The next new thing.....

sounds like youre describing grime...

WOEBOT said:

Lots of ideas and opinions skirting around the possibilities of "a new thing".

The very idea that it will in some way be "progressive" musically is to my mind plainly ludicrous. I suppose this kinda undermines the notion of novelty, but i reckon it will be the sentiments and energy alone that will distinguish it, and distinguish it radically.

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Must confess that I've spent my whole life hearing how the UK is obsessed with "the newest thing" in music. I never believed it, thought it was just a cliche resulting from the usual US prejudices . . . but I'll be darned if threads like this one don't make me begin to wonder . . .

What, btw, makes you think that there aren't ten (or ten thousand) "latest" things bubbling up around the world right now, yet to emerge months or years from now? Or perhaps never even reach you?

And more importantly, what in the world does "progressive musically" mean, anyway? Seems to me that tautology is a danger here . . . namely, if you define musical "progress" in a certain way, you can probably find it, or not: e.g., dubstep is progressive for some people in that it strips away in a new way, while it's probably regressive for others . . ."stripping down the signal to pure electricity," as you eloquently put it, might easily be perceived as progressive by some people, as regressive by others . . .

Interesting topic.

I dunno about this, I'm rather partial to the idea of radical form for radical content.


sounds like youre describing grime...

I wouldn't say so, grime was pretty innovative, it might have taken influence from dirty south, dancehall or whatever, but in 2003-2004 it still sounded fresh.

"Must confess that I've spent my whole life hearing how the UK is obsessed with "the newest thing" in music. I never believed it, thought it was just a cliche resulting from the usual US prejudices . . . but I'll be darned if threads like this one don't make me begin to wonder . . . "

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I think it's more to do with unhappiness with what is happening musically and a (perceived?) lack of originality at present that is causing people to ask this question rather than some kind of typical British obsession with bright shiny newnesss.

IdleRich said:

I think it's more to do with unhappiness with what is happening musically and a (perceived?) lack of originality at present that is causing people to ask this question rather than some kind of typical British obsession with bright shiny newnesss.

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yes yes, i know. there was a smiley emoticon on the earlier post for a reason

Originally Posted by Gabba Flamenco Crossover
At free parties, no-one cares who made the track, how old it is, who's playing it, what label released it or any of the other ephemeria we associate with hipster scenes - tunes stand or fall on whether they rock the crowd.

But we've had all this. 2manyDJ's, Erol Alkan these big names that have hipster kudos and mainstream success. This anything goes attitude was huge at Trash, and you don't get more hipster than that.


It will almost certainly be trad, might even (horror of horrors, lol) be, once again, plain ol' ugly rock once more.

Yup, check, had about five years of this as well. White Stripes anyone?

Look, you never know what's coming next, because innovation by it's very definition, can't be forseen. And as for trends, things can change overnight. I remember reading the NME in about 2000, (it was my mate's copy, honest!) and they were trying to hype a group of now largely forgotton bands that sounded either like either the Fall or The Ramones (I really can't recall anymore than that.) As "The scene with no name". My buddy and I just thought it was straw-grasping wishful thinking, but it eventually, with The Strokes, Stripes, etc, something similar became massive.
To be the honest, the mainstream is largely anti-elaborate and anti-talent anyway. The famous have become people to relate to rather than aspire to. The biggest shock now would be an innovative group with a vocalist that could really wail. Let's embrace a new elite, not discourage them with dumpy popularism!

i think woebot's suggestion is very interesting though- may be the next new thing might actually, erm, not be very good! perhaps it might be pretty straightforward rock music.

or may be the self-consciously lahndahn stories of jamie t and lily allen genuinely is the next new thing.

no one said it was going to be good.

