the middle classes — all the way from blue to white collar strata — and, occasional exceptions aside, it is also no secret that on the whole, the levels of hardship, poverty, aggression, etc. in middle class society have been steadily decreasing over the past half century. Get offended if you want to, but we, or, more accurately, our children do have it easier than it used to be.

Read the biographies of just about any beginning rock band in the Sixties and you will find that almost every one of them was literally at the edge of starvation at one time or another. Too often do we admire the out-of-nowhere genius of the Beatles or the Stones without taking a minute to remember years of dedicated suffering that they were willing to endure in exchange for creative and personal freedom. Like, when it comes to the Stones, we always like to snicker at young suburban white-collar boy Mick Jagger aping the features and attitudes of old Delta bluesmen; but we do not always remember that this was the same Mick Jagger who, of his own free will, had preferred the conditions of living in a filthy, crowded flat with his bandmates, scrounging for a living, to a life of assured comfort and stability as an established alumnus of the London School of Economics. Or all that unparalleled, unrivaled, unchallenged aggression on the Stoogesʼ Fun House, an album whose viciousness, as far as I am concerned, has never been surpassed by anybody and the very first notes of which still make my hair stand on end, no matter how many times I have heard them? Just read about the backstory of the Stooges and you will understand how closely it reflected their actual living conditions.

I have to do my best so as not to attach any emotional judgements to these historical observations. This is something that would be better left to artists themselves — artists are, by definition, supposed to thrive on hyperboles and shock value, so let somebody like Clint East­wood talk about the "pussy generation" of today, or wacky old Stephen Stills sing his heart out with vitriol about how "dead stupid cyberpunks" and "gigabyte meth freaks" have replaced the Woodstock generation. I certainly love and respect, en masse, the young people of today — my own son is over 20, so I literally have no choice here — and all the numerous small ways in which they have managed to surpass their fathers and grandfathers. The problem is, for all these small ways they just canʼt make any goddamn great music. They honestly try their best, but they canʼt. For instance, they can write millions of songs about break-ups — arguably the single most popular motif in todayʼs puzzling amalgamation of mainstream and indie — but they cannot make a single one of them burn with the same kind of inner flame as Fleetwood Macʼs ʽThe Chainʼ (I am listing this particular example because I was recently struck by just how totally ineffective the song had been made as a live cover by Florence & The Machine — oh kids, stay away from classics unless you have the guts to really really mean it).

This peculiarity has nothing to do with genetic diseases, or alien viruses, or the loss of ability to empathize or think, or a wilful embrace of decadence and apathy — and everything to do with shifting social conditions. Thus, politeness and inoffensiveness, which have more or less become the happy norm for intelligent young people, are your enemies when it comes to creating art — which should shock and offend if it truly wants to get to the point. Improvements in the general education system mean that formerly vibrant slogans such as "schoolʼs out for ever" and "we donʼt need no education" have largely lost their bite (not that our modern education systems are perfect in any way — but come on: those lines were all written back when corporal punishment was still a thing!). Most importantly, though, perhaps, with increasing opportunities all around, we are no longer able to understand the raw excitement with which young people half a century ago were getting into areas access to which had previously been reserved to higher classes — all those art school students who suddenly found out that they could channel their cultural heritage through themselves and out to millions of people in the outside world, on a scale previously unheard of in world history. Today, your ability to get through to millions of people with one click is taken as more or less a given — and from a psychological standpoint, this may be understood as a handicap rather than a stimulus.

What may have changed for the better (though I am not sure if "better" is the right word for it) is the official amount of intellectual content in modern musical productions. Long gone are the days when people could get away with the "love me do, you know I love you" type of lyrics. Modern math-rockers elevate musical structures to unbelievable degrees of complexity. Modern electronic artists make use of advanced hardware and software achievements to create sonic networks that make not only Kraftwerk, but even classic Aphex Twin sound like undergraduates. Production values have skyrocketed even for artists — perhaps especially for artists — who otherwise represent all the cheapest aspects of modern commercial music making (you know who Iʼm talking about). Many of the smarter younger people like it that way: for social reasons, they cannot bring themselves to sing along with "hey good lookinʼ, what you got cookinʼ", and are ready and willinʼ (sometimes openly, more often implicitly) to relegate poor old Hank Williams to the trash bin of history — just take the same melody, replace it with a less disturbingly sexist and more astutely worded message, and you got yourself a relevant modern classic instead. Although... relevant in the short run, perhaps, but something tells me that somebody like Kacey Musgraves is going to be replaced by the exact same Kacey Musgraves ten or twenty years from now — but the troubled magic captured in Hankʼs singing is not going to return any time soon. Maybe after a nuclear winter or something.

Nor do race, gender, religious or cultural background play a big part here. Thus, upon first listen, I really liked Benjamin Clementineʼs At Least For Now — the man was clearly gifted, a poet, a player, a visionary, and, above all, a person who clearly saw no obligation to stick to a particular formula just because of his skin color, instead trying to create a synthesis of some of the best features of European, American, and African music. And he did not even match all that well my general predictions — apparently, he did have a relatively tough backstory of school bullying and then busking near homeless shelters on the streets of Paris or whatever. And even so, two months after giving his debut album an almost glowingly positive review, I found out that the only thing lingering in my head was the overall concept of this album — not a single particularity about it. Now that his second album has been out for two years, I am almost afraid to approach it — I like the man too much to suffer another disappointment. (Oh, and just for comparison, if you happen to be afraid that I have Alzheimerʼs or something, the last album so far in my life that I have only recently heard for the first time and memories of which have been dazzlingly vibrant in my head for about a year now is Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatraʼs Nancy & Lee from 1968: for ʽSome Velvet Morningʼ alone I would happily trade ten entire careers of Lana Del Rey). Itʼs just that somehow, somewhere along the line his odes to broken hearts, grieved fortunes, and alienation took on a nature much more symbolic and formal than truly emotional / sentimental. I could try to sympathize and identify with him on an intellectual level, not on an intuitive one. And as it turns out, memory of the heart is usually much stronger than memory of the mind.

One indirect piece of support for this general theory — which could crudely boil down to "the better we live, the weaker art we create" — might unexpectedly come from the one music genre that I still tend to avoid, but which has really done its best in recent years to win me over: hip hop. Remember the observations on how few albums from after 2000 make it into the top 100 on RYM? Some people have objected to this saying that "the majority simply hasnʼt yet settled on a consensus", but something tells me it never will settle on any consensus; at the same time, however, the majority did clearly settle on a consensus for hip hop — apparently, Kanye and Kendrick at least have already been immortalized; not so sure about Danny Brown (this will probably depend on the way his subsequent career turns out), but in addition to these, we now also have acts like Death Grips, Run the Jewels, Brockhampton, and quite a few other who, as it seems even to people who are not the biggest fans of hip hop (like me), are way farther ahead on the cutting edge these days than any­body from the "rock" or "pop" sides of the tracks.

Indeed, given this enthusiastic reply, it is almost as if the late 2000s — early 2010s is going to enter history as the real period when hip hop finally reached its mature stage, despite all the long-standing praise in the musical community for classic hip hop acts from the Eighties and Nineties. Simply because it took the genre that long to properly break through the niche walls and begin reaching the general listener, black and white alike. Without a doubt, this had first and foremost to do with the expanding horizons of the artists themselves, as they grow both lyrically (now embracing subjects that massively appeal to consumers outside ghetto areas) and musically (increasing the sample base to include just about everything — I wonʼt lie, it was Kanyeʼs absolutely masterful incor­poration of ʽ21st Century Schizoid Manʼ into ʽPowerʼ that finally made me join the fanbase of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy). But it also had to do with the fact that hip hop, even in this relatively safe and cuddly era, still retains the essential bite of the underdog — never mind that Kanye and Kendrick were already well-to-do superstars by the time they recorded their masterpieces, never mind that Kanye himself, to the best of my knowledge, was a strictly middle class kid all the way rather than a slum / ghetto kid, I can still give him the benefit of representing a much more pissed-off, desperate, frustrated, fiery part of the nation than... uhh... well, at least somebody like Justin Vernon. In all honesty, ʽPowerʼ gets my tired old blood flowing faster than any single "angry" rocker from any single white boy since the days of Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley. (And no, the early 2000s garage-rock revival does not cut it: the Strokes / Hives / Vines crowd already suffered from all the problems I mentioned).

Whether the genre still has a glorious future in store for it, or whether we are now witnessing the absolute peak of a movement that will soon be reduced to feeble self-parody by the combined forces of the Overload of Opportunity and Corporate Calculation (and We Have It Easy, if the social conditions that supply so much fuel to this particular fire ever start improving to the same levels that they have improved for the white middle class) — this is not for me to say. For now, the main problem is that, despite major progress in this area, hip hop still has some way to go to completely transcend its niche status — partly because we have just entered the peak era of niches and nich-isms, and partly because the combination of sampling and rapping is still conservatively seen by many people as "not music" (I think now that this debate is largely a matter of terminology, but I still admit myself that it is much easier for me to deal with music played with real musical instruments), and also partly because, unlike blues, soul, and rockʼnʼroll, hip hop has proven much harder to adopt and adapt for Eurocentric musical culture. Still, the very fact that I was able to easily get into Kanye and Kendrick (and feel myself old when trying to get into Death Grips) after consecutively feeling nothing but indifference towards Run DMC, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Wu-Tang Clan.... that has got to count for something.

All that has been said here is sure to raise certain uncomfortable questions, such as: "Imagine that ʽImagineʼ has come to pass, and everybody is living in total peace and happiness; would art, and musical art in particular, be incapable of acute emotional resonance in such a society?" The thing is, such a question actually makes no sense, since our emotional resonance itself is shaped by the surrounding circumstances: in a society where the worst thing that could ever happen to you was a mosquito bite, weʼd have music inspired by weak mosquito bites (emo), strong mosquito bites (doom metal), and a lack of mosquito bites (twee pop), and our gamma of feelings would still run all the way from terrified to rapturous. So far, however, we still live in a society that has only recently began to learn how not to exterminate each other in world wars, how not to let a major part of its population live under normal conditions of everyday starvation, how not to resort to violence and cruelty on a casual basis — and still has a long way to go to ensure that these new values are not reversed. It is important to remember that most, if not all of the great art of the 20th century is inextricably linked to the unimaginable cruelties and hardships of that century — and from that point of view, we would certainly rather have a 21st century completely devoid of great art than have to go through World War III to raise a new generation of Lennons and McCartneys. Itʼs better to fade away than to burn out, and I hope that I donʼt die before I get old — just what Neil and Pete taught us to do based on their own lives, in the end.

In conclusion of this section, Iʼd like to briefly pass on this observation on the most recent teen fad — the phenomenon of Billie Eilish, whose success story right now is hotter than anything else on the planetʼs surface. Out of curiosity and general culturological interest, I have listened to a few of her songs and watched a few live performances, and the easiest explanation for this success, I think, is how she manages to personalize, for this generation of kids, everything that could piss off their hip parents and grandparents. All the aspects of her production are the epitome of mediocrity — she is a clumsy mover, a barely competent singer, a transparently untalented songwriter, a collector of lyrical and visual clichés — but she combines all of them in an act of generational defiance, imbibing that aggregated mediocrity with a tragic flair. Her entire show is like a Dumbfuck Rite of Spring, an act of self-immolation in the face of the fact that she, and the entire generation that she represents, canʼt really do much of anything — not with this world weʼre living in, not with themselves, not with anybody else. Itʼs actually quite creepy: watching her engage in this ritual with her audience gives a bit of an Island of Doctor Moreau feel, if you know what I mean. And it only further confirms my suspicion that those waves of depression which, according to both personal observations and confirmed reports, have engulfed our latest generations, go way deeper than politics, reactionism, right wing triumphs, or having to emotionally and intellectually cope with a Godless universe. But how deeper? To answer that, we have to discuss our fourth, and arguably biggest, problem.

Problem 4: The Mind Has Its Limits.

There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke.

We now come to the point with which I have been obsessed for the longest time — in fact, if I remember correctly, it had already provided the main focus for my earlier essay. Briefly, what I tried to articulate twenty years ago was that we may have reached a point where humankindʼs capacity for making fresh, exciting, innovative musical patterns and textures has approached, or even reached, its limits, and that soon enough, in order to have your mind greatly amazed and expanded by a new piece of music, you would have no other choice than to erase, forget, and/or rewrite the entire history of art.

Back in 1999, as I was still sitting atop my select pile of CDs, this idea could not have been anything other than a hunch — without the factor of Total Availability at your disposal, there was no way it could be confirmed (or disproved). Once, however, we did move into this new age where art and other forms of intellectual property can, as a rule, become available with one click of the fingers, I started catching myself, more and more often, in a state of constant déjà vu, of which music was only a part — books, movies, visual arts, you name it, followed the same pattern: "nice album / book / movie / installation, but didnʼt artist / writer / director / artist so-and-so realize more or less the same ideas earlier, and better?" Well, scratch ʽbetterʼ; we actually covered ʽbetterʼ under We Have It Easy. The more important word here is "earlier".

In that early text, I had outlined the overall history of music in a roughly linear fashion — actually, precisely the way it is usually presented in most popular accounts of music history; nothing original, and nothing particularly wrong in seeing the major line of development going through various phases of classical / academic music, then transitioning to jazz as the leading force, then to rock, then to various forms of post-rock (in the large sense — including electronica and hip hop). Each stage of this development was fairly complex, and no single time period could be completely reduced to one single dominant form, but you could put down a general history of music divided by periods where certain forms would be deemed old-fashioned or obsolete and certain other forms as fresh and innovative.

Thinking about the nearly twenty years of this century, I cannot come up with any single musical form, or even any set number of musical forms that would be clearly dominant over others — let alone "innovatively dominant". Rock? People are sick and tired of it, and other than cleaner production and modernized lyrics, rock hasnʼt had a breakthrough in years; papers that bury rock for good now come out in pop culture magazines like fly swatters against occasionally cropping up pests such as Greta Van Fleet. Pop? Yes, some people actually say that pop is the dominant force now — but pop in its many forms has been around for decades, and the breaking of the barrier between mainstream and indie can hardly count as an innovative musical develop­ment. Hip hop? Maybe the best candidate so far (if only because hip hop is the only genre that has progressed very significantly compared to its 20th century days), but still tied down by its niche status, still having a hard time overcoming its formulaic limitations, still way too often serving as a "meta-genre" that reinterprets past achievements rather than boldly pointing the way into the future. The electronic scene? Yet another niche, and one that has not really produced a truly legendary representative since the days of Aphex Twin and Autechre (no wonder the entire world still waits with bated breath for each next creation from either of the two).

