Has music ceased to matter?

[Guy Rowland]

OLD PERSON THREAD ALERT

I'd guess for most of us here, music defined our youth. Whatever era we were in, whatever artists and composers did it for us, we were in thrall to the power of music.

And music was EVERYWHERE. In the UK during my teenage years, the nation would watch Top Of The Pops each week and complain about it. There were the megastars - Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince who were cultural icons that transcended music. When Byran Adams was no1 with Everything I do for 98 weeks in a row, everyone knew about it. Frankie Goes To Hollywood shocked the nation. When Blur and Oasis released new singles in the same week in the 90s, it was a top news story. MTV was a cultural phenomenon.

The stock of music itself seems to have been reduced. It's now a niche interest. We have Taylor Swift, I'd say she is the only artist at that level of ultra-stardom that was once common and she's about 90 now. NEW music seems to have become subsumed by ALL music - old songs aren't seen as old any more, it's all in a giant melting pot where new artists have to compete with everything ever recorded, not just what is popular right now. While that's terrific on the one hand, I think it has ghettoised new music, and it's a double whammy because streaming makes careers unsustainable.

Making music is now so easy you just type in a prompt. Inspired by nothing more than a passing thought, the creative process is entirely eliminated. As Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park: "I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here. It didn’t acquire any discipline to attain it. You read what others have done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourself so therefore you don’t take any responsibility for it.".

The background to young people's lives are memes, not songs. The sacred ritual of saving up for an album, buying it, finding you didn't like it but would play it 30 times until either you did or found you REALLY didn't like it, is gone. It forced us to be challenged.

In short - music doesn't seem to matter like it used to.

But maybe that's not quite as bad as it first seems. I think the biggest changes have been to mass culture, which - arguably - was never so much about the raw power of music but the power of celebrity. Perhaps music can - and does - still mean as much as it used to on an individual level, it's just it is now lost in the cultural noise. Or is that itself slowly dying?

YouTube recently offered me up a cover of a favourite Prefab Sprout song, Bonny, by Seal. It knows me well. But it was the comments that really got to me. So many saying Paddy McAloon was one of the great underrated songwriters.



But this comment in particular speaks to the extraordinary power of music to connect people across time and space at such a deep level. How remarkable it is that someone wrote a song 40 years ago that has this effect when sung by someone else:

You watch a thousand videos and hear a thousand songs and you still feel hollow. And then Seal sings Bonny and you know you're not alone.

I hope someone feels the same in another 40 years about a song from their youth today.

[Tobias Escher]

Interesting topic, for sure! I think most of it comes from the kind of music you grow up with, particularly what social group you get into.
So I'm 39, and my whole life everything in the realm of popular music has completely passed me by. Any No.1 hit song when I was a kid, there's a good chance I've never heard. I genuinely had never heard a single Michael Jackson song until he died. Not one. It was just not the social circle I was ever in.

As a little kid (think start of primary school) I was big into classical music. Had my own record player (yes, at a time where these were already dead) since I can remember, and thousands of records from my parents. Still have them, still listen to them a lot.
Until about 11/12, that was pretty much it. One exception were Abba (again, YEARS after their stuff came out! My first CD was The Album in 1993, came out in 1977). And the only contemporary exception was one German pop/rock band, whose newest album was basically the soundtrack to summer camp I attended. That was the only "new" music.

Through family, I was and still am super big into Genesis. Again, decades after the fact. Only the old stuff, nothing from the Phil Collins era (still have not heard anything after the 70s).

So it was 99,9% classical music plus Genesis at home, some Beatles, Abba (that was the early 90s!!!). And then came German power metal. Quite early. From about 12/13, it was exclusively classical music and metal. Gamma Ray, Blind Guardian, Helloween, ... then when it started Symphonic Metal, later folk metal, basically anything but death metal. And still mostly classical music.
EDIT: From around 2008, bluegrass and "rodeo country" has come in. Never mainstream country,only the stuff like Dave Stamey, Chris LeDoux. Not a single track of all the big stadium country guys.
All that has stayed that way.

I can truthfully say I have never listened to anything "mainstream". As weird as it sounds, I don't know a single song by Taylor Swift. Not one. Primarily because I just hate hate hate the blandness. All of it. I've been forced to sit through some pop songs (don't even know by whom) a few years back when someone had the radio on in the car. And the whole time I thought "this would be nice if it would KICK SOME ASS!!!!!!". It's just all so bland. All autotuned to death, if a drummer plays more than 1 note per hour it feels it already is too "hard" for them, no distorted guitar in sight...
And the same 4 bloody chords over and over again, ultra bland. It all sounds like 1st guitar lesson (I don't play guitar), just soooooo boring.
It just all feels to me like "let's write a song that absolutely NO ONE can find in any way producing any emotion whatsoever. If they could feel empowered, it's too much. if it makes them sad, too much. If they think it has a message, too much".

