PONDERED: Are we in a musical recession?
Posted by Mat | Filed under Music
2012 is the end of the world. Surely the current economic woes and environmental roil are proof! The Mayans knew it, John Cusack played it, and the History Channel programs around it.
Yet, seemingly, they’ve all site of the fact that said calender is cyclical. The world has begun and ended ad infinitum. reinventing itself in the process.
Music, and pop-culture at large, are also tied to these same, Ragnarok-like, ebbs and flows.
New Wave, Alternative, and Indie have been the featured, invented, umbrella terms used to describe the upswellings of listenable music over the past 30 years.
However, as it relates to public consumption, each of these movements had a shelf-life; by the end of their respective musical decades they were usurped by more visceral, feel good music.
The cycle looks to be quite clear – end the decade with crap and languish for the next five years. Enjoy that half decade of creativity and prepare for the following cultural winter.
The last turn of the wheel occurred in 2004. The change was abrupt – Gwen Steffani Covering Talk Talk and reaching farther down into the sewers of music, The Ataris covering The Eagles.
Within a month those songs were banished to the land of wind and ghosts. The Killers, Modest Mouse, and The Yeahs Yeah Yeahs, all existent bands, had broken big and the look and sound of pop-culture would follow.
The rest is present day history. The question now, is Have we left that time?
Are we a few months away from Fred Durst’s new project, or maybe Lady Gaga is the newest harbinger or the musical end times?
Alternatively, have we broken the cycle? Data and ideas move exponentially faster than they did six years ago – have the mercurial opinions that accompany disposable media rendered a decades worth of pop-cultural tending down to a month long process?
Does this even matter in the face of 2012? In the immortal words of Kent Brockman, I for one welcome our new insect overlords.
Tags: alternative, bad music, cycles, indie, mainstream, new wave, pondered