Paradoxically, it is only when I completely and utterly refute the desire to search for this "next chapter" in the overall evolution of music that the 21st century begins to become somewhat appealing, or to simply make sense. If anything, its major innovative principle is "let a thousand flowers bloom" — a near-complete equality and welcome policy for everything you could ever imagine. Poke around and you will see people making new classical music, new jazz, new folk, new blues, new country, new progressive rock, new hardcore, new electronica, new world music in any variety you could ever think of — Overload of Opportunity at your service. No single genre of music may be formally declared "dead" as long as it continues to be appealing to even the tiniest slice of population and as long as somebody is still willing to work within its confines, and most musical genres still satisfy those requirements. Throw in the important aspect of constantly rediscovering "lost classics" — everything from obscure 17th century baroque composers to third- and fourth-tier 1970s prog bands — and your acquaintance with the world of music today is the audio-selective equivalent of Willy Wonkaʼs.

As great as it sounds from one point of view, it also means that from another point of view, music has essentially / roughly come to an end — perhaps temporary, but nothing out there proves that it could not be final, either. Now that I have had the opportunity to immerse myself into a long and detailed comparative experience of everything from 1920 to 2019, I can say for certain that the 2000s (at least the mid-to-late 2000s) and the 2010s are the first period in a long time to lack a distinctive "musical face" of their own. Most of the big differences have been functional and technical — the rise of YouTube, streaming, etc. — but stylistically, it is hard for me to tell 2009 from 2019, simply because there is no specific thing that would make me go "oh, this is so 2009 and so not 2019" or "this is so 2019 and so not 2009". Itʼs all the more astonishing when you look at the sheer numbers of "new musical genres" allegedly invented over the past 20 years — from jazztronica to vaporwave to glo-fi to chiptune to kawaii future bass to trans-Andean neo-goth-folkstep — not a single one of which can be said to have had any serious effect outside small circles of fans and critics.

Not too astonishing, though, once you realize that the majority of these genres are essentially "musical cocktails" — results of complicated syntheses of disparate entities that, like most cocktails, particularly appeal to small separate groups of discriminating connaisseurs, while the majority of consumers stays perfectly happy with the base ingredients. Sometimes it works reasonably well, sometimes it doesnʼt, and it makes about as much sense to study and savor all these developments as memorizing detailed lists of various types of proteins and carbohydrates (which is now not even a necessary requirement of your average biochemist, who can easily google them up whenever the need arises). No such synthesis over the past 15–20 years, so it seems to me, has produced a truly new and universally recognizable form of life. (With the possible exception for dubstep, although I think many of us would agree that this one was closer to a Frankenstein monster, and it still sorely needs to be put down for everybodyʼs good).

If I am wrong here, I have yet to see me proven wrong, and this will happen if everybody settles down on a few musical terms that can be quickly and securely associated with the 2010s the same way "psychedelia" is tied to the Sixties, "funk" and "disco" are tied to the Seventies, "hair metal" (yes, it was embarrassing, but it was such a unique trademark) is tied to the Eighties and "grunge" and "Brit-pop" are tied to the Nineties. Or if we settle on a relatively common answer to the question "Who are the Beatles / Stones / Dylans of the 2010s?" (ʽTaylor Swiftʼ and ʽEd Sheeranʼ, being 100% creations of Corporate Calculation, do not count as legitimate answers; ʽKendrick and Kanyeʼ may be closer to the truth, but see above on their niche status). Or, at least, if we all feel secure about deciding which ones are the artists to whose next records we are actively looking forward to — if you are the same age as me or older, a very likely answer is zero (if you say ʽPaul McCartneyʼ or ʽNeil Youngʼ, you really are a hopeless old fart; if you say ʽKing Crim­sonʼ, you are an exquisitely refined kind of old fart, but an old fart nonetheless); if you are younger, a very likely answer is somebody, but it is just as likely that the somebody in question will be completely different for each one of your ten nearest neighbors. (I personally tested this using my Facebook community as a focus group once).

At times, I like to metaphorically think of all the different musical genres as a pack of scattered marathon runners — some getting an early start and then running out of breath midway through and having to limp the rest of the way, some joining the race much later and sprinting like mad for a while, and some taking the time to mate in nearby bushes and then having their offspring join the crowd (yes, itʼs a pretty long marathon). But now it seems to me that the marathon has ended, everybody has crossed the finish line, and what happens now is that all the winners take their time to relax at the pool, sip cocktails, and exchange colorful stories of their best moments during the race: not a terribly exciting finale, but mayhaps a heart-warming one, anyway.

As a matter of fact, the idea that human potential for creating genuinely new forms of (musical) art may be finite is nothing to laugh at — we might be pretentiously giving a little too much credit to ourselves if we keep insisting on the opposite. And music is only part of the big picture here. From a scientific perspective, I have recently been amused by John Horganʼs The End Of Science, a deliberately provocative, but respectably bold statement that the human mind has pretty much ran out of opportunities for groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting discoveries of the Einstein / Darwin type of magnitude. New scientific achievements are still possible and certain to be expected (in fact, we predictably see them every day and will go on seeing them for many generations), but primarily within the limits of already established models and paradigms — anything that goes beyond that may already be outside the scope of understanding of the human mind due to its inherent limitations. (After all, it already takes a way above-average brain to understand the basics of quantum mechanics, let alone string theory).

Likewise, the most radical and challenging forms of music — from Ustvolskaya to Throbbing Gristle to late Autechre, etc. — are "accessible" to such a puny minority of the people that going beyond them would reduce the audience to near zero; more accurately, going beyond them, at present, is simply unimaginable. The drastic expansion of musical horizons in the 20th century was due to the old European tradition bringing in reinforcements — from Africa, from the Middle and the Far East, even from aboriginal traditions of the Americas, the Pacific, and Australia. No more reinforcements are available to us, unless we happen to uncover the mystical secrets of Atlantis or contact distant life forms in some galaxy far, far away. All we can do now is to simply continue cross-breeding the genres in much the same way that they have been cross-bred over the past 20 years — but if that continues at the same rates as it has, we might even find ourselves running out of all possible combinations before the century is out; and most importantly, few, if any, of these combinations will matter anyway.

"Welcome to the new Dark Ages", sang Greg Graffin on Bad Religionʼs aptly titled New Maps Of Hell in 2007. What he and his fellow Brett Gurewitz meant, of course, was the rising threat of obscurantism and neo-conservatism — a perfectly real threat that has become even way more tangible over the past decade. But I like to see this metaphor differently: in some models of history, the real "Dark Ages" were not so much a period of raging cruelty and superstition (of which humanity has always had plenty before and since) as a period of quiet intellectual stability following a major outburst of creative ideas, a period during which society was essentially trying to come to terms with all the previously accumulated knowledge, slowly disseminate it among a much larger group of people than before, and prepare the ground for the next big push. It may well be that we are on the threshold of another such period — and fate only knows, then, for how long it is going to last: a decade, a century, or several millennia. In any case, it is already happening: quietly, one by one, people here and there are beginning to talk about the slowing down of progress, and music is one form of art where this slowing down is particularly well observable, though certainly far from the only one.

Back when I was already suggesting something similar twenty years ago, some of those people who did not call me an idiot and thought the suggestion made sense still objected that the situation might be temporary, and that after a brief lull we would likely see "the next Beatles" achieving the next major breakthrough. I say that if this has not clearly happened over the last twenty years, then there is no reason to expect a miracle in the next twenty. The 20th century, with its many artistic, scientific, and technological wonders achieved through democratization, globalization, and general rationalism, has spoiled us so much that some of us might have truly believed in the endlessly exponential growth of artistic progress, even though common sense should have told us such a thing would be impossible; in reality, the curve simply hits a brick wall at some point — just like you canʼt accelerate past the speed of light; moreover, your body and your mind wonʼt even be able to properly adjust to speeds much slower than the speed of light. Like dear old Pete said way back in 1968, when the situation was nowhere near as dire yet: "We try harder and harder, tryinʼ to get our way / But itʼs a long long wait until Judgement Day / So settle your affairs and take your time / ʼCause everything in the world is yours and mine". And by that last line, he certainly meant Overload of Opportunity, didnʼt he?

Conclusion: Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3

But you and I, weʼve been through that
And this is not our fate.

If you have unexplainably made it this far down into the text, then either I am a genius of whining or you have a serious masochistic streak. To recapitulate what we may have implied this far — too much opportunity is a bad thing; careful marketing strategies are a bad thing; millennials and Gen-Z are depressed sissies who lost their parentsʼ ability to suffer and empathize; and, last but not least, we have simply run out of ideas and are now doomed to be forever running in circles like the hamster from Day Of The Tentacle. One solution is to go shoot ourselves right now, or, to save time, ask our illustrious global leaders to detonate their nuclear arsenals and be done with it. But if we do not want to give the cockroaches a chance and find this solution unacceptable, then our only alternative is to retort that all the above statements, even if they were spelled out in a more accurate and less overtly offensive manner, were nonsensical hogwash and whoever made them was simply projecting his personal issues onto the whole world, and whoever agreed with him was a propaganda victim.

Let me tell you this, though. Each of these statements, I think, is at least a reasonable hypothesis, and I would not dare to claim authorship of any of them; I am simply putting them all together here in one basket, which is not something I have seen anybody do so far. Together, they form quite a coherent little theory that will be either vindicated as more years go by, or proven wrong if some unexpected jolt breaks up the kaleidoscopic monotony (yes, that was quite an intentional oxymoron) of the past fifteen years. It may look like a grim, pessimistic, depressing theory that people — particularly young people, whose life experience has only just begun and who do not want to be forced to take Robert Smith as their role model — will want to shun at all costs. (Then again, see notes on Billie Eilish above). In reality, though, it isnʼt all that bad once you take the time to think about it, understand it, and learn how to cope with it.

For my part, I have realized that there is only one thing which is really responsible for all my bad moods and bouts of depression — and it is not the overload of opportunity, or the difference between generations, or corporate greed, or the realization of how limited are options are in the long run. What irks me most of all is the pervasive atmosphere of dishonesty and hypocrisy that has been generated around these issues. Over and over, year after year, pop culture has been getting more and more predictable, repetitive, simplistic, boring, trivialized; and at the same time, year after year, as if to compensate, professional writers have been outdoing each other in quoting words like ʽexcitingʼ, ʽchallengingʼ, ʽinnovativeʼ, ʽrevolutionaryʼ, and (my personal anti-rating leader) ʽamazingʼ at every occasion. Much of this is Corporate Calculation, of course: say ʽamazingʼ once and ten people will believe that it is amazing, say ʽamazingʼ ten times and ten million people will believe that it is amazing. But quite often, it is an involuntary reaction to the status-quo: people need their share of amazement like they need their vitamins, so they have to resort to lowering their standards just to survive.

The truth is, I believe, that we are no longer living in a world that consistently produces amazement, and it may be a long time — maybe never — before this conveyer is reactivated. Once we actually accept this and renounce the need to constantly prove to ourselves that we are making New Major Strides every day of the week, the situation has a chance of becoming more adequate. Importantly, it might also help us override Corporate Calculation, a major part of which is to convince you that it is precisely the Corporate­ly Calculated Artists who are at the cutting edge of progress and innovation at any given moment. Just as importantly, it will aid us to restore some much-needed historical perspective.

Again, it might look here that all Iʼm doing is selfishly and conservatively protecting the "boomer values" (more accurately, "Gen X values") of my generation against the rising "millennial threat", but I really want nothing of the kind. I grew up in the Eighties, and already at that time was fully convinced (and still remain convinced) that, on the average, pop music in the Sixties was inherently superior to pop music of my own generation. The same, obviously, did not apply to video games, which did not exist in the Sixties, were fairly rudimentary in the Eighties, and probably only reached their peak in this century. (I do have a deep nostalgic attachment to Sierra On-Line, but the mere fact that I sank hours and hours into Space Quest 3 around 1989 and that for the young me it may have been a far more immersive experience than playing GTA or The Witcher twenty years later does not change the overall perspective). In some respects, the grass was greener — in others, like TV shows, for instance, it wasnʼt. The problem is that today, every now and then, I come across discussions that worry about the future fate of video games and TV shows even more than they worry about the fate of music; who knows, maybe it is precisely because so many people have already given up on music as a leading progressive force, and placed their trust — temporarily — in video games and TV shows instead. (Incidentally, I have to confess myself that Mass Effect and Westworld made a much bigger impact on me in the past decade than any single musical album Iʼve heard from the same time — perversely enough, even some of their musical themes affected me more than any non-soundtrack music).

The key thing, I think, is to try and concentrate on all the aspects in which we are truly better off these days and not try and fool ourselves about the aspects in which we are not and possibly will never be again (or not for a long time). In a decidedly politically incorrect opinion battle on my FB group one day, irritated by a generic wave of leftist trash talk about "dead white males" and their ongoing hegemony, I once remarked that I preferred music (and art in general) by "dead white males" far more than music by "living black females" — an intentionally provocative remark whose main purpose was to see the kind of people who would misconstrue and twist it. Naturally, what this really meant was that accidentally, humanity as a whole happened to hit its latest creative artistic peak — from, say, the Renaissance until the late 20th century — at a time when white males of European civilizations were the dominant cultural force. Today, the situation is changing and we are happily busy correcting the balance of power, at least to a certain degree; but whether the newly liberated "minorities" (quotes are there because it always feels strange to call women a "minority") will be able to overthrow the Mind Has Its Limits obstacle remains to be seen, and I have my rational doubts about it — as great as you might be, even if you are late to the table because you have been tricked into setting the wrong time on your watch, you still only get scraps. The sad matter of fact is that in certain — many? most? — areas of intellectual activity, we may have already performed most of the possible tasks.

So, provided that some or all of this makes sense, what do we do?

I guess that we do nothing. We can embrace a bit of Taoism and try to understand that, perhaps, sometimes things get easier and more effective if you do not spend all of your time thinking about how to make them easier and more effective. We may embrace a bit of Ecclesiastes and realize that, perhaps, the time to throw stones has now been followed by a time to gather stones — sit down, look back, take things in perspective, be amazed not so much at our brilliant perspectives for the future but rather at the truly amazing paths that we have already traversed. We understand that, at present time, unearthing some forgotten, not too brilliant, but modestly nice pop album from 1965 is an action that is every bit as relevant — not an iota more, not an iota less — than listening to a soon-to-be-forgot­ten, not too brilliant, but modestly nice pop album from 2019.

We might also acknowledge that deriding each other on a generational level is not only impolite, but also counterproductive and intellec­tually meaningless, because individual people are shaped by the times in which they live. We should admit that honesty, sincerity, and a sober historical perspective should be keys to internal, if not necessarily external, peace and happiness. We could agree that music — and many other things — may not necessarily have a future, but it will always have a present, through which it will also be easier to connect with its past.