I remember when Amy Winehouse died, I read about it here, and I thought "Who??". I had never heard a single of her songs. Really not my style, I can see what people saw in her, but it really always passed me by completely.

Nowadays I learn about new music still primarily by friends recommending it. Also Auto-Playlists on Apple Music in the car after an album ends. Reading music magazines.

Guy. I took that paragraph:
"Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince who were cultural icons that transcended music. When Byran Adams was no1 with Everything I do for 98 weeks in a row, everyone knew about it. Frankie Goes To Hollywood shocked the nation. When Blur and Oasis"
Michael Jackson - bought a best of a few years back. My music player showed I skipped through a few songs. I listened to a few right now, somewhat liked it. Going on the list agin.
Madonna - never heard a single song
Prince - I have genuinely never heard the name before
Bryan Adams - I know him from the Dreamworks Spirit movie, and can sing these songs by heart. Didn't know he had done anything else, because I never bothered to search.
Frankie goes to Hollywood - never heard of them
Blur - same
Oasis - I know the name, but have never heard any of their songs (I searched for their biggest hits on Youtube, none sounded familiar).

It's totally crazy how much these things can pass one by...
Long story, no sense . For me music was never about the stars, never about what's "in", I always found that boring.

[GR Baumann]

I never heard, not to my knowledge, a single song from Swift. I probably heard snippets in the radio, the 45 seconds before the news or the likes, but not to my knowledge.

Look at "existing" genres, in the thousands, if not five digits already.

I fart into a Neumann U67, sample it, and call it cosmic flatulation, chop it up, and have a Gangsta-Kid rap to it, this hits some numbers, and now I fart 50 times, and publish a sample library, cosmic flatulation Vol. 1. as heard by Gangsta-Kid. etc.

The inflation of music is irreversible! We will not see a time again where a single band or musician influenced society, the way Bob Dylan, Hendrix, Beatles, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Zappa et al. were able to.

The constant flood of shit in the system has kids hooked to their little digital dictators, and the games just about started with AI coming to town.

So yes, there is a grave somewhere, on it's tombstone chiseled:

Music was my first love
but
Elvis sold over 1 billion records

[progger]

One thing is for sure, everything is always changing, and we never know exactly how those changes are going to unfold, particularly as other people perceive and adapt to them. All we can do is try to be as aware as possible of our own feelings, thoughts, and reactions as we get hit by those changes, and, hopefully, to stay as authentically true to ourselves as possible. And thrive. As artists, laborers, craftspeople, or just the messy and silly humans we all end up being anyway.

At the moment, music is definitely not the focal point of western-world pop culture in the same way it was in the 1980s and 1990s. I find that a bit sad, even though I've always mostly enjoyed music considerably older than I am, with periodic exceptions. Ironically, music is more important to me than it was back then, while I was growing up, or at least it feels like it is. It's always been important to me, since I was a wee lad, but it's only grown in significance... all while I become more and more aware that it shouldn't matter nearly as much as the numerous crises facing the world today (socioeconomic inequality, backsliding into authoritarian oligarchy, an ever-worsening global environmental catastrophe that continues to be mostly ignored, etc).

Mediocre music has saturated everything in the industry, as perfectly represented by the fake AI "artists" on Spotify that just exist to further consolidate that company's wealth. Non-AI music today often sounds even less interesting, at least AI did some proper homework! It's probably been nearly a decade since I've heard a new record that truly excited and inspired me, and I keep going back to Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Ravel, or Prokofiev (etc) for inspiration. I've also been a grumpy old man since the age of fifteen, according to my cousin, and I fully accept that.

But from my audiences – the folks coming to shows I'm playing, as either a sideman or leader, the folks buying and streaming my albums, the clients who like to work with me as an arranger or session player – I can perceive an ever-growing boredom with this saturation of musical mediocrity and automation. I've recently felt very gratified for having taken so many years to properly learn how to play, write, arrange, and produce music, I have plenty of gig work (for which I'm immensely grateful), and I've been reinvigorated to invest in my creative work, making records just for the sake of doing something cool, not in the hopes for great financial gain. I think the world is becoming newly and increasingly hungry for genuine, authentic, human work done on a high level, and that possibility excites me.

