What’s gone wrong with music?
31st October 2007
Steve Sailer nails it again. There was a tremendous difference between the music of 1945 and that of 1955, and a substantial difference between that of 1955 and that of 1965 — my older brother and I, just over five years apart, are effectively part of separate musical generations.
Between 1965 and 1975 is much less difference, and between 1975 and 2005 it’s almost negligible.
The rise of rap is, so far as I can tell, the only significant musical development (if, indeed, one can call it music rather than recited poetry) during that period, that I can recall. (No, disco was not a development. It was a fashion statement, and lasted about as long.)
High-schoolers today can listen to Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones and will readily admit that it’s “classic rock”; when I was in high school, music from before we were born was antedeluvian crap the parents listened to, for which we had no time.
The problem has become that the punk-New Wave rebellion against the blues got institutionalized, and the same musical styles that were refreshing in 1977-1982 are still hanging around. The more linear, abstracted styles that emerged after 1977 were interesting, but you can’t keep mining that vein — abstracting an abstraction hits diminishing marginal emotional returns pretty quickly.
So what happened?