In less abstract and more practical terms, I am not advocating for any radical change, because it is foolish to advocate for the impossible. If you like somebodyʼs homemade retro-synth-pop ditties popularized by YouTube (yeah, like Billie Eilish), thatʼs OK. If you like Taylor Swift, Rihanna, or Ed Sheeran, thatʼs fine. If you are deeply moved by the likes of Lana Del Rey, itʼs your prerogative. The only problem I have with any of these choices is if they block your view of the artistic timeline. I do not like it when people throw away old movies because they are in black and white or lack sound; refuse to play old video games because they are too pixelated; cringe at old records because they lack modern production values; or fly away in horror from "sexist" or "racist" phrasings by artists who, in their prime, may have actually been the epitome of anti-sexist and anti-racist movements. Open your minds wide enough to embrace the technologically and intellectually conditioned differences, and once your Billie Eilishes and Carly Rae Jepsens no longer exist in a vacuum — or, more accurately, cease to be your focal points of reference — you might begin to discern the proper forest behind the proverbial trees.

As for myself, I can say for certain that I am not at all "done with" modern music. As long as I continue writing about music in general, I will do my best to mention and occasionally review those sporadic tracks and albums that are as close to "amazing" me as it can possibly get; and I promise to keep my eyes open for at least some of those modern artists that succeed at least a little in uniting audiences rather then keeping them all nicely segregated within their niches — as long as these artists arenʼt exclusively manufactured by the algorithms of Corporate Calculation, since these seem to hold a near-complete monopoly on determining these days what is popular and what is not. Among other things, I am definitely going to watch the hip hop scene a bit and see where it goes, though I still have a very hard time writing about the genre. The only thing that Iʼm totally done with is shaming myself for not giving modern music the proper chance that it deserves — I do not know everything about it (who does?), but I have enough reference points to back up all of my personal conclusions. More importantly, I do not even feel like there is a big demand for my writing about modern music — so why bother all that much?

Looking at this from an optimistic angle, we actually live in a pretty good time. Neither Trump, nor Putin, nor Boris Johnson, nor any of the petty wannabe Hitlers springing up all over Europe have deprived us of the Overload of Opportunity, whose main benefit is that each and every one of us boys and girls can essentially shape our living space exactly the way we want it to look and feel. Each of us can have our own little shrine, our own DIY canon, our own set of idols and role models untainted by peer pressure — globalization and digitalization have made it possible to construct your artistic reflection with almost surgical precision. (Mine might just be a mixture of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Aimee Mann, and Win Butler; whatʼs yours?). In the end, it is completely up to you, not to me or anybody else, much less to the corporate industry, to decide who is better capable of rocking your own boat. And if, for instance, you decide that Lana Del Rey rocks your boat better than Kate Bush, or that Phil Elverum rocks it better than Nick Drake, or that Frank Ocean rocks it better than Stevie Wonder, well, the world is not going to stop spinning just because you have made that choice.

The only thing is that it has to be a choice — a choice that you have consciously chosen for yourself, not because you have simply lapped up what has been swept in your lap by the latest trends and fads, but because you have built up your perspective and then placed all the red pins in all the spots where you want them to stick out. I have briefly described to you here my vision of perfection, and I do not want everybody to necessarily share that same vision — but I do want everybody to settle for nothing less than perfection, because if our Overload of Opportunity gives us that chance, it would be foolish not to take it. And trust me, there is already enough perfection out there to last you a lifetime even if you want to be very, very greedy about it.

126 comments:

  1. Good to have you back
    Greetings from Mexico

    ReplyDelete
  2. "the modern world is more keen on following the model of Dire Straits than the Beatles"... Do you mean Dire Straits never grew up artistically? Could you imagine 'Telegraph Road' or 'Walk of Life' on their debut album, great as it was? Anyway - great writing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They evolved, but not by much, and I belong to the school that views their self-titled debut as literally towering over everything Knopfler has done since. But, of course, you could always replace Dire Straits with a better example.

      Delete
  3. As long as you'll start again it's fine with me. You're a fine reviewer (imo far more interesting than eg Prindle), especially when I disagree with you. So I'm looking forward to your second come-back.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This "improvised little essay" took you a month to write?

    "(That last part is sometimes presented as the icing on the cake — only recently, in all seriousness, I read an article about how the "disco sucks!" campaign was driven by racism and homophobia all along; I only hope that subsequent generations will manage to remember that at least the Gibb brothers were not a bunch of black gay men. Apparent­ly, some modern know-it-alls find it hard to believe that back in 1979–80, somebody could actually dislike disco simply because it sucked)." That is a legitimate observation about how some genres are received, though. Many of those who complain about hip hop associate it with ghetto stereotypes, and there is this implicit association between the genre and images of "uppity" black youths who act in ways which go against the established norm. Basically, a lot of backlash towards hip hop is laced with racism and classism, but it's perfectly possible to criticise the music genre - although perhaps not its surrounding culture - from a strictly musicological basis: provided songs within the genre are being evaluated from within the parameters of that genre. As for me, I have never ever been able to get into hip hop, but I can at least accept the genre on its own merits rather than measure it against the standards of an entirely different genre. A lot of criticism towards hip hop, in addition to being laced with racism and classism, is laced with rockism. The leaden standards of the old guard hinder acceptance of the new guard which threatens to supplant it, and this bring me to my next point…

    "Indeed, given this enthusiastic reply, it is almost as if the late 2000s — early 2010s is going to enter history as the real period when hip hop finally reached its mature stage, despite all the long-standing praise in the musical community for classic hip hop acts from the Eighties and Nineties. Simply because it took the genre that long to properly break through the niche walls and begin reaching the general listener, black and white alike." During your original essay, you spoke of the Hegelian process of musical revolutions, with "the Classical Revolution of the XVIIIth century, the Jazz Revolution of the early 1900's, and the Rock Revolution of the 1960's", as well as the accompanying change of cultural values which accompanied each revolution. In this essay, you describe hip hop as being more vital a voice in music than rock or pop, which had fallen into stagnation because of their entrenchment within the establishment, whereas hip hop is an outside voice which continues to progress. It also satisfies the requirements of being a completely different approach towards music from before, since it involves spoken word over samples. You do not provide any conclusive judgements about whether or not the hip hop revolution will take hold, but you claim "hip hop still has some way to go to completely transcend its niche status". This seems to imply hip hop needs to adapt itself culturally so as to escape the four walls of the ghetto (I am referring to my previous point about how it is perceived), in addition to transcending its technical limitations. Assuming that musical revolutions are valid in a Hegelian sense, and that each revolution is accompanied by a cultural sea change, would a cultural shift be possible were hip hop to adapt itself? If so, wouldn't the main challenge of adaption be retaining what made hip hop vital in the first place and not fall prey to Corporate Calculation, all the while being relatable outside of a ghetto context?

    "In conclusion of this section, Iʼd like to briefly pass on this observation on the most recent teen fad — the phenomenon of Billie Eilish, whose success story right now is hotter than anything else on the planetʼs surface." What do you think of Lorde, by the way? How does she compare to Billie Eilish?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's hard for me to consider that my own problems with hip hop might have anything to do with racism (given my love for the blues and many forms of R&B), classism (much of my favorite music comes from the underprivileged), or rockism (from classical music to pop, I am open-minded to most forms of music). My main problems with the genre have always been the strict and (in my opinion) boring limitations that it had imposed on itself. Were it to completely reinvent itself and open up to a sea of new possibilities, I have absolutely no predictions where this could lead. At this moment, it still looks like an open window. Maybe its future is somehow tied up to the transformation of our entire society in general - racial, social, cultural. But equally maybe it could be just a temporary bubble.

      Haven't heard enough Lorde to make a definitive judgement, but it seems to me like Lorde and Billie Eilish have fairly different types of audiences, and Lorde was not really hailed as some sort of exceptional speaker for her generation.

      Delete
    2. I wasn't accusing you of racism, classism, or rockism. That was just a general observation about how hip hop has been received. I also alluded to its "boring" limitations when I spoke of its technical limitations. Much of your criticisms of hip hop in your Wu-Tang Clan review have me covered. The issue there is still the same, which is how hip hop can stay vital while fundamentally reinventing itself. Like you, I have no predictions as to where this could lead.

      Delete
  5. A very interesting article. I think I agree on a lot of points, and I had similar thoughts myself: about running out of non-Europeans to "steal" music from, about over-optimization of corporate-produced sound, about limits of human mind, etc.

    On the Ease of Living, I'd like to suggest another great example of good living conditions affecting art negatively: what was last time you heard new original joke? I mean, I'm very well-versed in Soviet political humour, and damn, those jokes very funny AND subtle! 90's jokes about New Russians and ZAZ cars rear-ending Mercedes and Yeltsin were often derivative, but still had something in them. Now that Russia more-or-less passed the most rough years... I can find no new jokes anywhere. I don't mean TV comedians, of which we have unfortunately too much, and I don't mean situational Internet memes that are funny for a week and then fade into obscurity forever. I mean jokes that are told from person to person, that make you laugh out loud, not just type "lol" into your phone. I think I learned about two good ones in the whole 2010's.

    On a more practical track, have you considered the possibility that your readership just consist of people who aren't very interested in modern music, and people who ARE interested in it don't read you (because they prefer video, for example - I think it's widely accepted that text is dying out with Gen X)? Personally, I came to your site for Slade and Sweet reviews, and stayed to explore more of 60's and 70's music, but no matter how I tried, I was never able to get into any music written past 80's, unless we're talking about various revivals (I'm a big fan of neo-rockabilly and neo-swing).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Russian "anecdotes" have pretty much died out; some blame it on Putin, but I think that the tradition pretty much petered out once it became commercialized and corporatized. The Russian joke was great as long as its main medium remained the realm of oral folklore. Once they all got in print and on TV, the practice outgrew itself fairly quickly. That has not so much to do with Ease of Living as it has with Opportunity Overload, though - way too many cooks have spoiled the cake.

      As for the second point, yes, I actually mentioned that in one of the paragraphs ("George only writes well about The Beatles, and has no idea of whatʼs been going on since 1975"). Ironically, though, in the old days lots of people who read my site regularly were always pushing me to listen to and review newer stuff. Once I relented and began doing it, though... turned out people didn't really need it. Although my Radiohead and Arcade Fire pages still got plenty of views - so there might be something to it.

      Delete
    2. As for myself, I want you to write about old stuff you've never mentioned such as Prefab Sprout or Felt, or old progressive bands that were thought derivative at the time but now are being exhumed since people are looking for new things to listen to, even from before.

      Delete
  6. Hi George, Charly here! Nice to read your articles again (though I couldn't read 100% of it, you're a genius and I'm no masochist but I've got short span attention :D ). I pretty much agree with your general line of thought here, being the old fart I am now (or always was! I listened to The Beatles and The Yardbirds ones and such in 1982! Long gone!). About the ABC approach and related conundrums, I quote you with the "The Mind Has Limits" principle. Your code of honor won't suffer if you just take any group in the alphabet (hey ZZ Top needs you!) and maybe review some album, being old or "new", just because it seemed it mattered. We need to be selective, there's no other choice. Me I mostly stay in the 70s (and 80s) cos there's a lot of stuff I STILL didn't properly listen; your reviews of such times helped me find more worthy stuff. Also I found some very interesting stuff in the latter days (Lana Del Rey must be part of my artistic reflection; I find enough pathos? personality? in her music to engage me, last album is cool!). Finally I like the current George much more than early days George, you are more mature and patient, and still are able to kick the mandatory asses. Hoping to read more from you soon.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Charly! Always appreciate your words of support.

      Delete
  7. It's interesting to see a new spin on my favorite theory from the old essay; that the amount of music is finite and that the pool of musical ideas has been exhausted. Here you're saying that it might be the human mind that is incapable of venturing into new musical territory. A slightly more optimistic view, but the same end result.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I was going to argue, but I spent some time thinking about it and realized that the only "rock" albums that have really Stuck With Me--have really seemed to do something new--in the current decade are the three "big" Swans reunion records (The Seer, To Be Kind, The Glowing Man), and it doesn't bode well that these recordings were masterminded by a 60+ year old man synthesizing all he's accomplished over close to 40 years of music-making. It's a silly thing to worry about the idea that music is "done" when so much is being made, but it can't help but feel a bit depressing.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Welcome back. Very nice article. I was wondering if someday in the future you can write about the "alternative" rock timeline. I mean, something about the 3 decades of innovation and inventiveness in popular music focusing on non blues, non folk stuff, starting with Revolver (1966) that could have been the father of the creature,and going on with a chain of records including (as an example) Close to the Edge, The Dark Side of the Moon, Low/ Heroes, Closer/ Unknown Pleasures, Talking Heads, Disintegration, Loveless, OK Computer. Just a crazy idea from a fan.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hello George! Been waiting for a new review for a while and this review definitely was worth the wait! Genuinely, this essay may have been one of the most eye-opening essays I have read on this topic. I mean, I have noticed the de-personalized music industry, image over music, and the lack of dominance of a musical phenomenon hurting modern music, but this essay just synthesizes everything I have ever read on this topic so amazingly. I think you really blew my mind on the 4th reason of the “capacity of the mind” section, hardly anyone had really talked about this.

    However, I have a question about your thoughts on this matter. There have been eras of doldrums in history where people thought advancement had “ended” and the human capacity “exhausted”, but out of nowhere new phenomena came that revived the era. In the 50s and early 60s, who would have guessed the creation of art-rock or progressive rock? In the mid-70s, who would have guessed New Wave would be so fruitful as it was? For that matter, we are gaining capacity as human beings, jumping from level to level of understanding. Hell, the Flynn Effect shows IQs are rising. Life becomes more complex on a daily basis. What I am trying to say is that would it be naive of us all to try to assume that music or art in general has reached its limits in the human capacity? We may see a phenomenon that we wouldn’t have imagined humans being capable of but manages to thrive perfectly in this new musical environment. Who knows? We can say that this time is different, but can we really just assume that somehow our era is just suddenly the one where artistic growth plateaus? Most abstract ideas have very few limitations, why would be music be any different?

    Note I am not bashing you at all, just wanted an answer to a question. Huge fan of your work George and your reviews are one of my favorite things to read online. Hope that everything is going well for you and here’s to more reviews in the future!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi! Actually, ironically enough, Horgan raised the same issue in his book on science - at the beginning, he discusses our idea of how in the late 19th / early 20th century the scientific community was allegedly thinking that most of the mysteries of the universe have been deciphered and we only need a few finishing touches, and how relativity theory and quantum mechanics unexpectedly came along and put that all to rest. He then debunks this myth, showing that the "end of science" feeling at the time was actually shared only by a small (if vocal) percentage of actual scientists; the myth became perpetuated largely because it helped to aggrandize Einstein and those who came in his footsteps even more than they really deserved.

      The problem with both science and music today is not that we are not seeing any major breakthroughs at the time, but rather that we are witnessing the breakdown of a formerly stable curve - which used to predict that progress would be constantly accelerating over time. In some ways, this is true, as you mention the Flynn Effect; but so far, even the Flynn Effect has not turned us all into Einsteins or Lennon-McCartneys. With music, the fact that there has been so little change over the past decade is significant, because this is really the first time in at least half a century that we witness the effect, and we haven't really been used to this. It might be an accident, and it might be not. Mind you, I am not clinging to this theory, it just seems to me currently as the most logical explanation for what is (not) happening. It would be wonderful if the next ten or so years could prove me wrong on all counts.

