I think the point isn’t that categories hardened in the sense that they stay distinct but that there are no more experiments, nothing subversive. Stealing and mixing things you know work, is exactly that. Your kid’s diss track will be totally generic with no original idea. That’s the whole point of the comment above, not that it’s exact covers.
Comment on Probably helps that I'm happy to listen to whatever genre
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 5 days agomusical categories hardened
That seems like nonsense, given how genres slimed together by the late 90s. Everybody was stealing from everybody else and the best we could do was throw around labels like “alternative.” ClearChannel made every genre pull toward country while country became R&B for hwhite people. Meanwhile the electronica scene had discovered computers - a development that took longer than you’d think - and a bunch of dorks styling themselves as DJ [noun] had MP3s all over piracy services. This is right before Youtube, SoundCloud, and MySpace let truly independent artists reach arbitrarily large audiences.
If we really want to start an argument - there’s people who say anything generated literally is not music. Kids these days are growing up with the ability to drop a diss track on their friend for a faux pas that happened five minutes ago. Formulaic, yes, but immediately distinct from everyone listening to the same ten conventionally-attractive pop artists.
lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
That really ignores the subgenres so bizarre they were considered jokes. Nightcore, dubstep, vaporwave, witch house, et cetera. All of those influenced popular culture and popular music. In terms of mainstream experimentation - Radiohead alone, come on. The Flaming Lips careened through popularity and back into weird shit like a hyperbolic comet. A Deftones fan in the 90s would listen to “Spell Of Mathematics” and ask if it sounds like that on purpose. Chappel Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe” would not have been made the same, a decade prior; what she’d be guide toward is more like Adele’s “Your New Love.”
Rick Rubin is still alive and working. Artists give him their latest tracks for a vibe check and he consistently steers them toward success. And he tells says, he doesn’t give a shit what’s popular, because people have no idea what they want next.
lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
I might be wrong but I feel that today’s mainstream music is quite generic. Of cause there are bubbles for everything and more than before due to the internet.
I don’t know where to draw the line tho. The top level comment says it’s the early 00’s (or rather quotes Mark Fisher who said that), maybe it’s later. Maybe kids these days don’t listen to what I think is mainstream. Maybe I’m just old and “this is generic and no art” is the new “this is noise and no music”, I donno.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
My perspective’s always skewed when people say ‘you just hate new stuff,’ because I hated plenty of the old stuff at the time. We can say pop is generic, and I mean, as opposed to when?
Relying on the radio music just plain suuucks. There’s a cycle of alternating decades where the most popular stuff tends to be worth keeping, versus the big hits being unfortunate relics, but even the highest highs are rarely experimental or subversive. The idea of a cultural phenomenon being countercultural feels self-contradictory.
So yes, The Beatles were a big fucking deal for a variety of reasons, but their early career was all teeny-bopper relationship fluff. As late as Revolver they were writing two-minute AM-friendly hits like “And Your Bird Can Sing.” Meanwhile the Silver Apples were using homemade synths to sound years ahead of their time. If you went by radio play you’d think very little was happening.
Conversely, Depeche Mode blew everybody’s dicks off with Violator, but it’s just stripping back all the spacey industrial shit they’d been doing for a decade. “Personal Jesus” is a minimalist and twangy version of Martin Gore being horny on main. Their raucous live album 101 came out right before that and to my ears is the better experience. Was any of that on the Billboard 100? Was it fuck. Women crooning about love outsold them ten to one. (Okay, shout out to Phil Collins getting “Another Day In Paradise” to #7, because talk about atypical confrontational subject matter.)
Some of my favorite albums are from around 2000. Stuff from Kingston Wall, Meshuggah, Neutral Milk Hotel, ~Dragonforce~, Blind Guardian, Slayer - was that what I listened to, most days, at the time? Nope. I was subjected to “Last Kiss” for the thousandth time, having hated it since the first. I heard so much country that I developed opinions about it. At the lowest point, I could tell boy bands apart. Admittedly: this deluge of crud was sprinkled with Third Eye Blind’s love letter to meth, Filter tricking people into buying Title Of Record, Chumbwamba making anarchist agitprop dancy as a complicated joke, and quite a lot of genuinely good pop. But sometimes you’d spin the dial for a solid minute and prefer to leave it on static. When I finally found out how to pirate shit, I just grabbed stuff they’d already played, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Nowadays - is there a mainstream? I only heard “Your New Love” when I was in a dentist’s office. I found “Good Luck, Babe” on Youtube after some screenshots of tweeted jokes. For two decades, it has been dead easy to filter and cultivate your own tastes. You don’t have to hear about a band, visit a store, and plunk down negotiable currency to receive a physical album, unheard. You can go from “Who?” to an informed opinion in like twenty minutes. Elsewhere in this thread someone linked Igorrr, so there must be some newly-minted industrial polka fans, and you can readily say ‘don’t miss Gogol Bordello.’
Juice@midwest.social 5 days ago
Actually he wrote a lot about 90s music in this theory, his main example of a subversive musical genre from the 90s was Jungle/D&B.
I mean I don’t think its complete nonsense, this is definitely something that has always happened regarding the capitalization of popular music, Gramsci wrote about some of the tendencies, in his analysis of italian theatre and how monopolized capital exploited artists and small venues, back in the 1920s. I think the pressures certainly exist, especially because of the examples you mention, like clear channel, but also live nation and ticketmaster. Those pressures to homogenize and commodify music are objectively the result of monopolization of the music industry. Culture and economy are intrinsically bound up in one another.
But also I feel that he sort of over stated his point, like his analysis is sort of warped by chronic depression and like fiercely hating the Arctic Monkeys.