Past, present and future of music, some thoughts

[MusicLover]

Hi people,

As I listen to Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" (in impressive 24/192 quality), I can't help feeling nostalgic. Not really for that period of time itself, where I wasn't even born, but for the wealth in quality music that was produced for the general mass at the time. I'm referring here between the late 50s and 80s.

Do you feel the same? I reckon there's some good music produced nowadays, some excellent one for the discerning listener.
And when I say good I mean more specifically music resulting from an original cultivated creative process, performed skilfully and passionately. That's good music for me, regardless of genre, as I listen to absolutely everything that fits that mould, from reggae to the most conservative baroque music works.

It just seems to me that nowadays there's an obvious lack of originality and skills to produce tasteful tunes.

Am I been too pessimistic here or do you feel kind of identified with this view? If so, do you see a change of trend in the future?

All opinions most welcome here!

[Confused]

I have my own take on this. You can trace an evolution of music, from before the classical era, through the 20th century, when recorded media emerged, together with radio, and blues was stolen by the rock and rollers, which became rock, then metal, swing became pop and dance music, the disco era combined with punk caused almost a revolution, which takes us to the end of the 70's. in the 80's and 90's the evolution continued, with Ska reinventing itself, disco becoming rave, ambient and all kinds of variants of dance music. Rock became heavy metal, which became the new wave of British heavy metal, which became thrash metal, death metal and so on. In amongst all this was the electronic music revolution, and 100's of sub plots, such as new romantic, the Manchester dance scene, grunge and many others. This is a ridiculously short and crude summary of what I am trying to explain. I think you could write a book on this. You then get to the year 2000, the 21st century and all of the evolution just kind of stopped.... There is plenty of good stuff around these days (amongst all kinds of rubbish), but nothing that you could definitively place in the 2000 - 2014 era.

Certainly the excitement that used to surround the "popular" music scene has vanished. And yes, I am a bit pessimistic about the future of music, but you just never know.......

And for all of us, there is plenty of stuff from the past to discover.....

[MusicLover]

That's a very interesting summary. Actually, I also this it's from about 2000 when you start missing more quality work.
I know many feel the same, but it's still nice to hear different people's views on why is it like this nowadays. And I guess it's not just a problem with music. It happens as well in the cinema industry, maybe even to the same extent.

Drifting slightly, this kind of relates to a talk by Lou Reed about MP3/compressed formats and people's perception that they are listening to what the artist created and don't realise they are actually missing most of it by not going for the CD, let alone true HD content or LP.
We live in the time of immediacy. You wouldn't go to a concert or the Louvre museum rushing, would you? Why not behave the same when listening to music at home? At the end of the day, it's all about savouring the art. Call it music or painting, whatever wakes up your curiosity.

You are spot on when you say there is plenty of stuff from the past to discover! And that's the bright side of this little thread

[PhilP]

I agree with a lot of Confused's summary and also with the feeling that little that's new has emerged since the late nineties. Certainly it's difficult to identify any significant new trends in 'classical' music though maybe it's the nature of things that these won't be apparent for a few decades at least. There may also be an 'age factor' involved - perhaps today's teenagers/twenty year olds know what's new and I don't.

In my opinion popular music is Much too dependent on yesterday's aged stars releasing re-mastered versions of 30-40 year old recordings, compilation albums etc. together with a few current megastars. it's easy money for the music companies and far less risky than experimenting with new talent.

[ozthepoz]

Hi people,

As I listen to Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" (in impressive 24/192 quality), I can't help feeling nostalgic. Not really for that period of time itself, where I wasn't even born, but for the wealth in quality music that was produced for the general mass at the time. I'm referring here between the late 50s and 80s.

Do you feel the same? I reckon there's some good music produced nowadays, some excellent one for the discerning listener.
And when I say good I mean more specifically music resulting from an original cultivated creative process, performed skilfully and passionately. That's good music for me, regardless of genre, as I listen to absolutely everything that fits that mould, from reggae to the most conservative baroque music works.

It just seems to me that nowadays there's an obvious lack of originality and skills to produce tasteful tunes.

Am I been too pessimistic here or do you feel kind of identified with this view? If so, do you see a change of trend in the future?

All opinions most welcome here!

All very interesting!

My take on this is that - as a result of technology changes - there is an awful lot more music being produced now than there was in the 50/60s, and there are many more media channels.

Most of it, in my view, isn't very good, but I would say that Iron and Wine (for instance) would be of a similar quality to S&G.

Jim White's early albums are stellar, and both Elliott Smith and Mark Linkous produced some magic. Throw in Will Oldham, King Creosote, Natalie Merchant, Sufjan Stevens, Richard Buckner, Steven Adams etc and you have plenty of "proper" music to rival the earlier decades.

All this stuff is available on iTunes, spotify etc; as Confused says - the problem is sifting out the good stuff from the mass market output.

PhilP - Erased Tapes is a good place to go for new directions in "classical music". Have you heard A Winged Victory for the Sullen?

I'm optimistic about music, but I do spend a lot of time sifting.

[PhilP]

PhilP - Erased Tapes is a good place to go for new directions in "classical music". Have you heard A Winged Victory for the Sullen?

Hi OTP, thanks for the recommendation. I've just been browsing the Erased Tapes site and there are certainly some intriguing looking items there. I've read about A Winged Victory for the Sullen but hadn't actually heard anything more than brief clips until I followed your recommendation this morning and put them on in the background while I was working. I've got a bad cold and can't really appreciate music properly so I'll reserve judgement for now.

[ozthepoz]

PhilP - Erased Tapes is a good place to go for new directions in "classical music". Have you heard A Winged Victory for the Sullen?

Hi OTP, thanks for the recommendation. I've just been browsing the Erased Tapes site and there are certainly some intriguing looking items there. I've read about A Winged Victory for the Sullen but hadn't actually heard anything more than brief clips until I followed your recommendation this morning and put them on in the background while I was working. I've got a bad cold and can't really appreciate music properly so I'll reserve judgement for now.

Let me know what you think. I absolutely love their first album, and I'm just getting know the second one; it's a bit more complex, but I suspect that it will grow on me as I listen to it more.