      Delete
    2. "the myth became perpetuated largely because it helped to aggrandize Einstein"
      The first time I heard this the story was about Max Planck. When he told professor Von Jolly that he aspired to study physics the latter tried to discourage him. English Wikipedia confirms it, with a source.
      Anyhow, physicists themselves estimate that they know and understand about 10% of what can be known. It's easier to predict some breakthroughs in physics (a theory of superconductivity, the synthesis of quantum-mechanics and relativity) than any breakthrough in music.

      Delete
  11. Unfortunately, the clever use of epigraphs from Along Along the Watchtower really breaks down on Part 3: "And this is not our fate." Really? That fits the concluding theme?

    More apropos might have been to boldly jump from Dylan to Devo. Because the essence of Part 3 is more in line with The Truth About De-evolution: "Oh dad, we're ALL De-vo!"

    Great to have you back George. Now make with some reviews! (Please)













    ReplyDelete
  12. Great article with lots to think about!
    My 2 cents. With overabundance of everything and availability of any kind of art / other entertainment and onlslaught of social media music has no chance of playing the same role in the life of an average person nowadays as 50 or even 20 years ago. Our brains are attacked so heavily by all kinds of information that the amount of attention we can physically pay to music is naturally going down. Music competes not only with other music for our time and money, but with a great variety of other possibles sourses of pleasure (which I think is larger than anytime before). So music lost much of its appeal, and often becomes merely a background noise, alas. The same goes for literature.

    ReplyDelete
  13. I'll ask the most tantalizing (and maybe impossible to answer) question: who are the few and far between artists you mention in this century who count as "truly great" and rise above those pitfalls?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Arcade Fire are a symbol of the 2000s for me, and they have fortunately refused to be sucked into the corporate game, but their 2010s output is comparatively lackluster.
      For the 2010s - no idea. Maybe the best of the hip hoppers like Kendrik, or Death Grips. No one I've heard so far seemed to be really pushing the boundaries or giving it one hundred percent.

      Delete
  14. Could it have something to do with new instruments? Many advancements in the past were because of the introduction of electric amplification, improvements in synthesizers and so on. With a modern studio you can create any given sound at will, but these are not instruments that are conductive to composing music or that let you create natural sounds as an extension of your thought process the same way you can do with a drum or a guitar.

    ReplyDelete
  15. George review Death Grips

    ReplyDelete
  16. Amazing observations!

    ReplyDelete
  17. Many great points here. Only a philosopher could write as well as this. We could agree that both the Ease of Living and the Opportunity Overload is bad for the creativity, in science and art. I would add that too much fame is bad for the creativity too. Is it a coincidence that many bands break up after the most commercial record or go into a dry period? MTV and too many synthesizers were key players in moving the music industry into the abyss of the visual rather than the audible in the eighties. Still we are in that phase. Sources of pleasure, amusement and knowledge are so many that we must be selective more than ever. And great souls shine through, no matter from what time, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, the Beatles... maybe time has not judged what artists stand out from the most recent times though. If music and literature shall not become obsolete we must step back and enjoy music and written words in the good old fashioned way, I mean deeply rather than shallowly.

    Keep up the good work, George. Your blog helps many to appreciate good music.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Many thanks for this and I am eagerly waiting for 2039, I wonder what your thoughts will be on this subject 20 years from now :)
    One thing which I miss in today's music is obscurity. Everything sounds as if made by some neighbour or some cousin (talented or not). 60s music gives me a lot of times the urge to get off the couch and wonder "WHO are these guys?!", itsounds like distant messages from mysterious, yet familiar Entities. Today's musician overfamiliar, nothing obscure about it... And nothing to discover and rediscover.

    ReplyDelete
  19. The music that's affected me the most probably this last year is this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwsRxL1kN3o

    and it has nothing to do with rock or pop music, it's created by fan communities and adapted from video game soundtracks, and its meaning is derived from being matched with gameplay and visuals.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah... a little extreme for me. I prefer my video game soundtracks a bit more on the symphonic side, like Mass Effect or The Witcher.

      Delete
    2. I do think there are similarities to what you talked about in your essay. When you match simple electronic music voiced by these glitches and bleeps with a video game it makes the music come alive and makes it attain meaning much more readily than if it was divorced from the visuals and played in a club or whatever. And this music undoubtedly has artistic merit in the sense that it's innovative, readily identifiable and dated to a certain era, as well as that there are discerning young people with specific tastes about it.

      A somewhat similar example is that if I wanted to experience great narrative fiction in the past I might read a Dickens novel, but today I might as well watch the Sopranos. I think we shouldn't obsess about genres too much. I've always thought that the Simpsons is in many ways the same type of art as the Beatles, being popular yet subversive. 20 years ago when you said that music was dead, I would have said: so what, we have the Simpsons. If someone tells me that movies are dead I would say, so what, I just watched an amazing new tv-show on this or that channel. If literature is dead, then too bad, but non-fiction books are better than ever. Radio is dead, but I can listen to great podcasts about whatever topic. And if classical music is dead, then I don't care, because I can listen to video game music, and so on.

      Delete
  20. Haven't had time to read your full essay - will take me a night or two to complete :) - but I did want to disagree a little with your admiration for Rate Your Music. Frankly, I find it next to useless. Same for critics top 100 lists.

    Frankly, what I am looking for is an explanation of *why* someone likes a particular piece of music. I'd like to know what they see in it and from that determine whether or not I will like it myself. That is why I like to read the reviews of specific critics rather than looking at aggregate opinions. Reading reviews of albums that I have listened to and made an assessment of, I can tell how my taste relates to theirs. After that, when I read reviews of albums that I have not heard, I can tell with a fair amount of accuracy as to whether that album will be to my taste or not.

    Unfortunately, other than Robert Christgau, it is difficult to find any professional critics whose opinions are collected in one place. Despite my many disagreements with Christgau, I do understand what sort of artists he and I will both like. Over the past decade and a half, he has been raving about an almost unknown band Wussy. A couple years ago, I picked up their albums and I found that I really liked them as well. In a similar way, I have found that your reviews have turned me on to prog artists like King Crimson and Renaissance.

    Aggregate lists on the other hand, do very little for me.

    Raghu

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, first of all, you can find individual reviews - and select your own favorite individual reviewers - on RYM a-plenty, and I'd personally rather look for open-minded reviews there than on any professional site from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork (who have now almost officially made the transformation into "Rolling Stone for post-boomers").

      Second, aggregate lists are certainly not there to turn you on to new music (though, in all honesty, I have found quite a few excellent artists and music pieces by simply checking them off lists from time to time). They are there to see how your own perspective compares to the average consensus. And I find the aggregated RYM list to be much less affected by pandering, favoritism, and political correctness than any such list one can find in "official" critical editions.

      Delete
    2. Yes - you can find individual reviews aplenty. However, I read reviews predominantly to figure out what new artists to pick up. Just because a thousand people like an album does not mean I will.

      What I am looking for is a body of reviews which tell me where the reviewers taste lies in relation to mine. I first look at what the reviewer thinks of artists that I like. That way I can figure out where I can trust the reviewer. For example, I quickly learned that Christgau is not to be trusted when it comes to prog or metal but that his views on indie rock are not that far off from mine. So, when he strongly recommends an indie artist I check them out and more often than not, find myself liking them a fair bit.

      Delete
    3. stilton is the best reviewer on rym, someone conspicuously knowledgeable but modest, who seemingly studied composition and whose background is classical and contemporary music, and open on music and writing,

      Delete
  21. I was going to praise your wonderful coinage of the term "kaleidoscopic monotony;" sadly, a quick Googling of the phrase suggests it's been extant for at least 128 years, and now I'm filled with despair.

    Well, not really.

    As for your main points, I agree with them (if I'm understanding them correctly). The challenge to your readers to construct their own artistic reflection was intriguing -- I suppose mine might include the original four members of 10cc + Neil Finn + TMBG + Terry Taylor (you've probably never heard of him, but you should). Probably not the most respectable reflection, and rather narrow as well, but it is what it is.

    Glad to see you're back.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Terry Scott Taylor? I've only heard a couple of Daniel Amos songs, but I love The Neverhood's music.

      Delete
    2. Yes. I LOVE Terry's Neverhood music! He did another project within the past few years for a game called Armikrog. Definitely worth seeking out.

      Delete
    3. I own both Armikrog and its music. The music deserved much better.

      Delete
    4. Yes, I've heard the game was under-developed. But I love the tunes, especially all the various vocal treatments that Terry explored. You'd do well to dig further into Terry's other musical outlets -- the Daniel Amos records of the 1980s and '90s were quite the thing in their day.

      Delete
  22. While agreeing with quite a big part of everything said I don't find any of these statements depressing. After all nobody's depriving us the right to listen to the great music from the past and at the very least I'm thankful I had (and still have but to lesser extent) the experience of exploring the old music and feeling the real and inspiring amazement.

    I'd like to add few things though which I find quite puzzling/interesting. In no particular order.

    1. The new generations (and specifically the new generations of musicians) are keen to show their respect for some cool-at-the-moment icons of the past — namely, David Bowie or McCartney or Byrne — you get the drift. However, none (literally none) of them have at least a mediocre understanding of their discographies, let alone the motives and impulses, which precede the recordings or their context. For example everybody knows 'Space Oddity' but nobody seems to have enough interest to dig its' origins and learn it comes from the album full of cheap Dylan and Beatles imitations (yeah, I hint at the 'Hey Jude'-wannabe closing track), which is not necessarily a VERY bad thing — it just shows an interesting side of Bowie as a combinator (not always a genius one but still). Short attention span? Who knows. Anyway this lack of curiosity baffles me and doesn't let me trust all of these people somehow.

    2. From this reading I got a feeling you have yet to experience/study electronic music — namely, techno and house/deep house genres. Not that I'm an expert in this field myself but it's something where I've been shopping around for the inspiration lately. Sure it's too late to raise the bets on this scene any more but at least its' progress during the 90s and first half of the 00s is amazing and goes along with this subjective progress curve of 60s-70s-80s. I dare to say that the "next Beatles" definitely happened there (as much as I love Blur or The Divine Comedy if we talk about 90s). If I'm pressed to name a single band/artist, I'd go with Underworld — their progression during 94 — 99 is just jaw-dropping. If you haven't heard them yet, I'd urge you to. But Mr. Fingers, Meat Beat Manifesto, Moodymann, Matthew Herbert and many others are worth checking out. To me this whole scene is something, which can prove quite a big chunk of your arguments wrong or at least postpone them for another decade or so.

    3. What is also bothering me is the general positivity, which recently became quite aggressive in terms of quenching any negative perspectives. The usual argument is that "why would you waste your time bashing this and that when there's Overload of Opportunities — go and find something you like. Oh, you don't want to? Probably you're just narrow-minded". In fact, all of the anger in the negative reviews is gone and the only thing present there is just a polite weariness. It's uncool to be aggressive about bad albums, yet there's nothing to be really excited about when it comes to good ones so the overall tone is just something middle of the road — pleasant, nice, etc. However I'm sure that the sooner the world starts feeling the need for another Mark Prindle or Mr. Agreeable, the better it will be for the world and the Art in particular.

    4. Regarding "What do we do about it all? Probably, nothing" I'd go even further and say that it would be ideal to somehow take the current trends to extreme so just that all of this Billie Eilish/Ed Sheran joke is exposed in all of its' atrocity.

    5. Stereolab. I know I'm scrapping the bottom but if you need another example of pop/rock/experimental band who showed considerable progress and didn't fall into the pattern trap, it's Stereolab. Unfortunately all of my progress-examples ceased evolving in the mid 00s and probably this only proves your theory about the influence of Opportunity Overload on the whole state of Art.

    ReplyDelete
  23. 6. I still wonder to which phenomena should we attribute the existence of bands who keep chugging their own way with a great consistency level disregard of all these disasters — namely, Tindersticks or Nick Cave & Bad Seeds. Sure there's no progress on even the genre level but it seems to me that such a streak of similar great records from one artist was just impossible in the past. Maybe it was the public expectation and implied urge to change and evolve, which made the bands make bad turns to stay with the progress while now one can sit in the borders of their genre for decades — I don't know really. But as long as it works I'm happy to enjoy the benefits of current situation.

    7. Finally, it would be interesting to know your opinion on why the "permitted"/expected interval between the records has grown so dramatically. Now it's no big deal if 3 or 4 years pass between the records — but come think of it, The Beatles were churning out 2 records per year in their time. Okay, The Beatles may have set the mark too high, but what about a record per year? Is it really too much to expect from the band during its' peak? Probably there're too many distractions (touring/making money for daily bread, cutting videos, collaborating with others, shooting for fashion brands, etc.) but what if artists would start pushing themselves to put out more music instead of letting things go along the flow?

    That said, I'd like to thank you very much for the thought-provoking reading. Respect you deeply.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Sergey. No time on my hands to answer all 7 points, so just on the last one: I think somebody should ask the artists themselves, but my guess is that the very process of album recording generally takes longer these days because it tends to involve more people and more technical work. Nothing gets recorded over three or seven days any more, as it used to. It's sort of a big enterprise now, you have to take a deep breath before you plunge into the enterprise of making a new album, so it's natural for you to take long breaks in between. That said, if all these meidocre artists started releasing two albums per year... God please no.

      Delete
    2. Consider also that albums don't generate much revenue for artists these days -- they make their money *touring* their albums, and the longer the tours, the better. But there goes the time they might use to create more albums.

      Delete
  24. As always an interesting and thought-provoking read, thanks George.

    Just reading the 'Problem 2 Corporate calculation' section reminded me of YouTube videos by a record producer call Rick Beato, which you may find interesting:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuGt-ZG39cU
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YvXAf_-Tf4&t=48s

    On a more optimistic note, his "What makes this song great" videos are illuminating e.g.:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P-yUOlOC5M

    ReplyDelete
  25. Hi George. I just want to say that I have been reading your blog for quiet a while and really enjoy it. I think your article is very interesting and I want to ask you if you think there might be a change in the culture (maybe not in music) when millennials will start reaching middle age. Also I know that you are not a big fan of popular music that predates rocknroll, but I wonder what are your thougths on Cliff Edwards aka ukulele ike? Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There might be, and there might be not - who knows. Maybe we'll all burn up in nuclear fire before millennials start reaching middle age. At the very least, it'll be interesting to see how the children of today's millennials will be rebelling against THEIR parents. Hopefully we'll live to see that.
      Never listened to Cliff Edwards much outside of old Disney movies, but I guess he was alright as far as simple, innocent entertainment went. Not sure why you'd want my opinion on him.

