ilovefuzz.com

andtheLiquidmen wrote: Stagnation terrifies me...

I'd hate to say it, but "too late." Technology has changed, ideas haven't. I'm sorry, putting shit in a blender or making unlistenable glitchy noise does not constitute new music. It's the same tired ideas pimped up with new technologies. There are no new tricks. It's the same old shit the dinosaur music industry does every generation, repackage old shit, call it something new. And I think given the finite nature of the actual construction of music (12 note scale etc.), new tricks are going to be exceptionally hard to come by.
Dubstep is not music. I don't care what anyone says. For that matter, neither is 90% of what charts. it's wallpaper, muzak, background noise. Nobody really cares about it. That's the future of mainstream music, its dispoable.
Don't get me wrong, I want to believe that there is something original and real out there too, but odds are long.

I think this is why doom and stoner persist though, as well as that general move toward nostalgia, people know they can't go wrong with old favourites and they look to something that has real content as opposed to being just filler material. Who cares if everyone sounds like a bad Sabbath covers band? At least you can't get tired of Iommi. You know what you're getting and even a pale imitation of the original is better than anything Skrillex or Justin Beiber could ever churn out.
And lets not dis vinyl. It was the superior medium until the advent of mp3s. Even then, they only trump records because you can get them for free and they dont take up physical space. CDs were a straight up mistake and should never have happened.

This old bastard has ranted.

Iommic Pope wrote:

andtheLiquidmen wrote: Stagnation terrifies me...

I'd hate to say it, but "too late." Technology has changed, ideas haven't. I'm sorry, putting shit in a blender or making unlistenable glitchy noise does not constitute new music. It's the same tired ideas pimped up with new technologies. There are no new tricks. It's the same old shit the dinosaur music industry does every generation, repackage old shit, call it something new. And I think given the finite nature of the actual construction of music (12 note scale etc.), new tricks are going to be exceptionally hard to come by.
Dubstep is not music. I don't care what anyone says. For that matter, neither is 90% of what charts. it's wallpaper, muzak, background noise. Nobody really cares about it. That's the future of mainstream music, its dispoable.
Don't get me wrong, I want to believe that there is something original and real out there too, but odds are long.

I think this is why doom and stoner persist though, as well as that general move toward nostalgia, people know they can't go wrong with old favourites and they look to something that has real content as opposed to being just filler material. Who cares if everyone sounds like a bad Sabbath covers band? At least you can't get tired of Iommi. You know what you're getting and even a pale imitation of the original is better than anything Skrillex or Justin Beiber could ever churn out.
And lets not dis vinyl. It was the superior medium until the advent of mp3s. Even then, they only trump records because you can get them for free and they dont take up physical space. CDs were a straight up mistake and should never have happened.

This old bastard has ranted.

Every art form in the history of everything ever is the same tired ideas pimped up with new technology and combinations of previously existing things. The digital age did nothing but generate an endless nostalgia pool to stare at and reflect on.

There's always something original and "real" out there if you look for it. Even if you do find it, you may have absolutely no idea that it's original or "real."

Don't get me started on vinyl as "superior." Tell that to the stack of second-hand records I have that were never released on CD or cassette. I can never have them in a pop-and-scratch-free form. Vinyl is a TERRIBLE medium for long-term usage. Superior quality to mp3? No question at all. Convenience? Not a chance. CDs give you the full-quality version of the album in a small, portable disc. This is a fantastic idea, except for the fact that the disc is almost as fragile as a record. Ripping a CD at .aiff, .wav, or .flac will yield maximum results...except for that whole "massive file size" thing.

Frankly, I would rather listen to an hour of Skrillex then hear ANOTHER fucking stoner metal band at this point. What you're saying about dubstep, Bieber, and the world of pop music is exactly what 40+ year olds were saying about that "rock and roll" thing in the middle of the century. Does that legitimize Skrillex or Bieber as artists? The answer is who cares? The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Doors were just as much of a commercial identity as these clowns.


Just an aside to the two fellers I've addressed and any others to come: I apologize for sounding like a condescending prick if I do. There are just some particular ideas that really irk me when it comes to the history and future of music, and chances are they would come off nicer in a face-to-face conversation than through text on the internets.

