nostalgia ain't what it used to be
Jan. 20th, 2016 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanFor those of you reading this on Dreamwidth, LJ had a Question of the Day yesterday about whether or not modern musicians are less talented than the musicians from "Back in the Day". (Hint as to where the rest of this post is going: I said No.)
I think when people look back they remember the good stuff they enjoyed and tend not to remember how much of the truly bad and boring was also out there. I remember when I was high-school age with a radio in my room, flipping from station to station whenever a song came on that I hated - and I spent a hell of a lot more time knob-fiddling than I did listening. Eventually somebody turned me on to an independent station in Brampton that I could just barely pick up with a wire coat hanger taped to the back of my radio. That was where I first heard the Stranglers. the B-52's, Stiff Little Fingers, The Jam - so many bands that became 80's icons.
That radio station still technically exists, but it was taken over long ago by one of those big media conglomerates and now it plays the same crap that you hear on every other corporate station in North America. I did some research about a dozen years ago and I think out that outside of Universities there were a total of four independent stations left in the US and Canada combined. I wouldn't be surprised if even the last of those have since been bought up or pushed out.
I had just started University when Much Music started up. (MTV was launched only a year or two earlier.) The cool thing about the early days is that music videos were still a pretty new thing and so the station programmers were scrambling to find content, especially Canadian content. If you were a nobody just-starting-out band that had a friend with a camera you could get your video on the air, and they used to play some seriously weird shit, especially in the wee hours. Things settled down a bit as it became obvious that music videos were where record labels should be spending their marketing dollars, but there was still plenty of room for some creative programming.
Now that's all gone too. The station that used to own Much was taken over by some big entertainment giant. They don't play much music programming at all any more, and what they do is all the same mainstream shlock.
And I think that's where people in my age group get the idea that there is no good music around any more. They look at the music programming that used to have so much much variety and they think that since that's all crap now, that must mean that that's the music that's out there. They forget how the same thing happened to FM radio just a few years earlier.
I remember at some point in the 00's deciding I was going to find a bunch of new music to listen to - and I actually found a lot. On MySpace. Today when I want to do the same thing I go hunting for podcasts. I don't even know if that's the best route to take, it just happens to be the one I know about. If corporations do eventually succeed in strangling the Internet, creative people will just go do their thing somewhere else. And eventually somebody will tip off the old lady to where that is, and I'll go tagging along behind them.
And if previous patterns hold true, I'll do it about once every ten years.
I think when people look back they remember the good stuff they enjoyed and tend not to remember how much of the truly bad and boring was also out there. I remember when I was high-school age with a radio in my room, flipping from station to station whenever a song came on that I hated - and I spent a hell of a lot more time knob-fiddling than I did listening. Eventually somebody turned me on to an independent station in Brampton that I could just barely pick up with a wire coat hanger taped to the back of my radio. That was where I first heard the Stranglers. the B-52's, Stiff Little Fingers, The Jam - so many bands that became 80's icons.
That radio station still technically exists, but it was taken over long ago by one of those big media conglomerates and now it plays the same crap that you hear on every other corporate station in North America. I did some research about a dozen years ago and I think out that outside of Universities there were a total of four independent stations left in the US and Canada combined. I wouldn't be surprised if even the last of those have since been bought up or pushed out.
I had just started University when Much Music started up. (MTV was launched only a year or two earlier.) The cool thing about the early days is that music videos were still a pretty new thing and so the station programmers were scrambling to find content, especially Canadian content. If you were a nobody just-starting-out band that had a friend with a camera you could get your video on the air, and they used to play some seriously weird shit, especially in the wee hours. Things settled down a bit as it became obvious that music videos were where record labels should be spending their marketing dollars, but there was still plenty of room for some creative programming.
Now that's all gone too. The station that used to own Much was taken over by some big entertainment giant. They don't play much music programming at all any more, and what they do is all the same mainstream shlock.
And I think that's where people in my age group get the idea that there is no good music around any more. They look at the music programming that used to have so much much variety and they think that since that's all crap now, that must mean that that's the music that's out there. They forget how the same thing happened to FM radio just a few years earlier.
I remember at some point in the 00's deciding I was going to find a bunch of new music to listen to - and I actually found a lot. On MySpace. Today when I want to do the same thing I go hunting for podcasts. I don't even know if that's the best route to take, it just happens to be the one I know about. If corporations do eventually succeed in strangling the Internet, creative people will just go do their thing somewhere else. And eventually somebody will tip off the old lady to where that is, and I'll go tagging along behind them.
And if previous patterns hold true, I'll do it about once every ten years.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-01-21 02:32 am (UTC)One of the good things about youtube is that the artists actually get revenue from each time you play their videos, and also current technology means that artists can record and edit a video themselves, without having to deal with studios or distributors.
Mostly these days I'm listening to a bunch of Australian hip hop, which I got into because two slam poets I like also rap.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-01-21 05:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-01-21 05:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-01-21 06:34 pm (UTC)1. The music industry corporations have got bigger through consolidation, more removed from the actual music, and better at identifying what sells lots of product (which leads to the changes tracked in this Gizmodo article. Which means mainstream music has, like pretty much every other mainstream product, got blander over time.
2. The cost of producing and distributing music has fallen through the floor. Recording, pressing, distributing and selling music all used to be very expensive processes. Now, you can make a song and sell it to somebody on the other side of the planet without leaving your home for next to nothing. There has never been a shortage of talented people who want to make music, and now the barriers that stopped them have gone away so now there is more great music being made than ever before.