      Delete
    2. Oh that's alright. I was just wondering because I happen to really like him as a singer. I guess I get from him what you get from Carole King or maybe Brenda Lee. Thanks for answering.

      Delete
  26. I wonder if we've just run out of original melodies? I mean, there are only so many ways two chords or two notes can be strung together. It feels like we've simply run out of combinations and every song (to my ears) sounds like bits and pieces from previously recorded songs patched together. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe laughably wrong!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My own profoundly unmusicological, layman take on this issue has always been that the combinations themselves are formally almost limitless, but only a limited amount of them actually makes musical / emotional sense, and THAT might have been seriously depleted, if not completely used up.

      Delete
    2. I think you're on to something there.

      Delete
    3. Yeah, I've been wondering about this for a while.

      Delete
    4. As an example, if we take the classic Sabbath-style heavy riff - early Black Sabbath had tons of them on their first 4-5 albums, with nearly every single song triggering some deep-set emotion. However, Iommi's riffs post-'76 have been really hit and miss, formally adhering to the same rules but leaving relatively small imprints, if any. Likewise, Sabbath imitators such as Candlemass also faithfully followed the same stylistics, yet their riffs, once again, largely sounded like inferior and forgettable variations on the early glories. This leaves me thinking that Iommi simply hit upon the jackpot, quickly found all the right chord combinations that really worked, and then got himself and all the followers of the genre stuck with the same formula, but without the same magic.

      Delete
    5. Well, I think that Alice In Chains and Soundgarden found pretty good variations of those riffs, used them in different contexts (lyrically, at least), and sometimes even improved on them.

      Delete
    6. > This leaves me thinking that Iommi simply hit upon the jackpot, quickly found all the right chord combinations that really worked, and then got himself and all the followers of the genre stuck with the same formula, but without the same magic.

      Keith Richards said similar thing about hitting the magic pattern with Jumping Jack Flash and then just riding the wave for the rest of the career

      Delete
    7. I'm not sure about the exhaustion of good melodies. Simple effective riffs, maybe, but I'm sure that most musicians writing today havent listened to the majority of past great riffs or great melodies, so they could have come up with them too. Somehow they don't.As for more complicated melodies and riffs, they are indeed almost limitless.

      Delete
  27. With a second reading of your essay (what can I say, it’s been a slow work week) I find myself with some questions. What is your feeling about pre-millennial artists (e.g. Paul McCartney) who are still making music today? Do you find their output as forgettable as that of today’s “young” artists? I’m not asking to in order to be argumentative, by the way – I possess no special affection for today’s McCartney, for instance.

    Also, I read in your essay (if I’m reading it right) a desire for musical messages that are rebellious or some other way out on the edge. My question here is, where is that edge? In this day of tolerance and the acceptance of everything, the only possible rebellion would be some kind of conservative/sociological retreat, and it’s the rare individual who would be willing to die on that hill, I think.

    But I also question the necessity of “message” in music at all. Here I may be betraying an embarrassing ignorance – isn’t message an unavoidable aspect of any music with lyrical content? In this I am still squirming under my own experience of being chided by my professors when long ago, during my art school days, I attempted to inject a message into my art projects. I was warned that I was drifting into propaganda, even when I created a piece that decried the degradation of popular music at the hands of corporate interests. Do you think message (especially a complaint of some kind or other) is a requirement of popular music? Can a musical pushing-of-the-boundaries be sufficient, or must it be accompanied by a fist being swung in the face of God for it to be respected?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, the old artists make music that is largely forgettable today, although their age and experience occasionally give them an edge (Bowie's "Blackstar" wasn't mega-popular for nothing, but it took an old man dying from cancer to make it so particularly poignant). I love many of them dearly, but it is not up to them to save the world any more, no matter how many angry Monsanto-bashing albums Neil Young continues to put out per year.

      As for the message... well, of course "message" and "meaning" in music are not limited to lyrics. The opening chords of the Stooges' 'Down On The Street' send a far stronger message than any of their words. And it doesn't always have to be a "fist" type of message, either. Just something that bears a certain meaning to you.

      Delete
  28. I guess I share the opinion of many, that McCartney like many guys from the golden age of rock'n roll has still the touch that made them above average, but the zeitgeist is so different today. Genius thrives not when most people don't care about quality and ability to push towards boundaries of common consensus, both in music and lyrics. The hippies loved to try such things. Today tolerance to messages in lyrics is limited. The demand isn't much, the supply would be more if we had young prophets like Dylan today gaining popularity. I think those young geniuses are still around, but they are not noticed, or don't go into music at all. Today muzak, background noise, that's what many think about music, not worth buying or spend too much time on. When looked at in a broader way the problem of music is the problem of society as a whole. But the comeback of the vinyl is interesting, the effort to buy and listen to such a solid object means more devotion than downloading music, I'd say.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Great read. Your point of view on contemporary music isn't because you're an old fart; I'm a college student and I feel like a lot of pop culture out there today, including music, is barren.

    ReplyDelete
  30. George have you been inspired by The Red Hand Files?

    ReplyDelete
  31. Some comments on Billie Eilish. I did check her out and I find that I don't detest her as much as George does. Going by what she has put out so far, she seems to be a one-trick pony but she's reasonably good at that one trick. Listening to an album's worth of sings, I find that she starts to get pretty samey. I listened to a bunch of songs last night and I this morning I find that I really don't remember the details of any of them but the overall vibe is something that does stick in my head.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm sorry if the description gave the wrong impression: I don't "detest" Billie Eilish. On the contrary, I am somewhat intrigued by her and by the reasons for which she seems to be reflecting the Zeitgeist of 2019. I also have no memories of individual songs, for precisely the reasons I've described - there is absolutely nothing outstanding about any single aspect of her music making - but the vibe is undeniable.

      Delete
  32. Mr Only Solitaire: Few months ago I started discovering hip-hop/rap music and am amazed how experimental and artistic it can be. Before that only sporadically I listened to the early rap such as Last Poets, Africa Bambata, Grandmaster Flash etc... It is a splendid and very innovative music kind. The same happened with Jazz music few years ago and I can now say that the most enjoyment are given to me by Jazz...there are so many movements within Jazz that one lifetime is not enough. I live in London and the prices of 2nd hand CDs in charity shops are so affordable , which allows you to experiment with music and obtain bands that you never heard of. I enjoyed your review of the Associates from 2012. An unique band...Hope we will have enough time to listen as much as we can before we ultimately become part of glorious biomass. Thank you for giving us so much pleasure (100% agree with you on RYM website).

    ReplyDelete
  33. Thanks for the essay, George. It brings things full circle from the original one you wrote that fateful day twenty years before. I especially appreciated the last two paragraphs which serve as a call to action. They were very inspiring, and sort of reminded me of Chaplin's speech from The Great Dictator, somehow.

    ReplyDelete
  34. Hullo George !

    I'm happy to see you posted something it had been some time since your last article. This piece reminds me a lot of "Retromania" by Simon Reynolds ; have you read that book ? What I remember of Reynolds' theory is that today's pop music ("pop" as in every single genre of popular music available) is in constant search for new areas of the past to dissect & copy. Obviously, there's a lot more to it then this crude summary ; but I would love to read your thoughts on this, if you ever have the time !

    I'm looking forward to read your next articles. Cheers !

    ReplyDelete
  35. (Much to say, I'm going to need to reply over a few separate posts...)

    Thought-provoking article, George. I agree with much of it but not all. I largely disagree with the entirety of Problem 3 because a) I don't really think that young adults today do necessarily have it easier as, by all reports, things are actually worse for them than their parents in many respects and, even if they're not, nothing quite elicits existential angst quite like comfort and complacency, and b) the biggest problem with pop music today isn't that those who write it have nothing to say or that those who perform it don't have any passion for it (though corporate songwriters and pop acts usually don't) but that the art of crafting a great piece of music has been either eroded or is ignored wholesale. Plenty of people have pointed out the hit that melody has taken this century and, though it may be rather generalized, it's not far off the money and there has been an increased emphasis on passion and literal meaning in music to the detriment of pure songcraft. This obviously applies to mainstream pop where artists can have a decades long career without accumulating enough melodic ideas to fill a single Abba song, but a lot of indie pop suffers from the same.

    I do actually think that it's your fourth problem, which is hinted to throughout the rest of the essay, is that popular music modeled after the pop paradigm that began in the '50s and blossomed in the '60s, has a hell of an uphill battle trying not to just be a worthless rip-off of songs that came out ten, twenty, even fifty years prior. 1965 through, say, 1985 were such a fertile period for "rock" music (I use that terms as generally as possible) that it became harder and harder to come up with any remotely fresh musical ideas while working in an even remotely similar musical paradigm. You were right about this twenty years ago and you're right about that now.

    This is why, of course, hip hop is the only sort of music that seems at all fresh to you - mainly because it is. I say this as someone who flat out doesn't get hip hop, pretty much at all, but even I can recognize that it's the dominant form of popular music and the one form that is still moving forward. I don't personally like how a-melodic it mostly is and I largely don't get the black "urban" culture that surrounds it (unlike the black cultures that created soul, the blues and rock and roll) but it's hard to deny that it is the most dynamic form of music around. Even if I still genuinely don't understand how something that talks to so particular an experience has caught on the way it has with people who could not be further away from that world-view and culture if they were living on Mars.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And, to my previous point, it does explain a bit about why modern pop songs are so thoroughly anti-melodic - they're modeled over Kendrick or Kanye, rather than the Beatles or Elton John. You clearly get hip hop more than I do but I think we both suffer from the same problem: it's not "our" musical paradigm so while we may respect it and acknowledge that it is the most vital part of the musical climate, it doesn't change the fact that "our" music is about as dead as a door nail.

      This doesn't mean that I don't enjoy any modern music, incidentally, but I do find it hard to argue that much of it has any staying power. You mention the Avett Brothers and they're the perfect example. I enjoy listening to them and their unvarnished sentimentality struck a chord with me for a short time to such a degree that I considered them my favourite "modern" band for those few months. Now, though, I only seldom listen to them and though I certainly still enjoy their music, I find it hard to believe they were ever my favourite anything, no matter for how long (though they're still leagues ahead of contemporaries like the Lumineers or Mumford and Sons). My favourite modern act of late has been Jenny Lewis and later Rilo Kiley (I'm one of those maniacs who think Rilo Kiley got better the poppier they were) but I'm under no illusion: the appeal here is that Jenny is able to tap into some well-worn musical traditions but give it just enough of her own personality to make it feel fresh. But feeling fresh and being fresh may not, after all is said and done, be the same thing after all.



      But this actually brings me to the big point that I believe you missed or at least under-emphasized: No one cares. Despite the popularity of streaming platforms, I don't think that your average person - which is, notably, not the sort of person who would read your blog, let alone comment on it - has ever cared less about music. It's there to fill out the background noise while you're doing something else, to half-heartedly listen to while you wait for your favourite radio DJ to start talking again or, at best, as something simple and "beaty" to dance to. Maybe I'm romanticizing the past but I get the impression that people in the '60s or '80s weren't necessarily music geeks but were very much invested in music - in the Beatles or Pink Floyd, sure, but even the Monkees, The Carpenters or Def Lepard - and music played a large part in forming their identities or just was there to act as a soundtrack for their lives. It was also a communal experience with which to connect with other people who liked the same stuff as you (though you clearly did touch on this point in Problem 1).

      Delete
    2. (post #3, if that's not clear) The fact that this is no longer true doesn't mean that the artists themselves don't care about their music but that a) the mainstream pop industry CAN just get by on image and a couple of pre-programmed, danceable beats like never before and b) indie artists understand that they will have a very small, concentrated audience who are looking for a very particular sort of sound (one that they may only be interested in themselves) - which, back to my previous point, is usually built on long-established and thoroughly-mined musical paradigm. They thus get double stuck by having nowhere to go and to work with a musical form that in just four decades was more thoroughly explored than classical music was over centuries. They kind of don't stand a chance.

      And, ultimately, I think this is the reality than music fans of a certain type like me and you (though you have waaaaay more eclectic tastes than I do) are just going to have to learn to embrace. We can embrace hip hop, we can wait for the next revolutionary form of music and hope that we might actually appreciate it (which is harder to do, the older you get) or we can continue filling ourselves on warmed up, derivative but often pretty damn cool modern rehashes of our favourite music; on finding "new" old music that may have passed us by or just on our favourites, played for the seven-millionth time since we first discovered them when we were younger and more impressionable.

      Delete
  36. This is as thoughtful and well-written an article as I'd expect from you, George, even if I found myself resisting most of its conclusions. I think the thing that stings most for this millennial (a reader of yours for fifteen years, I might add, and an ardent fan of both Rod Stewart and, uh, Solange) is the idea that the rock stars of the 60s and 70s had it "harder" than the musicians of today, and that it was that sense of deprivation that pushed them to be more creative and interesting (than any musicians ever, apparently). I just can't help but feel that you're overlooking the absurd amounts of time, money, patience, and understanding gifted to these stars (you name the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and the Rolling Stones, who are all great examples of this) that simply no other musician, even the most popular of today, is afforded now or will ever be afforded again. Those musicians were fortunate enough to record at a time when rock music really mattered to DJs, audiences, producers, etc. This climate of almost unlimited financial and emotional resources was probably as significant an influence as anything else on, say, "Dark Side of the Moon." It's not just that the very talented musicians of today don't have the "energy" or "commitment" or "bite" or "vision" to make a classic... They don't have a whole world practically bowing at their every demand. The artists who have things to say, and the musical gifts to express those things, plus the budgets and time that the classic rockers of yore had, are interestingly the hip-hoppers that you so intriguingly rep... And I'd argue that Kendrick's three studio albums (hell, I'd throw in untitled unmastered, too) are an intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and just plain mindblowing musical achievement to rival just about any of the older artists you mentioned.

    At any rate, terrific piece. Always a pleasure to get my insides stirred by Only Solitaire!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi, thanks for the argument! No, I'm certainly not overlooking these advantages for early artists - they were covered under Problems 1 (Overload of Opportunity, which clearly implies that the resources spent on past artists were more plentiful simply because there were fewer artists) and 2 (pointing out that the corporate industry had a somewhat larger share of executives sincerely interested in music rather than just profits).

      But there is no need to rock the boat to the other side by speaking of "unlimited financial and emotional resources". Most of those bands were forging their skills and building up their experiences way before they were pampered with adoration and showered with love. The Beatles in Hamburg did not have unlimited resources, nor did the Stooges in Detroit, nor did Hendrix before he crossed over to England. The world did not offer these guys any credit before they actually proved themselves to be credit-worthy. Yes, it was a time when the world was ready to look up to all these guys, but it's a bit naive to think that your creativity will simply be boosted by having crowds of people go "oh, we love you so much, here's a billion dollars!" (Which is more or less the case with Taylor Swift today, and I don't see her making a masterpiece because of it).