While I do think that most of the core ideas of music have already happened, I think it's a mistake to dismiss anything else that comes along as unoriginal, because of the simple truth that one can take an existing idea and create with it a new or better version, or manipulate it in such a way as to be effectively new. Contacts and glasses are the same basic idea, but I wouldn't be tempted to say they are the same thing. And, because of the extreme increase in the availability of all music, and all styles of music, for the first time in history minds from all over the world can experience music in fullness, and have the opportunity to toy with an ever expanding pool of sounds and ideas.

I think I may be alone in thinking that right now, whatever the present moment is, is the best time that has ever existed for music. "Now" is the permanent golden era of music. More music exists now, and can be accessed than ever before, for obvious reasons. Everything good that has come before is happening right now, everything else will be here soon. Now is always the most exciting time for music.

Necrosis18 wrote:

andtheLiquidmen wrote:

Necrosis18 wrote:I can always tell when I'm listening to digitally synthesized sounds in music

With all due respect, I have to say this: Bullshit.

Yeah I guess I can't be sure

That's kinda the point isn't it, really? As time progresses, the distinguishing characteristics of digital and analog start to cross over and become one. As processors become more powerful and more prominent, the ability to tell the difference becomes harder. Why digital is so commonplace when it only makes a few things easier and cheaper is beyond me. I don't have any problems necessarily with the digital age. I've found some of the greatest music because of Internet downloads, recorded on cheap home studios with basic DAWs, but I still see the value in analogue tape reels, despite their cost, and tube preamps and compressors. For the audiophiles of us, there is no replacement. Processors can replicate to the finest degree, but ultimately our ears are finer. Ultimately that's what we all are. That's why we spend all our money on gear instead of cars and holidays. We're audiophiles.

Good music is good music, and good music is still being made...but if music seems stale to you then it's probably due to good reason...

Never before has the listener had as many choices and opportunities for instant gratification, and yet...music as a whole is both incredibly homogenous and compartmentalized at once, a trend that began from those marketing the music and not necessarily making it.

Pop music has come to represent a very specific sound or brand, while pop music a few decades ago could have been anything from r&b, country, rock, funk, so on...the styles developed around the technology of the time, and with every new innovation came new sonic territory and broader horizons.

Every major technological breakthrough has created a new style or genres of music.

From harpsichord to piano, to the introduction of electricity and microphones, amplified instruments, synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, computers and so on.

In the 1990s, the biggest technological change came in the form of access to studios, by home users with shoestring budgets. So now that anyone can record, using similar equipment and techniques...the market is going to be saturated by wannabes looking to co-opt whatever is popular and selling. There are still forward thinking individuals out there, but they represent a small demographic. Humans are creatures of habit and prefer the comfort of what's familiar.

There hasn't been any game-changing technology since the 80s, perhaps the 90s if you count the ease of digital editing via GUI. Better mousetraps have been built, but no gamechangers come to mind in the past 20 years. We're currently in the golden age of stompboxes, and there are some builders who seem to treat this as the new frontier, which I support. Moog, Effectrode, Skychord, LAL, and the infamous ZVEX. Then there are others doing top notch work in recreating old ideas with a modern take [or era correct] Spaceman, Skreddy, Stomp Under Foot, ARC. I'd consider Malekko and Dr. Scientist somewhere between the 2... and the list goes on, I could name drop all day.

All this amounts to is potential. Ultimately the user is the most influential variable. It starts and ends with the user.

So long as there are artists, there will be art. The art is only lost when people no longer value it.

The answer to Flac's file size issue:
http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/26/hitachi-announces-permanent-quartz-storage/

Edit: never mind I guess it only allows for 40mb per square inch.

Necrosis18 wrote:The answer to Flac's file size issue:
http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/26/hitachi-announces-permanent-quartz-storage/

Best. News. EVER.

I like Ke$ha.

hey hey my my rock n roll can never die

rustywire wrote:
Pop music has come to represent a very specific sound or brand, while pop music a few decades ago could have been anything from r&b, country, rock, funk, so on...

This. So much this.

I think the one repeating theme I've agreed with the most throughout this thread is the whole 'homogenization of pop music' thing. I'm twenty-six, hardly of note, age-wise, but unlike most of my friends and peers, (in my area, at least) when I was in my teens my parents were pushing fifty. My mom was an AC/DC, Janis Joplin, The Beatles, etc. type, while my dad is a Conway Twitty, Reba McEntire, Kenny Rogers type.

That was my entire musical world growing up until I got into middle school and realized there was OTHER music out there. As I've gotten older, music collection has become a bit of an obsession to me, and I have a rather large vat of sound sitting on my hard drive that, 90% of the time, I just run on shuffle. All genres and time periods constantly whirring around each other in eternal flux.

