I think when you had to buy a record or CD people would consider themselves a “punk rock” person or whatever for any genre and they’d tend to buy and listen to/show their friends that music.
With streaming services, and easy access to wide variety there’s not much need for this kind of thing so tastes blend more on the consumption side. They then start to blend more on the creation side too.
One thing I’ve noticed is that music has gone from an activity (listen to this record I got) to entirely personal and mostly ambient.
Maybe that’s a factor of my age, but I think it’s mostly related to higher stimulus activities now available on the internet.
He charts the patterns in how his students engaged with music over his career and comes to the same conclusions you do, shifting from a very highly engaged relationship with bands and acts to a relationship with music as more of an aural thing. Often he finds people don't even necessarily know the names of the songs they enjoy, while in the past people would read liner notes and learn a whole origin story for their favorite acts.
He attributes it largely to the neverending algorithmic feed. You don't need to know anything about the music you like to find more music like it, the feed does it for you. Not always for the best of course. I recently started listening to the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack and really enjoy it, but algorithmic feeds seem to associate it with a lot of anime soundtracks and Jpop rather than associating it with jazz and funk, the actual musical genres the soundtrack is in.
That's totally separate from the algorithm/genre issue though. The genres have never ever really perfectly matched up with the music but it doesn't matter. If the algorithm perfectly selected more music you like you still wouldn't be more likely to look up the name of the track I don't think.
Anyway that soundtrack is... not jpop per se but it is heavily influenced by it. The format and aesthetics are very jazz-like but the rhythms and harmonizations are very jpop. That might not be the most _useful_ association in this context of finding music that sounds similar, but it is there. And in its way as accurate as calling it jazz. Saying it's "actually" jazz or funk is... that's just not really how this works. It's not wrong to say it's jazz but it's wrong to say anything really is ONLY jazz, and can't also be other things too.
The causation goes the other way. People are more likely to want to learn about the background behind the music in order to more deeply immerse themselves into a scene where they can be exposed to more music like this. It's why if you go into the record store looking for a recommendation one of the first questions is "What kind of music do you like?" But if nobody ever asks you that question, and you never have to stop and think about it in order to articulate your answer to that question, you wouldn't really know off the top of your head.
They really did claim to have written "Killing Floor" with a stupid title of "The Lemon Song." Howlin' Wolf had been to london and recorded with Clapton. Hendrix had played a scorching version of it on BBC Radio One. No way they could have missed just that one. Then all the Willie Dixon. It's embarrassing how often Page/Plant claimed to have written classic blues and robbed working folk artists. Lowered my opinion of them significantly to see it so if you want to hero-worship them maybe skip compilations like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiiY4ciKFQA
And that's just some of it. When they stopped doing it the quality of their output fell off a cliff.
One way I have heard to mentally categorize things: What is the stereotypical musical instrument of that generation/genre?
For jazz and the silent generation it was the saxophone, maybe others though.
For rock-n-roll it's the electric guitar, no question.
The 80's was the electric keyboard and synths, kinda.
Today? The laptop.
The laptop is really just a tool to host different virtual instruments.
The "instrument" most easily associated with the past 15-20 years of electronic/pop music making have been Wave Table synthesizers like NI Massive and Serum.
Remember Skrillex? Those screeching sounds and basses are using Wavetable synthesis (from NI Massive in particular).
A big part of the reason it's harder to associate a particular instrument with newer electronic genres is because it's FAR easier (and more common) now to program your own patches (essentially a preset instrument) for your songs.
The DX-80 mentioned in the next section was VERY difficult to create patches for (even for it's time) so when you hear it in a song, it's almost always the included stock patches.
>The 80's was the electric keyboard and synths, kinda.
You'd associate a few types of instruments (and synthesis types) with the 80s but the reigning one was FM Synthesis, in particular the Yamaha DX-80.
Give a listen to some stick DX-80 patches and you'll immediately go "Yep, that's the 80's"
The VR "EXA: The Infinite Instrument"[1] seemed one intriguing window on the future. Development looks stalled.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/606920/EXA_The_Infinite_I...
edit: It was Eye Drops on TechTV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlM2LFPjS5k
However, for the keyboard, mic, headphone, software, etc you're in the ~$500+ range. But, a Silvertone Stratotone in 1960 was ~$55. That's ~$500 today when adjusting for inflation, so right in the ballpark.
> Lil Nas X and The Weeknd, neither of whom fits comfortably in the genre they are assigned to by the RIAA.
For me, this is generic and formulaic music that could have come out any time in the last thirty years (except for the ubiquitous "autotune/overcompress" sound I suppose).
"Not fitting comfortable into a genre" is so bland a compliment!
But I agree with this - all the action is in Bandcamp and similar.
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A composer named Steve Reich wrote several pieces of tape music (processed tape recordings) back in the 70s that were a huge hit (in avant circles), but then he went to study in Ghana and decided that this was a mistake. He felt that the purpose of music was for humans to play and sing together as a group activity, and that pre-recorded music did not fulfill this very deep human need.
