Past, present and future of music, some thoughts

[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.