      I knew from the start it would be the kind of argument that wouldn't be comfortable to millennials, but then I am perfectly okay sucking it up from my own parents and grandparents, and admitting that certain increased levels of material / emotional comfort tend to dull the senses, so I definitely know what I'm talking about, and there is no shame about admitting this, because ultimately it's just a function of time, not individual character.

      Delete
  37. One reason I don't believe as much in this idea that we've ran out of notes is that when modern artists cover old songs, they never surpass the originals, despite their advantages of better production and I guess accumulated musical wisdom. But I would usually prefer 60's and 70's artists takes on old standards over the originals.

    If you take English folk-rock, then virtually all the recorded songs are covers, adaptations or standards, but there is still an era of classic English folk-rock during the 60's and early 70's. I tried to listen to The Weed Tree, by a band called Espers. They're supposedly a well-regarded folk group from around 2005 and I thought their music was unbearably lethargic and boring. Whereas I think any given acoustic demo by Paul Simon or Sandy Denny is worth treasuring.

    ReplyDelete
  38. I have long thought that dominant musical forces are generational by nature. That means "rock" is Baby Boomer music, a product of that particular culture. Music is a kind of language and languages are "culture specific" as George S. well knows. Then again, cultures are produced by historical forces. Any kind of new musical breakthrough will have to be the result of a cultural movement in response to historical developments. Nothing is produced in a vacuum, of course. Look for whatever unifies the social fabric, elevates it toward a deeper spiritual reality, and focuses upon the development of HUMAN potential rather than empty technologies. Just my opinion.

    ReplyDelete
  39. No responses to your Lee & Nancy comments so I guess that is just you & me George. As a great admirer of Elisabeth Woolridge Grant I have a small toenail in the modern world but why does anybody still want to listen to Sundown etc , well the filthy lyrics , great tunes & fab production , something that EWG does but Lee does better because he had the songwriting skills that just seem more prevalent then than now , Kondratiev cycles presumably

    ReplyDelete
  40. More and more comments we have..

    ReplyDelete
  41. Hi George, been reading your reviews since years, I can say that I've learned a lot with them, as a music writer myself.
    Read the whole article (yes, took some time) and I agree with a lot of things you say but there are a few items to comment and maybe even add some.
    - I always thought that GRADING music and using points or numbers to qualify it was pointless, music appreciation always depends on the actual mood of the listener, looks like you've intellectualized it too much to appreciate current music, you created a mental scheme to reject it, it just won't fit. Level of greatness? That shouldn't even exist. The better vs. worst parameter shouldn't be used with music or something that involves taste and personal appraisal.
    - I think it’s almost certain that the music you listen in your twenties is the one that will define and shape you for the rest of your life, you (and most of your readers including me) are grown, feed and sustained by classic rock, we’re not people that will get easily into hip hop, rap or whatever you want to call it, even less if you’re in your forties, forcing yourself to like or appreciate something… it just won’t work
    - Classic music, basically all the examples you’re mentioning, has the approval of the passage of time, it’s been around for ages, accepted, rejected later and back into acceptance maybe in a period of 10 or 20 years. So modern music has that disadvantage against the classics, we don’t know what’s going to happen against the hardest battle: the passing of time. I think there’s a lot of great music being made today, we just shouldn’t compare it to what we like the most, or maybe I’m just being to tolerant, I don’t know… maybe we’re old farts after all.

    ReplyDelete
  42. Hi George, thank you for this insightful and thoughtful article as always! I've been reading your reviews since many years and they have certainly helped me in developing my musical tastes. I may not agree with all of them but they did help me in discovering many wonderful artists and songs. Since this will be a long post, I'm breaking it up into separate posts:)

    Since I'm from India, much of the US-UK musical scene of the past and even the present is not very much known. Barring a few popular artists of the past and present, many of the musicians are virtually unknown here. You would be surprised to know that very few people here know that there is a band called The Kinks! But thanks to your reviews and the internet, I was introduced to this wonderful world of such incredible artistic creativity - the musical scene of the 1960s-70s - about a decade ago. As a Gen Z cohort, I began my musical journey through musicians like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Akon etc. But out of curiosity, I began to explore more music from the past. And as I went back from the 1990s to 1960s, I was absolutely blown by the incredible wit, musical creativity, melodic sense of many of the musical artists especially from 1960s and 1970s. When I first heard the album Revolver in 2012, I was astonished that this was released in 1966! Even 46 years after its release, for me it was still every bit as fresh - both musically and intellectually - a certain sense of timeless appeal. I feel the same thing with many of the artists of that era - The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Doors, CCR, Jimi Hendrix etc. (you can probably include about 60 more artists of that era in that et cetera!) Compared to them, I somehow don't get that same type of 'musical thrill' with the modern artists, though I have tried it. I have tried Dream Theater, Dragonforce....and many other modern artists; but none of their works really come close to the sheer musical thrill that I get when I listen to something like Statesboro Blues by Allman Brothers. In that 4 min, Duane Allman's and Dickey Betts's slide guitar absolutely blows away any reason for me (and many of my friends) to listen to modern music! I know that music is definitely a subjective interest - you know as Hendrix put it - different strokes for different folks - so someone else may get such chills and thrills from rap or hip-hop. But looking at the musical scene from an objective view-point, I feel that ultimately people will eventually start listening to that which gives them more "chills and thrills" (both musically and intellectually) rather than what is more modern.

    ReplyDelete
  43. Due to the advent of the Internet, Gen Z (and future generations) can explore whatever music they like much more easily than the previous generations. What this means is that, the amount of impact that a modern popular musical artist has nowadays is far lesser than what they used to have in previous days. If Ed Sheeran puts out a new album, I don't care, because I feel why the hell I should listen to his sissy albums (though I have listened to it and hated it) when I have a new outtake of Hendrix pouring his heart and soul into the music that he plays. Another of my friend may not get into Hendrix feeling that it is just all loud noise and Ed Sheeran instead makes more melodic music. Some may not like English songs at all, and may be fully into African music or Indian music - something which was very difficult to do in the previous ages. Compared to previous times, youngsters nowadays have a lot more things to explore other than music (like the video games which you were mentioning) and even within music, a lot more styles to explore due to the ease of access through Internet. If you were in the 60s, I'm pretty sure you just cannot escape The Beatles - they're here, there and everywhere - on the radio, in record shops etc. and also the fact that music was one of the main forms of entertainment. So, if you compare The Beatles and Ed Sheeran on the level of impact that they have had at their respective times...there is no comparison really. And that gap will just keep on widening as time progresses. In future (even now it is quite visible), probably you will have certain demographic of population listening to western classical, some to blues, some to rock and roll, some to jazz, some to hip-hop, some to EDM, some to whatever form of music is popular then. It will be very difficult to find a huge number of people listening to one particular genre which is on-going then. Therefore, I don't think that popular musicians of the future can ever expect to have the same kind of impact that popular musicians of the past have had though they may be good musically. I felt this may have a lot to do with why there aren't many major musical breakthroughs happening now - maybe there's less demand for it?

    ReplyDelete
  44. So, who are the artists that people will continue to listen to in future – which of them will still have a timeless appeal - is something only time can tell. But looking at the current musical trend, many of the musicians from the 1960s – 1970s are still very popular. Many of the foreign exchange students (in my campus) from US, UK, Russia etc. have told me that artists like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix etc. are still very popular and they themselves dig a lot of music from that era. Even many Indian students listen to Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin etc., though amusingly they don’t listen to Indian music from that time – I hardly see any Indian youth enjoying Indian music of the 1960s-1970s. Also, surprisingly, The Beatles’ ‘1’ album, released in 2000 was the best-selling album of that decade worldwide and currently the 5th best-selling album of the 21st century. Not bad for a band that disbanded 50 years ago! Of course, in terms of musical sales, the other musicians from that time may not be as prolific, but they are certainly still highly streamed and very relevant. Even many rock artists from 1980s and 1990s are quite popular and relevant. Now, that type of relevancy and impact is definitely not seen in artists like Britney Spears or Backstreet Boys – at their time, they were so popular even in India (of course people know only 4 or 5 of their songs) – but 20 years later now, they’re largely forgotten. It is kind of similar to many of those girl groups and teen idols who sprung up in early 60s – popular then but forgotten now. What about hip-hop and other modern pop artists? – I personally think we will have to wait and watch whether people will still continue to listen to them 30 years later. But I do think we can safely say that Western Classical music, Jazz, and rock music (1950s-1990s) will be continued to listen in future albeit in smaller but significant groups.

    ReplyDelete
  45. As a teen in the late 70s I though by the time I was 50 bands like The Clash and Joy Division would be forgotten. Obviously they live on. Damn hard to predict the future!

    ReplyDelete
  46. As for electronica: check Andy Stott's 2011-12 efforts. I'm also quite strict about naming someone "great artist" and naming an album "the masterpiece". But his music has been growing on me for years, and so has the "consensus" as far as I see. I feel that electronica as the broadest field still has something to say, and he truly connects it to emotional/mysterious sense. Try him))

    ReplyDelete
  47. I think maybe the missing part of the story here is the history of classical music. You could maybe say that starting in about 1910 modern classical music began to seem like it was determined to be unpopular, and at the same time jazz and later rock seemed like they might be able to become the "new classical music." Then in about 2010 contemporary classical music maybe began to seem reasonably accessible again (maybe just because an old generation was dying out and every new idea the younger generations came up with was relatively easy on the ears - anyway, at this point, say, Kaija Saariaho, Thomas Adès or Julia Wolfe are maybe about as mainstream as Mendelssohn or Debussy were in their own day), and at the same time new rock (and/or new hip hop and/or new electronic dance music) maybe began to seem enjoyable-but-not-important.

    ReplyDelete
  48. So George, thank you a lot for your essay! It's so meaningful, a work that we all need today. There's little to comment and much to think about. Though I'm of the younger generation, 26 now, I can agree with many of your points. Very sober seems your observation on marketing strategies - something that I'd wish just to go and preach to everyone. Of course, I wouldn't do it like that) Overload of Opportunity making us get rid of a pantheon of Greats and spread the talent among Goods: that also makes sense for me. Well, starting from the point of "limited mind", I can argue. Unless the world is ideal, literally Heavens come, how can we stop, bearing in us this western/Christian streak of progress and quest for the best? Too much poverty is still out there, too big challenges are there to stop and say "no more inventions are possible". The ideal of science - the world perfectly explored and controlable - isn't achieved by now. How can (we) talk like it's all over? It's just fatigue: because, as you say, too much happened within last centuries.

    Besides that, I see some greatness and fresh ideas out there. Of course, the development slowed down. But it never stops completely: when the Ancient Rome ceased to be, Cappadocians were already painting first icons, which could be a shift back in some aesthetical aspect, but as we see from here it was also a true new ground. For example, I see freshness in this point: I feel like the art that is fading is mostly art based on Tragedy. I.e., music of medieval menestrels, Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, blues, top 60s rock - that all was largely tragic art. I see now some signs of revenge from Comedy, and, contrary to one of the comments above, I see huge refinements and updates in the field of humour. It's become truly complicated, combining hard-to-catch intonational modulations, exquisite toying with words and gestures et c.: that's what all the good memes are about for me. The days of "just mocking", sarcastic humour or the humour based on a solid plot (i.e., anecdotes) are gone. I'm not a good historian, but I doubt it has ever been as top as now, or at least has it been the leading sign of times? As for modernity, it seems to be like that for me or almost like that.

    By the way, I can also argue about lack of experience of true hardships. We all know that in our motherland Russia hardships are still as true as it can be, for big percent of population. Even if you're from Ok Moscow/Spb family (like me), you still can tell plenty of tough stories from the life, tough by quite high standards. It's not the point for boasting, of course. Brodsky used to say that one can go from the years of concentration camps and come up with no art, the other will spend a sleepless night and compose a unique poem: note a question of being genius, as even geniuses often work hard to achieve true artistry. It's just that our times revealed: experience, similarly to knowledge, is not the key to be a true artist. It may help, but... Maybe, we have to draw to some another source to learn being inspired, though of course it's better not to hide from difficulties when it's time to face them. But let none of us face the extremities like 20th century.

    ReplyDelete
  49. And, yes, for me one of the sources is God. It's pretty evident that within last centuries the integrity of science-art-God-daily life has been eventually breaking, and now it's just the time to see the fruits. You talked about Godless universe - when there's no this force or better Spirit, people start worshipping idols, and artists became one of those in 19-20 centuries, which I see as one of primary reasons why art has lost much of its weight. And I'm not supporting "right wing" and conservative tactics of perceiving Christianity, though in deep ideas there's usually some good balance between conservative and "liberal", just as in your essay. This part is subjective, for sure. But what I understand just as clearly is that true transcendental goals and deep hopes with strong motivation and great space for construction have been so often connected with search for God and learning from the Word. And I can see some words and lines look old-fashioned, but I definitely do not see the essence of Christianity become old-fashioned, as it has still never been fulfilled, finished or epitomised.

    So now we don't have the Greats, but I'm sure we are going to have them as long as we catch the Great behind the Greats. Not the bearded man on the throne but rather the mighty spirit able to fill with all the scope of emotions, return taste to various aspects of daily life, return true intriguing mystery to the nature, with strengh and always not fully comprehensible sense of love.

    And, again, I'm sure fresh artistic ideas are not too far, I'm doing a big research on them right now, and I see some captivating development and hope in both tiny corners and short flashes when it comes to the popular zones and big screens.

    ReplyDelete
  50. I hope I don’t come across as annoying George, but I am just curious when your next reviews are coming out. Sorry to ask, I have been eagerly waiting for your reviews for a few months, so I was just wondering.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, no, I'm sorry for all the delays, but my first priority right now is to polish off some older reviews and reinstate them on the site as separate pages, then continue. This renovation will probably still take a few weeks. I'm definitely still in the business, just want to set a few things in stone before moving on.

      Delete
  51. George you are Polish??

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, he's Russian.

      Delete
    2. If George is Russian why he say he needs polish?

      Delete
    3. He said he needed to "polish" some reviews. To "polish" (with a short 'o') means to refine them, to make them shine. No relation with "Polish" (with a long 'o') = from Poland.

      Delete
    4. I thought this was an attempt at a joke, but now I'm confused myself.

      Delete
  52. Would you say hip hop groups that use live instruments transcend the limitations of the genre? I'm referring to such groups as Beastie Boys, OutKast, and The Roots.

    ReplyDelete
  53. From "Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties" by Ian MacDonald: https://pastebin.com/FGxgAZwz
    (It was too long to directly paste it in the comment).

    ReplyDelete
  54. Ironically, I actually discovered a 'new' band through your blog, namely Agalloch, and their first three albums became some of my all-time favourites (the last one sucked though), so I probably read your reviews of 'new' music more carefully than the ones of the Beatles. I guess that's not that new anymore, though. The 2010s sure have been pretty dry, I can agree on that...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's no such band Agaloh you must be wrong or I don't know

      Delete
  55. http://only-solitaire.blogspot.com/search/label/Agalloch

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The link is broken

      Delete
    2. No, the link is perfectly fine. Copy it and paste it into your internet address bar. Alternatively, scroll up to the top right hand corner of the page and in the alphabetical list of bands/solo acts you will find a band called Agalloch.