polz said:

who says there will be a new thing at all? maybe the whole rock/soul/funk/hiphop/dance etc. conglomerate of musical styles has stopped evolving, just like jazz and country before it. Maybe the new music is "musicals" (where i live it increasingly seems that way, they even have monthlies) or ringtones. Maybe there will be no new music at all, only new communication channels, with accompanying new styles of Art (or art). Film, graphic design, drawing. Who says music will or should evolve for ever, maybe we are witnessing the end of an era which lasted for about half a century. Maybe the majority of the world will become religious again, and we will listen to updated psalms and hezbollah march music (which sounds quite good sometimes)

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fukuyama said that about history and was proved wrong. does anyone think that the youth of twenty years time will still be listening to the current genre set?

thing is, all the big movements look like total breaks with what has gone before to us because we were either involved in them or have an emotional investment in them. when you analyse it with a coldly rational eye, none of them came out of nowhere and all of them were combinations or an evolution from what already existed. there is nothing new under the sun. the future is already beginning to happen.

polz said:

that has happened already. all the popular music of today basically already existed 20, or lets say 15 years ago. And dont talk about grime, because i believe about a hundred mc's and hundred dissensians listen to that, we're talking popular music.

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*popcorn*

polz said:

that has happened already. all the popular music of today basically already existed 20, or lets say 15 years ago. And dont talk about grime, because i believe about a hundred mc's and hundred dissensians listen to that, we're talking popular music. There hasnt been a real new thing since the days of rave, maybe jungle. (i dont think 2 step counts). So that's 12 years ago. Production values may have gone up, but what has basically changed in hiphop. People are still talking about hiphops golden age, that was 1988, 18 years ago. And indie, i dont think anybody thinks there's anything new there.

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but this is my point - jungle and rave weren't new. they didn't come out of nowhere, they developed from existing music forms. even the whole thing of raving wasn't new. there was a soundsystem culture before jungle. at some point, people draw a line in the sand and proclaim that the current state of affairs has evolved enough to be considered a break from the old. this process has not stopped - we just haven't drawn that line yet. and whos to say our generation will be the arbiter of what should be considered new?

plus i think hip hop is in outrageous health. i hear stuff that blows my mind all the time. it most definitely cannot be dismissed as staid and stagnant. what about its global influence on so many different music forms, reggaeton, dancehall, even grime? (although i hear you, when you estimate its popularity, no offence grime fans)

I've been wondering when we'll see the next paradigmatic shift in music making. In the 70s, the rock paradigm and associated ideas about what it constituted music and musicianship started to be supplanted by the disco/dub/hip hop triad which has shaped pretty much every new development since. We're bound to have another rupture, but it's hard to tell where it will come from. I have no idea.

Around 1990, Will Straw wrote an article where he distinguished between rock and 'dance musics,' saying that rock had given up any sort of attachment to the idea of progress while dance musics held a futurist outlook. Rock, he said, had essentially become spatialised, meaning that it was no longer concerned with invention, just the reorganisation of existing rock themes and styles in relation to one another. All value in rock had come to be derived the recombining of canonical elements in ways that might be novel, but also always familiar and comfortable.

Dance musics, he said (just as rave was really kicking off), are all about invention and the idea of moving forward, creating new forms and always destabilising what had come before. (From that perspective, you could say that rock had adopted a postmodern, end-of-history outlook, while dance musics maintained a modernist spirit.) True as that may have been/seemed at the time though, I think electronic musics have started to become spatialised as well (house being the first to go that route, but followed by parts of techno, some hip hop, drum and bass, roots reggae - any style that has begun to look inward for most of its inspiration.)

Not saying I entirely agree with this characterisation, but it's an interesting way of framing the question.

Interesting too though, that disco/house, hip hop, dub all developed at a time when they could still maintain a degree of relative isolation from outside scrutiny for long enough to work out very specific forms and technics before they began to spread. Thirty years later, everything marginal is immediately on display either by its own efforts (grime on net radio) or through efforts to commodify it (cool hunting and marginality as the new 'in').

Also, what tools/instruments will be used?

I don't really like the kind of unrealistically hegemonised description of the "state of affairs" that allow people to make pronouncements like "the next new thing will be really simple and not over-produced, unlike all the over-produced music at the moment." It just seems to me to rely on consciously ignoring exactly half of what's going on at any particular time.

