Is all modern music terrible? | Page 10 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Sun King said
There is good modern rock music, that much is undeniable.

The problem is that it doesn’t get featured at all on the radio, and the rock music that does get featured is usually trite and extremely formulaic. My biggest concern, primarily for rock, is that there is no band that really defines the era like there was in the 60s/70s/80s and 90s. Yes there are the likes of Tame impala and Arcade Fire who have come out with brilliant albums in the past ten years, but nothing that could be defined as a true classic or as one of the greatest albums of all time. 

More than this, these bands don’t seem to have personalities that endear them to the wider population like all the greats did. You have to want to be the biggest band on the planet, but a lot of the current generation don’t seem to have that ambition.   

Let’s keep perspective.  The recording industry (apart from the music industry) is a former shell of itself, particularly with regards to rock music.

First thing is, take account of record labels.  How many are there?  Of those, how many are after rock acts?  Most of all, of all the labels… minor, indie, whatever, how many are actually owned by a major label?  And how many major labels are there now?

Now ask these same questions, but pretend it’s 1973.

It was the advent of Elvis and The Beatles and a host of others that brought rise to rock music and enabled it’s domination on the radio and in the record store, but before that… what?  Popular music, be it Andy Williams or Frank Sinatra.  As rock fought for a foothold, smaller labels flourished while the major labels floundered, waiting for the ‘fad’ to burn itself out.  When it became apparent the flame-out wasn’t going to happen, they scrambled to recover and brought their resources to bear.  The rock music genre grew exponentially, bringing all the players along with it. But it was on a fast track; think how quickly rock reached it’s “Golden Era” and how long did it take before it began breaking apart? Punk was soon to rise and a lot of people would be deeply (although temporarily) distracted by Disco when it surfaced.

Still, during this Golden Age, even with Elvis fat and The Beatles no more, the genre was exploding with talent, although a lot of it really weren’t proponents of rock, just risk-takers cashing their talent in a current ‘sure-thing,’ and it’s why you would eventually have manufactured blues-based rock bands being led by former broadway performers masquerading as frontmen.  Still, the public ate it up and clamored for more; they wanted it louder, glammier, more shocking and by the 80’s, “hair metal” was reigning supreme.  Record labels were hiring a new breed of “A&R” people by the busload, trusting these street merchants could find more of what the kids wanted.

Surrounding and interlacing with all of this were technological advances.  Advances that were having a direct and profound impact.  Digital media.  Now you didn’t need to buy music, just find a friend who already had it and copy it onto a CD.  You didn’t need radio now.  Who needed to hear advertisers’ commercials interrupting good music?  You could put together a mix CD just like those cassette tapes, except these never wore out and you didn’t have to rewind them or have to reach for a pencil to put one back together.  And the sound!  It didn’t sound ‘warm’ like an LP, but the clarity!  You didn’t need that big stereo now, either.  On top of all this, the labels, losing profit from loss of sales (since the kids were just buying ‘one’ and passing it around) began jacking up the price without taking any steps to preserve their product.  And, like always, when you tell a kid they can’t have something, they just find another way of getting it.  So the money got tighter and there was less record label promotion.  Concerts, long the stronghold of a band’s profits, were now being crept into by the industry as a way of raking in more money.  They started writing contacts that forced the acts to give up more, including artistic freedoms and pretty soon, every rock act looked just like the other.

And the kids got tired of it all.  Then someone pointed towards Seattle.  The smoke hasn’t settled but it’s thinning.

In the states, it’s common for a band to pay a house in order to play there.  That is wrong on so many levels.

With software like Pro Tools and others, you can professionally record a song in your home.

Rock flamed bright, it’s true.  And many of us are forever in love with it.  Bu through it all, popular music remains.  And today, it is back on top, just as it was in the mid-fifties and where it stayed steady all through the decades. The record labels (the few that exist) the major ones… they’re after whatever the kids want.  With few exceptions, they want what you see.

There are kids that love what we loved and a lot of them are playing it in clubs and at parties.

There’s another theory as to why the raw talent they have is so different than the raw talent of Bob Dylan or John Lennon or Robert Plant.  It focuses primarily on the differences of their influences; those earlier men -and their peers- were influenced by a wide variety of musical sources while today the kids all tend to be influenced by the same people; the ones I mentioned. They’re all from the same period and all of the same relative genre. So the kids today lack the broad spectrum of influence that shaped the very people they revere.  Some ask why this hasn’t happened in the Popular music genre and some answer that the very name of the genre indicates a continuous wider variety of influence, so it self-perpetuates.  And remains popular.  Sam Smith can be influenced by rock, R & B, soul, all of which has had contributors to the popular music genre and that’s where the bulk of his fortunes come from.

This all sounds depressing so I should point out that I don’t subscribe to rock being dead.  There are a ton of great bands out there, still.  And a few of them are damned charismatic, so I don’t think we should give up hope just yet.  As they say; Rock On!

Starr Shine? said

C.R.A. said

Is that how you read it?  

Yes.  

You mean to tell me Elvis and The Beatles were big before 1973?  This changes everything.