      Delete
  56. There a few artists who qualify for "looking forward to their next record" but they are far from young/new (no, Sir Paul is not among them):
    - Nick Cave (probably my favourite live performer at the moment as well)
    - Tom Waits (I have my doubts whether he will release anything though)
    - Iggy Pop (the latest one hasn't convinced me, but "Post Pop Depression" is awesome)
    - PJ Harvey (I still find it offensive how many years ago in your review of "Murder Ballads" you claimed not to know the difference between PJ and Kylie Minogue!)
    Anyone who appeared in this Millenium? No.

    What I keep wondering about though it this: I do agree with you that the times of greatness in music seem to be a thing of the past, and it could be connected with the limited amount of the spark of genius being spread between millions of musicians. However what still happens occasionally - the so called "dinosaurs" of rock can once in a while record something that does stand on the same level as their earlier output, and what is horrifying about it - often that happens as the parting message. The last Bowie album is one of his best, and so is "You Want It Darker" for Leonard Cohen - I don't understand how but standing close to the edge did let them become as resonating as ever (in Bowie's case maybe even - more resonating than ever). But it does seem a very depressing world where your best bet at greatness is waiting for your favourite artist to be dying in order for him/her to record the ultimate swansong.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. On the old blog, George classifies Bowie as a C-rated artist (same artistic level as ELO and YES), so somehow I doubt Black Star could have raised his esteem much. Perhaps time itself has though. Looking forward to the D's (if he ever gets there) to find out.

      Delete
  57. Just out of curiosity George, you covered Sly & The Family Stone on your old page, but only up until Stand!. What is your opinion on There's A Riot Goin' On and Fresh?

    ReplyDelete
  58. This one is the 100th comment!!

    ReplyDelete
  59. There’s a Riot Goin’ On is a masterpiece for its unique sound, for its bleak tone and wasted mood, summing up the unease and menace of its era as perfectly as their earlier hits had captured the positivity of the late-1960s. Fresh is a growing step for Sly — out of the murky and dangerous milieu that infused Riot and into a greater perspective on his own capacity to make music a positive form of communication. In its own sense, and on its own terms, it is his masterpiece.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sure is weird that his music went to hell right after that growing step.

      Delete
    2. Doing cocaine is a fine line.

      Delete
  60. Whoever has posted some time ago the comment on the string arrangements (or lack of werewolf) in hip-hop, sir, you must understand this is but your opinion. Hip-hop, as a genre, goes, so to say, completely in parallel with what George, or, indeed, any other reviewer writes (or don't) about it. I know, people like you tend to flame others for ever so slightly different opinions, that's why I'm standng out of the crowd as Anonimos and not because forgot password. Honestly, to think hip-hop is about strings is, approximately, the same as to think string theory is about theory. Both are worldviews, vastly different from that of traditional rock musicians, with guitars and drums. Hip-hop, strings or not, is, perhaps, the last chance for humanity to achieve, if I can explicate myself figuratively, a global warming - warming towards each other, warming towards Art, warmng towards better understanding of zillions of problems which stalk our multicultural society, yet you say no, they need strings. Know what, they need strings they go get them. I'm not even sure maybe you meant strings like ladies have in wardrobes for fun sexual masquerade that's surely an unnecessary part of hip-hop.

    ReplyDelete
  61. This was a wonderful read, expectedly. I will have to come back and read the parts I sped through again but I broadly agree with many of your arguments. I will connect the dots between two things you mentioned, the poptimism wave and the advent of new old music (new classical/new jazz) and add a third layer, the emasculation of the male star via American Idol. I will come back to this third but first a political observation that reflects on the way pop culture has evolved. I am not a conservative but I do listen to what conservatives say because, if nothing else, know thy enemy. So... I remember one thing coming up again and again is conservatives decrying Hillary Clinton for playing Katy Perry songs for her TV appearances. On the other side of the divide, liberals felt Trump playing rock music at his rallies perfectly reflected the homophobic and racist constituency he was courting. Here's the thing : Katy Perry sucks. And liberals can cry hoarse about how bigoted all that rock music was,but it had meaning, it had a heartbeat and it wanted to move you. Move you at least to headbang if not to tears. This was music that cared about making you care about it. There has been an organized and systematic destruction of such music from the mainstream and even the pop of today is radically different from the pop of even the 80s. If you don't believe me, watch Whitney Houston sing Saving All My Love at the 1985 Grammys. This was when her sweet soprano hadn't been destroyed by drugs and before she began to mistake riffing on every syllable for expression. That performance was beautiful and powerful and made you sit up and take notice even if you didn't care for that kind of overly commercial music.

    And this is where American Idol checks in. On a number of occasions, Cowell has gone out of his way to discourage rock singers from his show. He actually eliminated this Aussie singer, Michael something (Rick Beato mentioned him on his show), after a stellar rendition of Dream On. Adam Lambert didn't win the title either but was apparently good enough for Queen,huh. I have decided that this is not incidental and Cowell was performing an important function for the mainstream, of making people forget the concept of a male rock star, dangerous and charismatic, so that they could be permanently hooked on safe and inoffensive pop. It seems to have worked and also led to a splintering of music listeners. Those who are still stuck in yesterday's way of consuming music, that is based on what radio, TV or neighbours tell you to listen to, are comfortable with the Katy Perry/Justin Bieber/Taylor Swift equilibrium. Those who actually engage with the music can tell something is rotten about this equilibrium and seek meaning. The older guys in this group probably go back to their records from the 60s and the 70s while somebody of my age group wants to hear new artists playing one of the same old genres.

    A possible way to bridge this gap is via a talented and virtuosic white female artist. I have nothing against artists of colour, being a POC myself, but the Trump crowd is simply not going to give a talented black female artist the time of day and will probably dub her an affirmative action hire.

    OTOH... Floor Jansen. She is well known as a symphonic metal singer, currently with Nightwish but previously of After Forever. But at Beste Zangers, she has been making waves with her ability to step outside her comfort zone. She delivered a great performance of Shallow, better, I say,than Lady Gaga. And her rendition of Phantom of the Opera, capped with an astounding D above the soprano C, has passed a million views on YouTube in just a couple of days. If enough such performances happen that originate from left field artists but cross over and achieve critical mass, we can at least get the music industry to care about basic singing ability, authenticity and about lyrics that make sense and don't just spew a vague, feel-good optimism. But maybe it's too much to ask?

    ReplyDelete
  62. Apropos what somebody mentioned about melodies being limited in number, melodies have ALWAYS been limited. Consider that our popular epoch is still is essentially blues based or veers towards the American songbook at any rate and that's really old. We don't remember the songs written for Sinatra or Jo Stafford or the like but that formula is what is in essence gets a makeover every once in a while. Prolific artists, especially American ones, tend to know their standards front to back. Stevie Wonder gave them a R&B spin, Steely Dan gave it a jazz rock touch. Fiona Apple doesn't even try to make it sound unlike pop standard music. And YET she sounds different and unique because that particular combination of anger and humour is compelling. Again, she is a unique and troubled individual and is comfortable being a recluse in return for saying whatever the f she wants to in her music. That boldness and that absolute commitment to art over self is in itself increasingly rare.

    ReplyDelete
  63. "Meaning resides not in literal substance but in tone and expression"

    I have trouble conceiving of meaning residing anywhere outside of a subjective interpretation.

    " music which no contemporary artist can claim to match in feeling, variety, formal invention, and sheer out-of-the-blue inspiration. That the same can be said of other musical forms - most obviously classical and jazz"

    The above can only have been said by someone who is completely unaware of developments glocalized jazz in Europe, Africa, South-East Asia, etc--it literally exposes the author's personal prejudices.

    Otherwise, interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  64. Also, blecch: "only the soulless or tone-deaf will refuse to admit any decline at all. Those with ears to hear, let them hear."

    This is a classical pois
    oning the well fallacy. Garbage, even while I am not in complete disagreement that the quality fluctuated (and continues to do so).

    ReplyDelete
  65. A quote from Dan Piepenbring - Prince's co-writer of his soon to be published memoirs:

    "In a section on his worries about the future of radio, Prince complains: "They keep trying to ram Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran down our throats and we don't like it no matter how many times they play it."

    So what was his problem with Ed?

    Piepenbring admits: "To be honest I was so much in agreement with him on that subject that there didn't seem to be any more to say about it at the time. More than a grudge with a few artists in particular, what he was bemoaning was a culture that simply doesn't allow artists to colour outside the lines."

    So it seems Prince was sharing your worries concerning the Corparate Calculation part. Then again, this can hardly come as a surprise, as Prince already considered himself to be Sonys slave in the early nineties. In those days, I believe, it was more common for artists to complain about their artistic freedom. Maybe part of the problem is that the stars of today don't seem to notice anymore that they are being used. Or maybe they aren't, maybe they are simply the ones using the system.

    ReplyDelete
  66. Disregarding the issue of quantifying greatness, considering enjoyability of music is inseparably tied to the subjective experience, I think your observations about the Overload of Opportunity, Corporate Calculation, and The Mind Has Its Limits are astute.

    However, I take issue with We Have It Easy. I both disagree with and dislike the idea that, in order to produce great art, it requires the artist to suffer or to experience hardship. It's the artist's talents, which are the sum of nature and nurture, which determines the creativity of their output. Any "great" artist is able to leverage the intensity from their experiences as inspiration. It so happens that many consumers want the art they consume to be angsty, and from this comes the misconception that suffering leads to great art. The sheer volume of "edgy" third-rate artists who think the expression of pain is adequate enough to make a grand statement shows otherwise.

    Also, you seem to be conflating your subjective experiences with objective observations. Early in the essay, you outline your personal problems with modern music by stating you don't remember most of the music you listen to by 21st artists. This, of course, assumes the lack of memorability of 21st music to be a general trend, when it's quite possible that someone else who listened to the same music you listened to is able to remember it much more clearly after a comparable number of listens. Without putting the "memorability" factor to the test, this remains within the realm of speculation. Also, popularity of an artist doesn't always equal greatness (as you'd agree). Likewise, not all "great" artists achieve significant popularity. Case in point, you namedropped Bach, Beethoven, Miles Davis, The Beatles, and Björk as examples of "apex" artists, but Sparks were a fairly minor 70s band, and Swans had little more than a cult following until their comeback over the past decade. Your RYM stats mostly demonstate the phenomenom of "audience splintering", and that doesn't mean audience splintering results in a lack of "great" artists just because music is no longer structured like a food chain.

    Finally, lack of originality doesn't necessarily mean a lack of quality. Folk and blues have a long tradition of recycling melodies. Between a derivative garage band with a good ear for melody, and a trans-Andean neo-goth-folkstep artist who doesn't do anything interesting with their gimmick, I'd take the derivative garage band any day of the week.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I meant to say "21st century". D'oh!

      Delete
    2. Well, you said it yourself: "The sum of nature and nurture". In the We Have It Easy section, this is exactly what I am talking about - nurture. I have no reasons whatsoever to believe that, for whatever reason, in the past 20-30 years the women of the world stopped bearing amazingly talented children - unless we're talking some Handmaid's Tale level shit here - so it HAS to do something with nurture. From there on, I admit to largely speculating on the issue, but I'll probably only drop these speculations if you, or anybody else, come up with better ones.
      As for conflating different things, well, if my subjective experiences fit neatly into the phenomenon of audience splintering (which IS happening today on a much larger scale than over the previous 50 years), this could certainly mean something, couldn't it?.. In any case, I agree with most of the tangentially related points that you make here - and don't think they contradict the idea of a big shift in generational mentality at all.

      Delete
  67. - - If my subjective experiences fit neatly into the phenomenon of audience splintering (which IS happening today on a much larger scale than over the previous 50 years), this could certainly mean something, couldn't it?... - -


    I don't think so. The concept of "end of history" is earlier than the audience splintering.

    ReplyDelete
  68. I've never read your blog before, so Im not going to make any mean assumptions about your tastes, but Im also not going to give your tastes more due respect than normal - I need a better reason for "modern music isn't great" than "you dont like it." However, one area where your taste is clearly holding you back is hip hop. Not because you have to like it, but because it disproves a lot of your assumptions on modern music. You want a hierarchy? Try to find a genre more focused on competitions and comparisons. People talk about their favorite rappers like you might talk about your favorite basketball player. Your point on "People blur the underground with the mainstream now" is completely irrelevant in the face of hip hop. Hip hop heads respect the underground just as much if not more than rock fans ever did. Because of how annoying it is to clear samples, hip hop even has its very own kind of release medium (mixtapes) that are literally just a non-commercial album. Personally, Im a punk fan. I've always had a respect for the underground, and while I've never spent hours complaining about such and such a band selling out for doing anything vaguely commercial, I understand where their coming from. So where I come from, your indie darlings would be considered as commercial as Lady Gaga.. but these rappers, their the real deal. Chance the Rapper is every bit as DIY as Fugazi was, and Fugazi never got a grammy. And finally, I really do not see a reason why Kanye or Kendrick wouldn't be Beatles level (or better). Niche genre? I have yet to meet anyone under 25 who isn't intimately familiar with Eminem, Kanye, Drake and Kendrick - all of whom, by the way, have done numbers that rival even your biggest classic rock superstars. So on the one hand, your right - rock no longer has big culture defining stars, it no longer has the anger it once did and the legendary characters it used to, it no longer has that classic mainstream vs underground dichotomy that you're so comfortable with. But that's because rock is dead, not music. Hip hop still has all of those things. Mainstream rock doesn't exist anymore - if you dont like hip hop, you don't like the main genre right now, so you're going to have to dig. Which is fine - I hate brit pop with a passion, and I still find classics in the 90s, their just a little more scattered.

    Another central point to your essay is that people "let anything go" nowadays. Honestly dude, I have no idea who you're listening to, but I don't know a single person who's putting Adele or Taylor Swift in their top 20 anything. Well, I guess you might put Adele there... by the way, wtf is up with that? Im not the biggest fan of Carly Rae Jepsen or Lana Del Rey either, but at least I can respect them as artists. Yea no shit nobody talks about Adele selling out, "selling out" implies she was good at some point. Adele's like the pinnacle of bland, washed out pop music trying to be peddled as art - which is why she does so well at the grammys, yet most people have already forgot who she was. I was going to make a comment about how every critic has their one bland white pop diva that they pretend is actually good, but you apparently do the same shit. And you have RYM dude - how many RYM lists do you actually see more than one or two pop albums on? Even from personal users? Talking about RYM, how did you manage to see a whole website based on rating and ranking artists and still think that hierarchy in music has gone by the wayside?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In the context of the rest of your essay, "Respect the context of the time this music came out in" comes off really weak and whiny. Your entire argument for modern music being worse is based on your personal taste, but when someone from this generation does that for your favorite bands suddenly he's an ignorant asshole? The Cocteau Twins vs Beach House is probably not the best example, but why should the person in that example have any problem if they simply found a better version of the Cocteau Twins? Honestly it sounds like you're just making excuses for shit that's outdated. Fuck hypotheticals - I'll give you an example of an opinion I actually have. I've never enjoyed a Rolling Stones record. If the Rolling Stones' main appeal is being heavy and rebellious, than their appeal died 45 years ago. And you want to sit here and tell me that your favorites are elevated to a higher level now because they have "lasting artistic quality" and they've survived the test of time, but then when I say they didn't suddenly its my fault for not digging up history books to explain why I should be okay with digesting the artistic equivalent of Taco Bell. Now, some bands HAVE held the test of time, which is why the Cocteau Twins were a bad example - no kid these days shits on those guys. But who knows, maybe that'll change in 20 years too.