On the other side of the coin, I work at a shitty restaurant and, subsequently, have to listen to shitty top 40 'hits' for twelve hours a day while my brain slowly melts into goo. And the biggest difference I see between the pop music of from...let's say from the 50's to the late 90's and the pop music from the late 90's to the present is the lack of diversity.

Obviously, as stated earlier, cost-effectiveness of production, new technologies, etc etc, all have their impact on music of all varieties, not just what's popular, and this is apparent through most music I've listened to from pretty much any era of recorded music. But in the last fifteen years or so, I've definitely noticed a...narrowing of the field, so to speak. "Pop" music used to just be a catchall for music that was popular, but these days I feel as though there is a very specific type of sound associated with pop music.

Of course, I suppose you could argue that the last fifteen years or so, considering my age, could just be what I'm the most aware of/familiar with and therefore things that are older and before my active cognizance of music automatically seem more diverse and interesting. A sort of imagined nostalgia, I guess.

Homogenization, narrowing of the field, whatever the hell you want to call it, there's definitely a trend in modern mainstream music of simplifying and, as some of the early posters in this thread said, it's more about entertainment value then any sort of musical 'worth' in the pieces presented for consumption. But I think the keyword in there is mainstream. I think we can all agree that the further you shift away from radio-'worthy' music into the realms of the less discovered (regardless of the genre; be it doom/stoner, post-rock, blues, alt-rock, techno, etc etc), the more you find things that are more interesting and creative, even if they're not 'groundbreaking'.

Someone said earlier this sort of trend will continue until the modern music industry consumes itself, and I agree one hundred percent. At this point in time I feel as though all the music industry does is restrain artists in a variety of ways and that, for the majority, it's just a bunch of crotchety old men that don't understand how these 'interwebs' and 'em pee threes' operate. But eventually, the industry will collapse. And, really, the infrastructure for a new industry is already there, in the form of things like Pandora and Spotify and general digital sales and streaming media (I hate streaming media and much prefer digital files, but that's an entirely different argument).

So I guess the tl;dr version of this:

-Modern (mainstream, pop, et al) music sucks but,
-this doesn't matter, because
-eventually it's all going to topple onto itself anyways, so
-just ignore what's popular and listen to what you like.


(As an unrelated side note, I almost NEVER get involved in these conversations because I always feel like I'm a little...under-read, so to speak, in comparison to a lot of other people. So I apologize if any of my missive seems unclear/nonsensical/repetitive.)

For the most part I agree. However, modern pop is more versatile than you think. Maybe not as expansive as the 60's, with its plethora of R&B, Rock, Funk, Country, etc., but it's certainly there. The likes of Muse, Foo Fighters, Snow Patrol, The Killers, and Kings of Leon hold the torch of rock; Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne hold the torch of fake of Hip-Hop; Nas, Eminem, and Jay-Z hold the torch of real Hip-Hop; Skrillex and Daft Punk hold the torch of House and Dub-Step; Amy Winehouse and Cee Lo Green hold the torch of modern R&B; Taylor Swift, Adele, and Lady GaGa hold the torch of Pop; Metallica and Guns N Roses hold the torch of Heavy Rock, etc. etc.

So although music is not as inclusive as it used to be, there is still great diversity out there. Pop music spans the shit of Nick Minaj, to the eccentricity of Lady GaGa, to the rock gods of Muse. Muse, unless they continue down this dark path of Dub-Step enthused instrumental, will go on to become as highly regarded as the likes of Led Zeppelin. They are the modern day version of Pink Floyd. Are they as good as them? Not in my opinion, but they're still immensely talented and have composed some of the greatest rock records of the 21th Century. They'll go on to inspire talent far and wide, just as Led Zeppelin have done.

the future of music is the next time you pick up your instrument and go **piiiinnnnng** (or whatever sound your instrument makes)

Give it time. It took Pink Floyd years to become fully recognized. Led Zeppelin had a quick rise to fame and obsession, but it wasn't so easy for Pink Floyd (at least from what I've read).

Think about it, someone has to take the pedestal. Someone has to be the next hero, so to speak, for my kids and your kids. If it's not Muse then who? My little sisters generation (7) will need to find someone to rely on and obsess over. It's part of growing up. So if it's not someone awesome like Muse then who? The hole will need to be filled by someone.