The Future of Music...

Can I add Run The Jewels to that list?

 

This sentence is as much time as I'm wasting with someone who doesn't even consider rap or electronic music to be music.

 

Your last point, yes why. It's like in society overall, it's ok to trash and belittle what is seen as a majority, never what is perceived as a minority.

 

...is gonna rock.

 

Here's how I see it: I believe music goes through phases where sometime what is most popular is mediocre and yet during that phase some of the greatest music ever made is going on at the same time. And sometime music goes through a phase where what is most popular is truly outstanding and some mediocre stuff is trying to mimic it.

I think we are in the first kind of phase- that lately what is most popular is mediocre (as I've said before, I don't think music can be "bad"- extremely unexceptional maybe,, but not "bad") and yet underneath the mediocrity, some incredible music is being made. It's a good time to dig deeper and find the gems.

(Paul, what do you think of my theory?)

A side note: About 10, 15 maybe close to 20 years or so ago, I read somewhere that Bob Dylan said, "If I were young and just going into music I'd become a plumber instead of a musician." Can anyone verify that?

 

The future of music and arts has always relied on some public support (government and churches and such) and the support of wealthy benefactors to provide support for the arts. The future is no different. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and the other classical greats have all relied on public and private support for them to survive and create their music. Current music is no different. Music venues for the public and public arts benefit all and helps create and promote culture. It needs to be supported with both public and private funds. I'm glad that Paul McCartney is getting involved. He's influential and also the type of wealthy benefactor who can make a difference for music and the arts now and in the future. Music and the arts has treated him very well. Need to keep that circle going so the next Paul McCartney can happen.

 

. . . actually has nothing whatsoever to do with your desperate attack on music that you don't like on the basis that "it's not really music". You might not like it, but it's still music.

Incidentally, it is simply not necessary that music have rhythm, melody and harmony. Ever heard a drum solo? It's still music, despite the absence of melody and harmony.

Look, if you don't like it, you don't like it. Nobody's asking you to like it. It may come as a shock to you, but you're not a member of the intended audience. That stuff is not being written for you. You're not supposed to like it. At any given time, very, very few people over the age of 50 are going to like the forms of music that are most popular with people under the age of 25.

It may also come as a surprise to you to learn that what you think is good music is regarded as utterly worthless junk by some other people who know a lot more about music than you do, but happen to like a very different kind of music.

Just focus your attention on what you like, and don't worry about what others like. Music will be fine, or at least it will be around as long as people exist, which, these days, sometimes appears to be quite possibly "not all that much longer".

 

Paul who.....??????

 

OP's opening gambit looks suspiciously like a "new music sucks" diatribe to me...except that Rap/Hip Hop has been around for almost 40 years now. Um, ah...your sock garters are showing!

May I humbly suggest the OP watch the Netflix's spectacular dramatization of the Birth of Beats/Rap/Dance/Modern R&B called 'The Get Down" that sheds light and love and danger and humour and creativity on yet another African/American musical phenomenon that began with Blues and Jazz and subsequently (and, rather covertly) all the Rock N' Roll and Classic Rock music that he must surely purport to love. If you could force yourself to endure this wonderful series AND then still say that this "music" is lacking in any way, I would respect that OP would have done his due diligence. Just sayin'.

 

sad be the days when rock is dead. New music does indeed suck.*
*Except for the few.

Long live rock.

 

New music is doing fine. Music will continue to evolve. Art that stays stagnant and never evolves becomes boring and outdated. Post-rock and electronic music are creating some very nice and interesting music. Hip-hop also has its influences. Electronic and hip-hop are combining to create new sounds, rhythms, and melodies. It will be interesting as post-rock and hip-hop combine and influence each other. They likely already have, I just haven't noticed yet.

I'm listening to Mogwai right now. Post-rock is a sort of combination of rock and classical. Rock music that doesn't follow the standard verse chorus verse with maybe a bridge. It's rock music that flows more like classical. I like it. I like it better than anything the Beatles or Stones did. I see good things in the way music is evolving right now. We will always have more new musicians creating blues based and pop based rock. That becomes comfort music. The new music based on post-rock, electronic, and hip-hop and other new styles is what will create music that is new.

 

I'm all for change and moving ahead. That's what music has always done. But whatever the next thing that comes along is, for me to get excited about it and appreciate and /or like and /or love it, it will have to be predominated by human elements. By "human elements" I mean, real people playing instruments- not just programming sound, real and varied emotions- you can't fake that, and something within the music that moves my body and/or mind toward a place I can relate to or at least desire to relate to.

Looking at the history of music, music with those elements- the soulful/emotional/human elements- I believe that is the music that lasts while others fade.

As we move further into the age of electronics, we will probably see more and more machine made music. People are becoming more and more tied to their machines. That's a simple fact. People will soon become more and more machine-like or part machine themselves. That's already happening and likely to continue even more so. If music is mostly made by a machine with no soul, then mainly those who will enjoy it ages from now will be machines. Maybe AI machines. Not for me, thanks. I'd rather hear music with human elements, and that kind of music will continue to be made for a long time as well.