      And this brings us to the final point. You've started out by saying you aren't the first person to make these statements. But while there's nothing wrong with restating something, you do run into issues when those statements have already been responded to, at length, like 15 years ago. One of the biggest problems with rockism, an ideology you clearly subscribe to, is that you rely on music quality being this undefined and inconsistent mix of artistic merit and personal enjoyment. Which is fine, but don't be surprised when someone picks a new band from disregarding one or the other, because there is not a single person in the world who likes Beach House because they think their innovative, just like you'll hopefully not pretend to be listening to Adele or brit pop for anything similar.

      Delete
    2. But I mentioned my generation loves hierarchy and all the competitiveness and comparisons that come with it - so lets get it. Who today compares to the greats of old? Honestly I dont actually like indie that much, so 2006-2014 is probably my least explored time period in music, but even I know plenty of great stuff from there. Arctic Monkeys before they sold out, Queens of the Stoneage (same story), Streetlight Manifesto, all those emo pop bands (im sure there must have been some good version of Paramore, right?). But what about something like the Cocteau Twins, an act that was artistically phenomenal? They clearly blow all of those bands, as well as Arcade Fire, out of the water. But the Cocteau twins weren't exactly pop stars - to find comparisons to an experimental off-the-map indie group, you have to look at today's underground experimental music. Probably the best contenders would be Xiu Xiu, with Death Grips, Tunng, and King Gizzard being decent runner ups. I also find a lot of stuff on bandcamp that would also probably qualify for that level of greatness. In the punk realm, Daze n Days and Titus Andronicus are the most creative thing we've seen since Fugazi, and IDLES and Tropical Fuckstorm are up there in terms of quality if not originality. And that's completely leaving out hip hop, which is like leaving out psych rock in a "best of the 60s" discussion. Besides who you've already mentioned, Aesop Rock, Chance the Rapper, Big Krit, Flatbush Zombies, and Vince Staples all have albums that can contend with rock's best. Then you have Odd Future, who are kind of the reverse Beatles. The Beatles were a boy band who made great albums then split up into garbage solo careers (we can agree on that at least, right?), whereas Odd Future were a hip hop group of questionable quality that split up into some of the most acclaimed solo artists of this generation.

      Finally, a couple of small nitpicks. Post-modernism and poptimism are not the same thing. The reaction to disco absolutely did involve homophobia - no offense, but im taking the word of professional historians over some random internet blogger. The last two decades have obviously had defining genres - '00's indie and '10's hip hop are instantly recognizable to anyone who's been paying attention. Lastly, this seemed like kind of an afterthought for you, but Im a little skeptical about the "make your own choices" part. Because as far as I can tell, this generation has far more autonomy in their music listening than you guys did (which is why all these niches popped up). Sure, corporations still have a huge influence with subtle advertising, but they literally hand picked what you guys were allowed to hear on the radio. They decided what music you like, they only influenced what music I like. Thats assuming that independent choices are even possible, but uhhh thats a discussion for another day.

      Delete
    3. Thanks for the long rant and it's a real wonder how you've managed to avoid any name-calling despite obviously being quite angry. (Other than bringing up the dusty accusation of "rockism", which is a pretty cheap label if there ever was one). It would certainly deserve a detailed reply, except that it's pretty hard to deconstruct a stream of consciousness where good arguments are mixed in with confused statements and non-arguments (like, when did I ever say that post-modernism and poptimism are the same thing?).
      I'll reply to one point, though - about RYM and hierarchies. Technically, you can construct a hierarchy of just about anything. What matters is not the hierarchy itself, but the stability of this hierarchy and its shape. In the shift from "pyramid" to "trapezoid", there is still a hierarchy, but the top part is nowhere near as well defined. Take a year like 1970 and you will see that at least 7-8 albums from that year (most of them "rock", yes, but also including Miles Davis and Curtis Mayfield) are ranked over 4 points (a VERY high honor on RYM), whereas in the year 2010, only Kanye gets over 4 points - everything else is much lower, and it's a mish-mash of indie, IDM, art-pop, R&B, metal, etc., with no single musical direction clearly in the lead. This is just one very typical sample, and it's quite telling.

      You're trying to bait me into starting a generational war here, but I'm not gonna take the bait. I'm pretty sure most of my points will stand, but we will have to give it at least another ten years, though - which, if I'm right, will pass by pretty quickly, because time tends to flow quite fast in an age of boredom.

      Delete
    4. Lol and thank you for replying so quickly. Angry? I guess I was a little harsh about Adele but cmon dude, you deserve that one. She’s a little low in the hierarchy, if you catch my drift. Besides, there's not really a nice way to say "That artist you like sucks". I usually try to avoid it, but with the Stones and Adele it was actually relevant to the conversation. I checked out the RYM examples you made, but from what I see they have the same shape - just different heights. The 5th album vs the 20th album are about the same point difference. If anything, 2010 has the bigger point difference just because Kanye's such an outlier. RYM tends to rate older albums higher because their more solidified in the canon. You can kind of tell that from the album's picked - Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and George Harrison above more artsier, underground picks like Nico, Amon Duul, and Soft Machine indicates that these rankings are based more off what their dad played than artistic merit.

      I don't know what you mean by a generation war. As I said, Im a punk fan. I grew up on Suicide and The Clash. Most of the music I listen to came out between 1976 and 1991. But outside of that one genre Im personally biased towards, I don't see any good reason to think that great music has just stopped being made. And I don't mean rockism as an insult, its a genuine description of the stance you're taking here. At least, a good amount of the criticisms aimed at rockism equally apply to this blog post. Its a ceaseless adherence to a very particular hierarchy, one that influences RYM ratings, one that has such a cultural relevance that it just feels unfair to put Billie Eilish in the same conversation as the Cocteau Twins. Hell, it’s even affected me to an extent – Swans and Pink Floyd remain a tier above anything else I’ve ever heard, and I still believe that Loveless is one of the greatest art pieces that humanity has ever produced. But we run into problems when we try to come up with “objective” explanations for having this hierarchy. Because lets be honest, its just plain hypocritical to shit on pop fans for not respecting creativity, technical complexity, and lyrical quality when I have Nirvana, Ramones, and Beatles records sitting next to me. And I can’t really call something timeless if it took less than two generations for people to get sick of it. Or so the usual anti-rockism stance goes. So while I’m not going to tell you that some old Rolling Stone types brainwashed you into subscribing to the rock canon, Im also not going to accept that there’s something inherently true about it either.
      You might be right that while hierarchies in music exist today, there’s less of a consensus on them. Usually I would say that’s a good thing because it means less people are following the crowd, but hey maybe it does result in less “great” music and therefore less music with sticking power. I don’t know if recent trends have indicated that happening, especially with Kanye and Kendrick existing, but it would kinda be cool if they did. The more people are forced to find their own “greats”, the more hierarchies that exist, the more music I get to appreciate. Half of what made the indie scene so interesting is that they idolized Sonic Youth and the Velvet Underground rather than the Beatles and David Bowie. They created a new rock canon and in doing so opened a whole new way of looking at rock music, a whole new set of bands elevated to that “great” status. So imo, the more that happens, the better.

      Delete
  69. Well, perhaps now I can post my opinion here. So, I'm going to paste what I wrote in the Facebook group, because that text really belongs here.

    When you talk about Overload of Opportunity, it sounds like you're saying that there is always a new (or recent created) band with any kind of sound one can imagine. But I disagree with this. In my point of view, music today is not as diverse as it can be, what means there is still room for creativity.

    If we pay attention, almost all the new rock artists (from 2000-on) release a kind of depressive, slow paced music, many times talking about death. They usually follow the steps of Radiohead (indie-rock) or Slayer (heavy metal). We almost never find upbeat-psychedelic dance rock, or romantic ballads, or arena-energetic bands, or handsome sophisticated rock crooners. Who are the heirs of Elvis Presley, or The Police, or AC/DC, or Iron Maiden? We can find one or another artist following theirs steps, but they are always amateurs, without a refined sound, except if we are not talking about rock. Something similar happens with other styles: Hip-hop, electronic music, jazz, folk, each one has its own standards and follow it without much room for a change.

    When someone says current rock sucks, the answer is always: “you’re lazy, forget the mainstream and search the indie-rock bands, there is lots of good music there”. Well, if you like the Radiohead-style sound, yes, there are lots of good bands there. But what if you don’t?

    From the songwriter’s point of view, there is also a common rule: “just do what you want to do, without the influence from the businessmen and the public”. I understand that this is important to avoid censorship, break old rules etc., but if we become too radical in this idea, the emphasis will be in the action (“to do what you want”) rather in the result (the song itself). In other words, what really matters nowadays is not exactly the result of the music, but the way the songwriter do it. That’s a kind of Copernican Revolution in music. A revolutionary song is not really important. Originality between songs nowadays is like the originality between fingerprints: they are all different to each other, but at the same time they are basically the same thing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And let’s talk about the people who are in the charts today. It’s very hard to find smart people, like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Steve Harris, Mark Knopfler. Very few can be considered guitar gods, like Jeff Beck, Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads. So, there is another problem here. Sophisticated musicians are not in the mainstream anymore. Some could say that this is a different problem, once a genius may not be a popular star and vice versa, but it is curious how the lack of great music and the lack of popular success of rock came at the same time. Coincidence? Mind you, Queen was the best seller artist of 2018, and it means the big audience is still interested in rock. There is no reason to think that people won’t like a new rock band, except if the band’s sound doesn’t please them. And there is no new rock band with a sound able to conquer the big audience nowadays, no matter if they are genius or not.

      So, if we pay attention, there is not that huge amount of diversity in music today. People just chose a way to go and are happy with that. No band stands out because this is not their intention. They just want to celebrate some values (perhaps existentialist values) and already know what type of music express these values. That’s the music behavior related to the idea of Fukuyama’s “end of history”. There is no need for another Beatles or Beethoven, changing the direction of music, because we are satisfied with the current sound.

      What I want to say is that the world’s intelligentsia has all chosen the same path (zeitgeist), and what they want is not to make creative, popular, amazing music. They are satisfied with the old songs and just want to make music that express their feelings, like the old ones do. Ambition is seen as pretentiousness, arrogance and greed. A genius is considered to be someone unbelievably exceptional, and people think it would be at least naïve if someone thinks this way about himself.

      People in the world are very connected with each other nowadays, but Overload of Opportunity doesn’t mean Overload of Diversity if we have billions thinking in the same direction.

      So, my opinion is that we are living in the new Dark Ages, but we can change that anytime. Nonetheless, first of all we need to want the change our ideas about art and become ambitious again. And that’s not going to happen if we are completely satisfied with what was already produced.

      Delete
  70. Sir, I have two questions for you, one serious, one slightly facetious. The serious one is, have you not noticed the rise of reggaeton? I'm surprised you show not awareness of it, since if I'm not wrong it's a pretty popular genre in Russia today. Now on the more facetious side, how can you hate Taylor Swift for being cold and calculating, while loving ABBA despite them being the very embodiment of those same qualities?


    Now a more general comment. Some time ago I would have found your essay thought provoking, and in a sense it might still be, albeit for different reasons. Basically, as it is the essay betrays biases and blind spots I have recently been forced to confront about myself. In other words, I have kinda been forced to admit that I have been kind of an ass when summarily dismissing some modern music as unlistenable crap, and an hypocritical ass at that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the questions, here are the answers:
      1. Never suspected any particular popularity for reggaeton in Russia - I guess they occasionally play it around, but hardly so much more than any other genres; it is particularly popular in the Latin-speaking world, and, obviously, Russia is not part of that. Aside from that, reggaeton is a genre that is at least 20 years old as of now, and also a genre that has hardly produced any acknowledged classics - to my mind, it's largely the kind of muzak you expect to be blasting from the speakers of Hispanic families on beach parties at the weekend. Of course, perhaps I'm missing something awe-inspiring here, but you are the first person to imply that I might be.

      2. I love ABBA because the songwriters in ABBA wrote original, interesting, catchy, meaningful melodies and made these into the main focus point of their success. In comparison, Taylor Swift (and her henchpeople) write derivative, predictable, simplistic, hookless melodies and for that reason, have to resort to image-based psychological strategies to create a main focus point. Nowhere in this text, or any others, do I condemn "commercialism" as an evil per se; even the greatest musical geniuses often have to engage in marketing and self-promotion to grapple fame and fortune. The difference is that people loved ABBA far more for their songs than their pretty faces, whereas a song like 'Love Story' could never ever survive without its accompanying video, whose Disney princess style makes a far bigger point than its music.

      3. Good for you. I, too, have once dismissed Captain Beefheart and The Clash as unlistenable crap, and have been forced to admit being wrong on these things. But the day I admit to having being wrong on Taylor Swift is the day I win that last victory over myself and learn to love Big Brother.

      Delete
  71. I read the entire essay and I thought there was some prowess in not using the word post-modern but you did it once. A lot of valid points, a lot of debatable ones, all very interesting. It made me think of jazz and how it quickly turned away from experimentalism because it reached what was some sort of a dead end very rapidly. Or post-war classical music, which was dogmatically serialist, before giving way to firmly ensconced niches, that were more or less waging war against each other. I might comment more later in a less superficial way. Thanks for that very interesting essay which made me want to listen to some Sergey Kuriokhin, that old and regretted postmodern (genius) very talented guy.

    ReplyDelete
  72. Hi again sir, thank you for your answer. I wouldn't go as far as suggest that reggaeton has produced anything mindblowing so far, in fact that's what I mean when I talk about music I had long dismissed as crap, and just recently have come to terms with the fact that there are elements of interest in this music, especially when it comes to rhythm. Maybe I still think most of it is crap, FWIW. As for Taylor Swift, never mind, I'm not too familiar with her music. I was just slightly amused at the sight of a certified ABBA lover hating on someone for calculation. And also I wouldn't go as far as saying I love Big Brother, but there is certainly some Top 40 stuff I enjoy, like Bruno Mars.

    Best regards.

    ReplyDelete