[Guy Rowland]

But from my audiences – the folks coming to shows I'm playing, as either a sideman or leader, the folks buying and streaming my albums, the clients who like to work with me as an arranger or session player – I can perceive an ever-growing boredom with this saturation of musical mediocrity and automation.

Excellent! Without question, this is a movement that will continue. I hesitate to say "grow" with the same certainty, but that's likely too.

Ai generated videos of eye-popping incredulity already elicit only yawns. The twenty-somethings in my life unanimously are uninterested in anything by AI - in fact positively hostile. I think the market for live music, played before your very eyes by people with talent will flourish. The market for session players feels less certain to me so that's very good to read.

That's all one part of the equation, but your argument is bigger than that - the increased reliance on automation to create a homogenous sound. This is a subject that absolutely fascinates me. The synths and drum machines that started in the 70s birthed entire genres. Dance music threw out real musicians somewhere in the 80s and has never looked back - the public craved metronomic precision. Kraftwerk embraced the machines, now widely seen as perhaps the most influential group of all time. And I love Kraftwerk! I was an technological evangelist.

But now we can create literally any sound with ease it is an irony that everything sounds the same. By the time vocals are manipulated into sonic perfection, they do all tend to sound similar to one another. Artificial voices which never sounded quite real enough have seamlessly merged with real voices made to sound unreal and met in the bland middle.

All the while, a handful of TV channels grew to hundreds which themselves got usurped by trillions of videos accessible by anyone who can be bothered to lift a finger. The background noise of life turned into an overwhelming roar which exists to distract and even manipulate the world itself around us.

The mental health issues of the younger generations don't need too much explaining.

A friend of mine is a teacher of primary school children (5-11). She told me that recently she had to run a music lesson where kids were encouraged to write prompts into AI so they could "make their own music". It disturbed her to her core. On the other hand, I can already see how AI can be genuinely beneficial to creative artists so saying all AI is inherently bad feels too simplistic and perhaps misses the deeper point.

Jean Michel Jarre - another pioneer who embraced machines - has a wonderful simple phrase as he talks through how he made those ear-popping sounds 50 years ago, how he transformed noise generators and filters into a sonic landscape with "a little musical intent". There is something about those words that feels profound to me. Musical intent is the mechanism that has united songwriters, composers and musicians of every stripe for thousands of years. The desire to turn lifeless objects into art, the magic of creating something from nothing. The writer does the same with mere words. As humans it is in our natures to create art and tell stories.

If that intent is bypassed, we are somehow eroding our humanity - all in an era where relationships are gamified and online personas curated to generate maximum engagement. At the risk of ballooning an already vast subject even further, I wonder if the rise in fascistic tendances we see everywhere in the world is essentially that we're forgetting how to relate to one another as human beings.

"Machines do heavy work, while man controls the machines". This old quote is used more than once by the band Public Service Broadcasting who make music about human endeavour. Perhaps the challenge faced by music and art in general today is when that simple quote gets reversed. As one priceless tweet said, "When I was young I used to dream that I'd write poetry and paint all day while robots did the laundry and the dishes - not the other way around".

[progger]

Indeed, and agreed. "Musical intent" is a powerful concept!

[wst3]

there is good music being written and recorded today, but it has become darned difficult to find it, and I think that is the problem - which stems from the acceptance of mediocre music (and art in general!)

I'm 66, grew up (musically) in a very strange mix (sorry) of music - my folks listened to the rat pack and others of that ilk, my grandfather listened to the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy and Stokowski. My friends and I started our journeys with Chubby Checkers and the Beatles (of course) and then branched out in many directions. Protest music. Rock and Roll. The blues. Progressive rock. West Coast rock. You name it we listened to it, largely because the local FM station played all of it. The first albums my parents bought me were Tommy, Chicago Transit Authority, CSN&Y 4 Way Street (from which I discovered a love for live recordings), Three Dog Night, Inna Gadda Da Vida, and Woodstock (which was played in the family room as often as my bedroom). In 9th grade I discovered Duane Allman, Clarence White, Danny Gatton, and Lenny Breau. Oh yeah, and Joe Pass and Mickey Baker. Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was an early favorite, Harry Chapin and Jim Croce were big favorites, and then there was James Taylor's One Man Dog, as was pretty much everything by Zappa. Somewhere along the way I discovered Coltrane, Davis, Copland, and Barber.

ALL of it was exciting! All of them offered something new from which to learn.

These days I listen to a college station, but even they are no where as adventurous as they once were, so finding new artists is getting more and more difficult. I remember hearing Nickel Creek for the first time on that station, along with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sean Colvin, and especially Nanci Griffith.

I really miss new adventures in music! I hope this is just a lull.