 

I have a friend that the bulk of his music and art is basically computer generated, and the results speak for themselves, campy at best. No thanks.

 

Direct answer to OP.

My opinion is that, no offence intended, you have a lot to catch up with music.
Your view seems to be pretty exclusive and, frankly, outdated.
At the very least, today one must admit that there isn't One "music" but many "musics" and visions of it, if one can't make peace with what one doesn't like.

People like Russolo, Varese and more importantly Cage put that idea to sleep. Music is, more generally, any form of organized sound produced for aesthetic purposes (meaning: to be listened as such) or utilitarian ones (to be used as a soundtrack, for example).
The most influential musical movement of late is american Minimalism, with in its pure original form gets rid with melody and functional harmony, focusing on audible processes. All minimal electronic music is a consequence of that influence (among others of course).
Also Ambient music (another minimalist offspring) gets rid with rhythm too, and it's still "music"!

not true. There's always harmony in commercial pop, even if you don't hear "proper" chords being played. It's in the background and implied in the melody (otherwise it would sound atonal). It's just simplified to its extremes (maybe another consequence of minimalism) and some studies have shown a progressive reduction of complexity and variety in harmonic songwriting since the Sixties.

There are rap songs using melody in the chorus; also, rap is not about rhythm alone, its more about a rhythmic use of lyrics and the content of those lyrics.

"Electronic music" is not equal to dance music. There is serial (dodecaphonic) electronic music (Babbit), melodic/tonal one (Vangelis), of course ambient (Eno) and drone (Eliane Radigue). And I'm just mentioning people at random, there's a universe out there, going as back as the first music using Theremin in the Twenties.

That's the root of your problems. There's not natural music. All music is artificial. It's man-made. Unless you go the Cage way, and define "music" as every sound you hear, including the environmental one.

Also, you're talking exclusively about contemporary "commercial music", not taking into account "serious" "art" or "whatever a composer does" music. That changed a lot too after the Seventies, many talk about "post-classical" music, the boundaries between "rock" and "classical" are not that strict anymore. There's the so called (and critically despised) "new age" music, a quick and inaccurate tag used to define (apart the commercial side of it) also more "classically" composed one that still retains a song-like simplicity and (optionally) a shallow and easy emotionalism or spiritualism.

Given this restrict premises, how can one formulate any valid opinion about the future of "music?"
The only thing I can say about it is that commercial music is governed by the market needs. The market says "go streaming with your phone", that is gonna influence aesthetics for sure. Catchy and simple are the words. Avoid ADD and skipping to the next track. Compress to make it consistent through earbuds. Avoid too much chords cause they're boring and old style. Etc.

But really, who knows?

And is Music what musicians make, or what people buy (or at least listen to illegally?).
Because it makes a lot of difference in choosing which history to write.

EDIT: sorry if it seems I want to give a pedantic lesson to anybody. I just can't put those ideas down in any other way in the short space allowed by the thread comment.

 

music is anything, limiting it isnt progression, its holding on to the past.

 

You don't know very well electronic music, then.

 

I think topics like this, and god know how many of them we have read in the last years, testify that people in their 50s, 60s onwards (sometimes even in their 40s) simply stop to decode the present and dream about a long-gone past where music was "real" and "great", rock was the most listened genre on earth, etc. etc. Really, it's ordinary administration at this point.

But, also, a forum like this constitutes a giant cognition bubble where The Beatles are still the better band on the planet, or it's relevant to discuss who's a better singer between Roger Daltrey and Robert Plant or if the new Stones album will be as good as Sticky Fingers. And that lies the problem, cultural niches are surely comforting (it's great to find many people who share your views), but they generate stagnant thought.

 

I think the future of music is bright. My kids are always turning me on to new stuff that i really like. Only yesterday my daughter gave me a Tash Sultana album. Fantastic stuff. There is great new music out there but you need to search it out.

 

The future of music is very exciting. Just ask Synthesizer Patel or Antony Carmichael.

 

Music we listened to as a teenager was real and great, by definition.
But it's not because of the music. It's because of us.

I read a book about psychology of music where the author went as far as saying that the taste you form in teenage years will be you basic taste in music through all your life. It was the standard, for him, he didn't even consider exceptions.
I find it a little reductive and this forum shows that there are music lovers that widely expand their views through time. But as you say, the same forum also proves the psychologist's point with large statistical evidence.

 

Does there come a time when we have too much music? I think we are very close to the point where all we will be doing in creating new music is repeating ourselves.

 

This could easily be a description of what became known as progressive rock.

I admit to being ignorant of "post-rock." Could you please educate me on the difference between Progressive and Post- and provide some good examples for me to investigate? Thanks.

 

Post-rock is a very wide ranging definition. Certain post-rock bands were basically neo-progsters, others came from a hardcore punk background and alternated moments of guitar assault with spacier structures. Many others had rhythmic structures indebted to jazz, dub and electronic music.