Interesting piece. Personally I'm more interested to see an analysis from 2016 to now. It seems that is when the relative musical stagnation is the most obvious
I guess my bigger point is the “stomp clap” genre was the last genre that aged badly. I myself see superficial changes over the past ten years but I can’t register anything released as far back as 2016 that would sound “cringe” now. Funny thing about it is Millennial style in every other way has been deemed lame but Taylor and Bruno still rule the charts. I know cultural stasis is a dead horse but still not convinced that it isn’t real, especially in the realm of music.
Great Piece! Stomp clap makes me think of the music on suburban supermarket playlists - every song has this distinctly yell at the top of your lungs chorus a la Imagine Dragons. I blame the Champions League theme song and the intro to QOTSA "no one knows" for starting it lol
Comments from 72 year old Huck: We DID listen to older music when I was young. It was not measured: not many ways to detect our listening since we had no money to spend, some of it was embedded in TV shows, and in many cases we sang it to each other best as we could remember (until the first affordable small-reel recorders came along and revolutionized our music sharing, pre-cassette).
My first "favorite song" was CATCH A FALLING STAR by Perry Como. I only heard him sing it once a week, but I sang it a lot in between, as I did L-O-V-E by Nat King Cole, who had a 15 minute (!) show on TV, if I remember right. Similarly, my Italian friends and I liked Dean Martin and a girl in my class had gone nuts for Jack Jones. We were all listening on the radio to current stuff, too...I remember finding a broken jukebox (played without paying!) at the local soda shop a couple years later. My cousins and I stacked up every Beatle song on the thing...it had taken me a year to really grasp onto them but I was hooked.
It was HARD to find different (new or old) music in those days. When we came across something we shared it the best we could. A friend played me a Bing record, which I immediately recognized from the radio; I was so happy to learn the name. I got a promo record discarded by the local college radio station so all my friends got to hear The Smothers Brothers live at the ONION way before CBS found them. When I finally got $3.00 to spend I was beyond elementary school...I finally could BUY music (HA&TJB's GOING PLACES). I had already pirated my cousin's Beach Boys and Four Seasons onto my Xmas present 3.5 inch reel-to-reel by then, so Billboard's data from me would have been a bit skewed (although I still listen to Herb Alpert today).
Is stagnation just about whether change has happened or does quality come into play? Sure that’s totally subjective, but at what point does stagnation have more to do with whether or not “this is good” rather than “there has been change.” Your three points of change, all having to do with pop and rap, seem a bit limited on this score. In any case, comparing 98-18 to 58-78 wouldn’t be a fair fight on any metric.
Well that’s the interesting thing about the cultural stasis debate. People have been complaining the music, or culture, is getting worse since the beginning of time. But the idea that nothing is changing feels like a very new thing people are saying
It's tough to manage expectations though, right, to want big things. Maybe even more so in turbulent destabilized times. Your examples of the shifting styles from one decade to the next are relatively small ball aren't they? They're not exactly like taking the journey from Elvis and the Everly Brothers at the start of the 60s to Abbey Road and Led Zeppelin at the end of them.
I think the tech has overwhelmed culture. The digitization and migration of music onto streaming apps on our phones is the biggest change and perhaps there's a feeling that there hasn't been innovation in music itself during this era that is commensurate with that huge shift in how we listen to it.
It feels akin to the primary innovation in the film world in this era, Netflix, a distribution service. The innovation was the platform, not any of the actual film or TV the company funded.
I think you hit it. Streaming pushes music out, but also gives you what it thinks you want, stagnating things. Back in the 1950's my friends and I were actively searching for new stuff. We hated stuff that was being pushed out by big radio stations (Pat Boone ring a bell?) and finding old or new music that you could share with friends was a big thing.
And maybe it isn't so much stagnation right now as it was real change for a couple decades there...
When the Remember the Titans movie came out my then nine year old daughter was surprised that I knew the songs she thought were new. It temporarily made her think that Dad might be cool, but it soon passed.
Interesting piece. Personally I'm more interested to see an analysis from 2016 to now. It seems that is when the relative musical stagnation is the most obvious
Might be worth another essay!
