Music : Over the Years

dear Lord, disco!?

well you've Queen fan so you are forgiven

 

Up.

I think this topic could deserve some more discussion!

 

I agree with Terr_Mys on this issue.

Anyway, lately rock has been playing more and more on pop station. Some say we are in one of those periods where rock is "king". Certainly rock is receiving more attention than in say, 1999, but nothing like what happened in the Grudge Era. What are your thoughts on this?


DarthNut,
the nuttiest guy around.

 

I think that mainstream music may not be as great as that of the past. But then I'm thinking it's because what happens is the good music lives on while the stuff that isn't so great dies with time . . .

But upon comparing the good music of then with the good music of the later then and so on until now, I'm not sure. :\ Too different to compare, it seems?

And also, there's all those other hidden, undergroundy music scenes and styles and some of them seem to be going pretty great.

 

To the last comment before mine: How big is the difference between the high point in the "Grudge Era" and the high point of whatever followed . . . And the same question to the former and the era before that?

And would you say that rock's "In"-ness is declining now?

 

Rock music comes and goes in cycles. As the current batch of teenagers grows older and (hopefully) matures chances are they will demand something more satisfying musically then Britney and her clone army. The problem was that two or three years ago they were all making money hand over fist and that encouraged record companies to saturate the market.

In the next few years I'm confident that there will be another nest big thin in rock as there has been every 12-14 years since Elvis. Who knows what it will be, hopefully it will have beter legs than grunge.

 

It looks to me like the cycle is an alternation between really produced stuff (say disco, or the current pop trends) with less produced, more organic kind of stuff like grunge, etc.

I'm hoping the next pull away from the over-produced stuff winds up with some music that isn't so centred on the guitar band sound, and is also less steeped in tonality. Maybe some shifts toward texture rather than melody/chords would be cool.... or experimentation in different tuning systems than the old hack 12-notes-in-the-octave stuff. Who knows.

 

The Beach Boys didn't like to surf but they got called that because their managers liked the image.

Strawberry Fields Forever never made it to no.1 in the UK - it was held off the top spot by Englebert Humperdink.

The biggest artist of the 1970s was not the Sex Pistols, the Clash or the Ramones but Olivia Newton-John. The biggest 'indie' star of the 1980s in the UK was not The Jesus and Mary Chain, U2 or The Smiths, but Kylie Minogue.

Pop was commercial from the moment Frank Sinatra hit the big time and Elvis swung his hips on television. Pop has always been about image as well as music - the Beatles changed their look constantly throughout the 1960s. In other words, we have to be careful about being overly selective about the past. There was no golden age.

However, I do agree that the present music scene is unusually moribund and predictable.
The truly exciting moments in pop/rock music history - the 1960s, punk, etc. - come about when pop music crossed with other forms of music. What I find depressing about the current music scene is the degree of segregation there is between different genres of music. This is especially bad in mainstream pop, where the boy/girl band formula has become a way for record companies to maximise their profits without getting into the mess of difficult artists who want to have opnions and experiment with the form. Such groups are being churned out. There is innovation, even in music by Britney and Justin, but it is all at the level of production - and this kind of innovation never connects with people and is never going to glavinise a generation in the way past bands did.

 

As far as hard rock is conserned I have heard that the band Mastodon is going to be what the future will sound like...Exteremly techincal hardcore with insane drumming... sounds interesting to me.

Although if I were to say what the furute of hard rock/metal will be, it will porbally sound like Soilwork's Natural Born Chaos.. clean/death growl vocals with heavy guitars and lot's of chatchy hooks...some light synth as well for atmosphere.

If any of you anre interested what either of these bands sound like her are some selections for downlaoding .... (I would really be interested in what you guys think *cough* Grand Admiral *cough*)

Soilwork:
As We speak (really good)
Black Star Deciever

Mastodon:
March of the fire ants
Ol'e Nessie

Well that's my two cents