Quote: (05-23-2014 02:12 PM)kapitaw Wrote:
I hear at least 3-4 albums a year that are refreshing and challenging, and they're usually independent or from small time labels. It's hard for original and well produced music to go unnoticed nowadays. It may be more difficult for musicians to make a living, and perhaps that's what your dark ages comment is referring, but I believe it's easier nowadays for true talent to be recognized and appreciated. I wouldn't call it a golden age of music, but I'm really content with the amount of new, high-quality music that is available to the public.
Look, it's music. Highly-personalised reaction for each person, so I can only speak for myself. I'll clarify:
Age is a big part of this. I'm 43. I have literally heard it all before by now. I have 4,000 records across multiple genres in my collection, and I have actively listened to every single one, which means, I invested multiple listens into each album, learning from each what works, and what doesn't. Sometimes I'd initially hate a record, and closer listening would expand my horizons, and I'd end up loving it.
I'm entirely self-taught. My family was too poor for any kind of lessons. Albums were my university. They're how I learnt to write and arrange music. I explored everything. I want music that actively-challenges me as a listener, and makes me question the construction and how it works. I'm a mechanic, considering songs as engines.
As such, what is new and ground-breaking to some ears is simply familiar parts to me, or, most often, a poorer-quality copy of a better engine. Hell, guys were praising new new wave in another thread. I've lived through *three* revivals of this by now. ('95, '00, '05).
This is how I hear music, and why it bores me, because it's not just this chord progression, but all of them. (And it's easy to disguise and put your unique stamp on any of them, but younger musicians are gradually losing this ability because they're amateurs).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ
My issues with the modern indie scene (the williamsburgh upper class hobbyists), which is at odds to the 70's-80's indie scene I grew up with (pissed off poor kids sleeping on floors):
- comfort and privilege produces lousy art. There's no depth there. Wonder where all the political songs have gone? Wonder why even the 'challenging' stuff wouldn't sound out of place backing a car commercial or playing in a coffee shop? It's all so goddamn polite, and when it's supposedly-challenging or confronting, (Animal Collective, MGMT's 2nd album), it's *still* goddamn polite.
- homogeneous influences means no unexpected influences to make the music more interesting. Hipsters know the Approved Rock Canon and draw from that alone. Here's Springsteen again. Here's Radiohead. Yawn. Hacks imitate. Artists combine from influences into something new.
- a lack of intellectual curiosity in general, which means you don't get the cross-pollination of higher art (novels, artwork, art films), informing the work any more. There's little to take away from an album. Most likely it's solipsism and navel-gazing, which surprises me, considering how much the 70's singer-songwriter genre was reviled.
- self-awareness of cool - bands won't risk bringing in the influences that haven't already been critically-acclaimed for risk of looking uncool in front of the audience and hip reviewers.
- hobbyist status means the musicianship isn't there, they don't understand how to construct a song in an interesting and unusual way, they don't understand the pull of chords, or how to use extended chords to create interest through *subversion of expectations*.
- the band isn't forged in fire from playing hundreds of live shows.
- the audience is homogeneous. They also know the signifiers of cool, and there is no longer an antagonistic relationship between artist and audience, that produces great bands when thrown into an aggressive pit of wolves and forced to win them over. Go to any hipster venue, and the audience is largely posing and doing the I-Phone thing, with the band as a backdrop. If they don't like you, they don't physically-threaten you with having your arse kicked if you don't stop playing 'faggot music'.
- they have no artistic integrity to sell out. It's expected to have brand managers and be talked about by tech companies as being an 'emotional content providers'.
They're hardly the CBGB's crowd, pissed off and alienated and criticising what they hated about society. They're not the English Futurists, who were squatting in inner-city urban decay under a layer of concrete namedropping J.G. Ballard and using synthesisers to paint the dehumanised future they thought was inevitable. They're not US indie and punk kids of the 80's, touring small venues, connecting with other alienated kids screaming 'wake up!'
There's no intelligence , critical thinking or rebellion in modern indie: it's simply comfortable upper middle class music - perfect for the modern university drone to listen to on their desired branded portable music player of choice whilst feeling smug and hip about their 'unusual' taste, which has taken no real effort to seek out and discover, which helps feed their narcissistic construct as an Unique And Special 'Good Person'.
Modern Indie Music is music for Cultural Marxists. Buying anything Pitchfork recommends is lazy consumerism, with all the expended effort of signing a Change.Org petition. A lazy signifier of refined taste, and the lie of being somehow more awake and aware than the rest of the population, which means Arcade Fire is just the Huffington Post and Tame Impala is The Atlantic. Fuck it entirely. I wouldn't want to share a beer with any of the these bands. Why why won't any of them react against it and rock the boat? Fear of social consequences? Or - most likely - fear of advertising money vanishing.
So, what happened to Punk and 80's Indie Rock, particularly now it's tame enough to be on Broadway with Green Day? It's Roosh. It's Aurini. Forney. Mike over at D&P. The CH crew. Tuthmosis' eating disorders article. Each of us on here in these threads. Pissed off guys questioning everything, hating the lie we've been sold, but with the advantage of lacking the true nihilism of punk that we can improve ourselves.