

Why Music Is Dying - T-A
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-07-08/why-music-is-dying

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api
I agree about social networks having this disturbing tendency to elevate snark
and hot air, but I don't think that's the fundamental reason.

My own two cents:

Music is dying because it's become bland. I love music, but only when it
has... energy. I don't know how else to put it. It's got to call up intense
emotion, intense imagery. It's got to have something to say.

It's also got to be compositionally interesting. Too much of today's music
relies on heavy bass and catchy hooks to cover up the fact that it's kind of
predictable and boring.

I look for new music often but little of it makes the cut. Of the music I buy,
little of it stays in my playlist for that long. I just don't hear much energy
in it.

To me it mirrors a broader and IMHO a little disheartening cultural trend: the
death of counterculture. In the past 50-60 years in America various
subcultures / countercultures were the dominant source for new, interesting
art and expression. We had the beats, the hippies and various fellow
travelers, punks, goths, ravers, and now... I'm not sure. I don't think it's
just that I'm old. Even when those things were in their underground heyday,
people outside still heard of them. I think if there were anything I'd have
heard something about it but I don't see much. Hipsterism is all about being
too cool to care about anything and that seems to be about it. The only other
thing I see is this obnoxious neckbeardy Internet culture of cheezy snarky
badly-drawn cartoons and memes, sort of like a cross between hipsterism and
the comic book guy from the Simpsons... it's like hipsters but they don't get
laid. Boooooring.

~~~
tjr
I heard it said (paraphrasing) that jazz stopped moving forward when Miles
Davis wasn't around to push it.

Obviously that's not strictly true, and wouldn't apply to other styles of
music, but I think the sentiment is true. Some of it was counterculture as you
mentioned; some wasn't necessarily "counterculture", but was more
experimental, striving to go further down the same path. But however you term
it, it seems to me that a lot of music has grown stagnate out of repeating
known formulas instead of exploring.

Considering jazz again, there's a lot of "new" music categorized as, say, "neo
bop". Would Diz and Bird have been doing "neo bop"? I doubt it. They were
trying new things. I don't suspect they were particularly attached to bop
music per se, but they wanted to push the boundaries -- take swing music and
see what new things they could do with it. To me, most "neo" anything sounds
about as bland as you'd expect; rehashing old ideas without the creative
energy that made those old ideas work in the first place.

I sometimes find new music that I really like, but I mostly listen to the same
music I was listening to ten years ago. And a lot of that was old even then.

~~~
api
One of the things that needs to die is _bass_.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCawU6BE8P8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCawU6BE8P8)

So yeah, loud bass sounds cool. Some interesting stuff was done with it
fifteen or twenty years ago: hip hop, drum and bass, etc. Dubstep was one of
those things that should have been a little micro-trend but somehow got super-
popular because _bass, man!_ It must have some kind of psychological effect or
something, but once you get past that it's really boring.

Bass is kind of like spice. It can be used to make food more interesting, but
it can also be used to cover up food that tastes like crap by overpowering it
with hot sauce.

I agree-- nobody's trying. Nobody's really pushing the envelope. I think it
mirrors what we're seeing in other areas: lots of lame apps instead of
tackling hard problems, etc. We're in this weird gilded age depression-ish
thing where there's lots of money sloshing around chasing not much in
particular.

------
koberstein
Music is not dying...

