If only I'd known... Bill drummond has had a rant about music that pretty much mirrors what I said a couple of weeks back. Admittedly he's applied it to more than just electronic music, but the same sense of grumpy resignation is there. Everything's all played out, and there's not much new to get excited about.
Interestingly, in his essay Bill notes:
"I even have fantasies about waking up to find that all music has disappeared from the world. We can't even remember what it sounded like. We knew we had music, we knew it was important to us. In my fantasy we would have to start making music again from a year zero situation, with nothing but our voices. As I said, just a fantasy."
This also echoes something I said a few months back:
But as long as we have recorded music, things aren't going to change as long as we have well-worn conventions to refer to. It'll take a comet to the musical libraries of the world to get any thing as exhilariting as the first ten years of rock again.
Hmm, that first sentence needs a bit of attention.
Bill's solution? None really, except he's just launched (er, last year, actually) No Music Day, an effort to turn the music off on November 21, the eve of St Cecilia's Day (St Cecilia being the patron saint of music).
It's worth supporting, if I can remember.
Is Bill right? I vacillated a bit in my last post on the subject (the humble pie one), suggesting that my narrow point of view was distorting things. I think that perhaps Bill and I have a sort of romantic, radical approach to music. Unless it thunders up to you and chops off your bollocks (examples: Hendrix, Led Zep, Funkadelic), completely mindfucks you (Throbbing Gristle, that freejazz stuff Andy likes listening to), or is possessed of a towering genius that no one can replicate (Burt Bacharach), it's just not worth listening to.
A problem with this sort of essentialist, reductionist approach is that you end up running out of stuff to listen to bloody quickly. You hear something new and just think "I've heard that sort of thing before", and give up. Doing this, you discard music that's otherwise bloody good but doesn't shake you to your very core.
Of course, music still has the capacity to surprise, but the bar has been lifted so much over the years that you need to have perhaps a dozen "genius" elements to your track to make listeners over the age of 25 to go "Holy shit, that's unbelievable!". In the late 1960s and early 1970s you probably would have only needed three or four such elements to make an impact.
And partly it is an age thing. When you're older, you just don't have the emotional energy to invest in music any more. I only really get excited now writing my own stuff (until I run out of mental energy and/or inspiration).
Posted by stuart at October 17, 2006 7:12 PMHope I haven't put you off open comments... ;-)
Anyway, here's a coupla thoughts: the one about the format of the music (availability) reminded of the one Michael told me, about how he and Amanda couldn't work out what they wanted to listen to one day, and after starting and rejecting craploads of CDs, they just gave up listening - and within half an hour knew what they wanted to listen to. They couldn't work out what it was before because they were being distracted by the constant background of music.
I really do think part of it is age because sometimes I realise how blah the things I like are, but they have the emotional investment already. Here's my latest totally untested theory: there has never been good music, it's just that there is a steady stream of young (or otherwise musically virginal) people to miss this, and they keep the whole sordid beast alive... ;-)
The other one, in terms of emotional investment, is like the one about my dream of Incunabula++. I can get the visceral thrill of music in my dreams because the dream is about the emotion.
(I had a dream where Autechre released "Incunabula++" - a double CD on the same model as the double version of Tri Repetae. What was really exciting was that the bonus disc had this stuff on it which was as if, instead of developing down the path they did, they instead took the style of the first three albums and then turned it into "free IDM" (on the model of free jazz, see...) So it was utterly bonkers but nothing like the later stuff. Of course, this being a dream, I remember my enjoyment of the music far more than I remember the music...)
Actually that goes a bit further: I've found 'Loser' by Beck to be one of the most powerful songs ever, as long as I hear it on the radio while I'm half-asleep. It never has the same effect when I'm fully awake. Maybe this is why people get trashed at gigs... :-/
I might restrict myself from carrying on...
Posted by: Andrew at October 19, 2006 11:16 AMI would say similar things would apply in relation to literature too - it's remarkable the number of books that seem to be entirely based on copying genre conventions, rather than breaking out and trying something new, even within genre. (From my biased perspective, fantasy novels seem particularly bad at this)
I also agree with Andrew's point about the steady stream of young people - I recently read a book which I think I would have thought was really great if I'd read it when I was 20, but ten years later I realised how remarkably like a number of other books I'd read it was, and wasn't all that interested, but I suspect this was one of the earlier samples of the style, and I'd been reading the derivatives before something that was possibly a bit more original in its time.
Posted by: Janet at October 20, 2006 12:14 PM