I was skeptical when I first read this, but time has proven him entirely right.
But I completely and utterly disagree with his view that "the purpose of music was for humans to play and sing together as a group activity"
Music, and any other complex human activity (like visual art, or literature) is just way too rich and varied to have any one or definitive purpose.
What might make sense or be the purpose of music for one person might not for another. Someone (like myself) might enjoy making music alone, and who is Reich to presume to tell me that we're doing it wrong?
Of course, he's welcome to make music in groups if he wants. I'm not going to tell him he's doing it wrong either.
Parenthetically, I enjoy making music in groups too, but that's just not the only way I enjoy making music, and don't think I'm missing "the purpose of music" when I'm working alone.
This statement looks intelligent and interest but upon reading carefully says absolutely nothing. I don't even get what you are trying to say. Music is a group activity. Mozart played with orchestras, beyonce has scores of musicians to bounce off ideas of, Fela Kuti played with many bands - what does making music alone mean?
Reich's view was at the very least based on an observation, a learned and studied observation as a practioner and scholar.
Sure, some musicians clearly make music with others.
But some do not.
And for someone, no matter how learned or studied, even if they're a famous practitioner or a scholar, to dictate what music is for everyone is absurdly arrogant and myopic, to say the least.
If Reich has an argument to support his claim, he should state it, and his supporters should produce that argument, not point to him being a scholar, etc, as supposed evidence that he's right. That's an argument from authority and is a logical fallacy.
Different people have different goals and different aims. What meaning any particular person finds in an activity varies from person to person, and the wider and richer the activity is, the harder it is to make the case that there's only one right way to do it or that it means only one thing to everyone. Music and other arts are examples of such rich, wide-ranging activities.
True. And I should rightly retract and accept that shortcoming but you've provided me with no real argument other than negating mine. No examples of what you're talking about, not data point to chew on, fuck all.
It still an empty statement in and of itself.
> Different people have different goals and different aims. What meaning any particular person finds in an activity varies from person to person, and the wider and richer the activity is, the harder it is to make the case that there's only one right way to do it or that it means only one thing to everyone. Music and other arts are examples of such rich, wide-ranging activities.
Another completely empty statement. If I had a few days to live, I'd learn nothing from it. T'would be a waste of precious time and energy. Blanket statements, without form, without focus, without context are more meaningless than a false truth. Looks intelligent, but ultimately meaningless.
I vehemently disagree. that's like writing when you don't know how to read. Possible, but meaningless.
I can't read sheet music. The condition to understanding Bach's music on your own is to first understand sheet music. So to make his music you must read and understand his language. Is that music? It's subject to whoever interprets it. If we go nearly extinct what would be a more useful piece of evidence of what music is, Bach's Sheets or Madonna's "LIKE A VIRGIN" MTV special?
Lil Nas X and The Weeknd are placed in R&B almost exclusively because they are black. In your eyes, sung by a white person in 1986, would be synth pop.
Did Billy Ray Cyrus make Old Town Road suddenly country? Is Montero (call me by your name) rap or a gay dance anthem?
But to how many people younger than me does this really register?
Genres like synth/vapor wave are very conscious remixes of periods of time many of us were barely alive during, and their popularity comes in part, I think, from the tenuousness of their connection to the time period from which those genres draw their audiovisual cues. For me, at least, my earliest memories are a dream half-remembered, and music that draws from but does not emulate music from that time period can be a way for my imagination to fill in the blanks.
And great points: > "Not fitting comfortable into a genre" is so bland a compliment!"
> Steve Reich wrote several pieces of tape music (processed tape recordings) back in the 70s that were a huge hit (in avant circles), but then he went to study in Ghana and decided that this was a mistake. He felt that the purpose of music was for humans to play and sing together as a group activity, and that pre-recorded music did not fulfill this very deep human need.
That is very interesting. (Also, I've only heard Reich's music live, but I've never played along.) In folk music, it is a core belief (long ignored): It's music for folks. Woody Guthrie's songs were written so anyone could play or sing them, as I understand the story. His successors often played more complicated and challenging stuff, much that ordinary people couldn't hope to perform or isn't singalong music. It's hard to imagine sitting around a bar or a living room or out under the stars, singing 'Like a Rolling Stone' together.
And if you look at what is happening on Bandcamp or Soundcloud or YouTube or wherever else young people are trying new things you see a tremendous heterogeneity of inspiration and not a lot of concern for where the sound fits in.
The parallel trend of course is the power migration from labels and producers to artists, and these are intrinsically related. The artist wants to experiment and find their own path, the label is always trying to replicate success (to radically oversimplify on both counts). Labels have a role to play in supporting artists, but the power dynamic is different when the artist brings the audience they've been building independently for years.
The direct connection between artist and audience shows how much more open to new ideas we can all be. It is the same receptivity that powered the integration Dylan describes taking place in the 1950s, and I think its great.