
The Year the Music Died - tintinnabula
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/january-2020/the-year-the-music-died/
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alxhghs
More like the day this author’s preference for how rock should sound died.
There are plenty of good rock bands that followed and that are still coming
out.

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mojuba
I think what the author meant to say was to blame copyright (he literally
mentions it in the first sentence) and commercialization of the music
industry. Something similar happened in the movie industry too.

I don't think the divide between commercial and independent has ever been so
prominent and deep as it has become in the past few decades, again, both in
music and cinema.

Rock music is an _indie_ phenomenon. That said though, I'm not sure if it died
its natural death like jazz music did, or it was the result of said
commercialization. Or maybe both.

Yes there's still indie rock music alive and marginally thriving, but can an
indie rock musician beat your typical commercial pop star in terms of fame and
popularity? No chance. Marketing money beats everything and everyone. It
destroys genres and whole cultures. A lot of the times underground music is
better and more interesting than what the industry will try to sell you and
yet it remains underground with relatively little exposure.

That's the change that happened sometime in the late 1970s and into the 1980s.

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asplake
But jazz isn’t dead either...

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mojuba
As much as I love jazz music, it's not evolving anymore. So it's dead in
pretty much the same way as baroque music is. It's beautiful, it's great but
it's not evolving, no new big names like J.S.Bach or Miles Davis. That's a
typical sign of no life in the genre.

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radiowave
Not that it's important, but I notice that the author can't tell the
difference between a french horn and a trombone.

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pengo
I stopped reading the article after the second major factual inaccuracy. The
author clearly has an axe to grind and is determined facts won't get in the
way.

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Rerarom
Wtf? What about Queen?

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RickJWagner
Biggest click-bait title of the year, IMHO. Of course Rock hasn't died.

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tragic
What a fine way to rule out of existence almost all subgenres of metal and
punk, and all of indie rock, and indeed anything other than bands who do
bucket-list arena tours. All this stuff is rock, and millions of people listen
to it; the author is merely ignorant.

It's as if somebody were to declare that house music died in 1990, with the
only evidence being an analysis of records from that year, and everything
subsequent to that year simply ignored.

That is not to say that there's nothing wrong in these scenes, but we then get
to the sort of economic arguments he dismisses at the outset; eg, the effect
of gentrification on night spots, and so on.