I guess my bigger point is the “stomp clap” genre was the last genre that aged badly. I myself see superficial changes over the past ten years but I can’t register anything released as far back as 2016 that would sound “cringe” now. Funny thing about it is Millennial style in every other way has been deemed lame but Taylor and Bruno still rule the charts. I know cultural stasis is a dead horse but still not convinced that it isn’t real, especially in the realm of music.
sounds like data mining
Great Piece! Stomp clap makes me think of the music on suburban supermarket playlists - every song has this distinctly yell at the top of your lungs chorus a la Imagine Dragons. I blame the Champions League theme song and the intro to QOTSA "no one knows" for starting it lol
Comments from 72 year old Huck: We DID listen to older music when I was young. It was not measured: not many ways to detect our listening since we had no money to spend, some of it was embedded in TV shows, and in many cases we sang it to each other best as we could remember (until the first affordable small-reel recorders came along and revolutionized our music sharing, pre-cassette).
My first "favorite song" was CATCH A FALLING STAR by Perry Como. I only heard him sing it once a week, but I sang it a lot in between, as I did L-O-V-E by Nat King Cole, who had a 15 minute (!) show on TV, if I remember right. Similarly, my Italian friends and I liked Dean Martin and a girl in my class had gone nuts for Jack Jones. We were all listening on the radio to current stuff, too...I remember finding a broken jukebox (played without paying!) at the local soda shop a couple years later. My cousins and I stacked up every Beatle song on the thing...it had taken me a year to really grasp onto them but I was hooked.
It was HARD to find different (new or old) music in those days. When we came across something we shared it the best we could. A friend played me a Bing record, which I immediately recognized from the radio; I was so happy to learn the name. I got a promo record discarded by the local college radio station so all my friends got to hear The Smothers Brothers live at the ONION way before CBS found them. When I finally got $3.00 to spend I was beyond elementary school...I finally could BUY music (HA&TJB's GOING PLACES). I had already pirated my cousin's Beach Boys and Four Seasons onto my Xmas present 3.5 inch reel-to-reel by then, so Billboard's data from me would have been a bit skewed (although I still listen to Herb Alpert today).
With the exception of the Mumford and Nick Drake tracks I don't find any of the posted tracks appealing in the slightest.
Thats totally fine. But thinking something is bad doesn’t mean it is stuck
Is stagnation just about whether change has happened or does quality come into play? Sure that’s totally subjective, but at what point does stagnation have more to do with whether or not “this is good” rather than “there has been change.” Your three points of change, all having to do with pop and rap, seem a bit limited on this score. In any case, comparing 98-18 to 58-78 wouldn’t be a fair fight on any metric.
Well that’s the interesting thing about the cultural stasis debate. People have been complaining the music, or culture, is getting worse since the beginning of time. But the idea that nothing is changing feels like a very new thing people are saying
It's tough to manage expectations though, right, to want big things. Maybe even more so in turbulent destabilized times. Your examples of the shifting styles from one decade to the next are relatively small ball aren't they? They're not exactly like taking the journey from Elvis and the Everly Brothers at the start of the 60s to Abbey Road and Led Zeppelin at the end of them.
I think the tech has overwhelmed culture. The digitization and migration of music onto streaming apps on our phones is the biggest change and perhaps there's a feeling that there hasn't been innovation in music itself during this era that is commensurate with that huge shift in how we listen to it.
It feels akin to the primary innovation in the film world in this era, Netflix, a distribution service. The innovation was the platform, not any of the actual film or TV the company funded.
I think you hit it. Streaming pushes music out, but also gives you what it thinks you want, stagnating things. Back in the 1950's my friends and I were actively searching for new stuff. We hated stuff that was being pushed out by big radio stations (Pat Boone ring a bell?) and finding old or new music that you could share with friends was a big thing.
And maybe it isn't so much stagnation right now as it was real change for a couple decades there...
When the Remember the Titans movie came out my then nine year old daughter was surprised that I knew the songs she thought were new. It temporarily made her think that Dad might be cool, but it soon passed.