What are crunk, reggaeton, baile funk, the nu "French touch", nu wave indie etc etc ad nauseum if not examples of pretty simple, stripped down, "funktional" musics? There's hardly been a dearth of it of late. People make the mistake of looking at one particular strand of music which, yes, might temporarily be characterised by either simplicity or sophistication, and then erroneously assuming that the development of this strand stands in metonymically for popular music as a whole.

And, really, simplicity vs sophistication is not the kind of aesthetic choice I think I <i>want</i> to make... it goes without saying that most really good music is a mediation b/w the two - but I guess we've had this argument before (I accept that my refusal to adopt an either/or position on this is a sign of weakness or komplicity with kapital etc.)

By the way, my favourite example of a potential "next new thing" this year has been the Gypsy Beats & Balkan Bangers comp put out on Atlantic Jaxx - at once simple and sophisticated!

polz said:

why? i know this seems self evident for people, but why are we bound to have another rupture. is this a law of nature? why can't it be that nothing will happen?

has the art of writing novels changed the last 30 years? no. has theatre really changed the last 20 years? no. so why can't popular music stand still. maybe all innovation/evolution has gone into fields like games, multimedia, web devolopment.

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OK. You're right, maybe nothing will change at all. But do you really think "all innovation/evolution has gone into games, multimedia, web development"? There haven't been any developments in music, film, etc. since these new media came along? And aren't there many types of innovation at play here (eg.. - the urge to make bodies move on a dancefloor isn't being diverted into video game coding). Plus, I think we'd all get so bored that someone would be bound to try something different.

I'm not talking about "a law of nature." But culture changes, and periodically it changes drastically. Popular music has undergone continual waves of change for the last century for three reasons: new technologies make new forms possible; cultural globalisation ensures continuous, shifting flows of influence; and, if all else fails, capitalism demands new things to sell to people (though I'm not really suggesting that the type of change we're talking about here is going to originate in that realm, but you never know).

And yes, Western literature and film (don't know about theatre) have undergone changes in the last 30 years (post-colonial fiction - Rushdie, Kureishi, etc. - being one major example; CG and DV being just two major changes in film).

polz said:

i don't think this one's true. Only Jamaica had (a big) influence, but i don't see real influence from other parts of the world, only orientalistic fads like the diwali riddim, or mory kante like one hit wonders.

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Globalization doesn't have to mean exotic, third world locations - what about the US / UK connection? Jungle isn't made from british funk records...

The capitalism part is tricky because it wants to sell "the next new thing" but oftetn wants to avoid the risk (lost investment or having to re-organise it's markets). But that mindset of wanting the newest-latest has also permeated popular culture in general, making us impatient consumers always looking for novelty.

And this...

Only Jamaica had (a big) influence, but i don't see real influence from other parts of the world, only orientalistic fads like the diwali riddim, or mory kante like one hit wonders.

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... is so untrue! What styles are you thinking of? It must be only the smallest slice of Western popular music. Migration, imported music, satellite TV and the net ensure that cultures are always moving and mixing. What about all things Desi, for example?

Don Rosco said:

Globalization doesn't have to mean exotic, third world locations - what about the US / UK connection? Jungle isn't made from british funk records...

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Right. Same with Latin American influences of all sorts. In France, North African influence is very strong. Not to mention all sorts of regional cultural relationships that that bypass the West.

In this instant global communication age. What CAN be new? Name me just one thing that lay hidden, uncovered, unknown.

The only true NEXT BIG THING would be caused by something like visitation by aliens from another planet, or some stupid music rule that kids stubbornly adopt, like only making music that contains the notes c, c-sharp, and d.

True about the instantaneity of things. I think the route grime has taken has something to do with that.

What I was bring up upthread though wouldn't be so much a change in style - something like a new rule or trend - as a fundamental shift in how music is made and what counts as music. Hip hop introduced music made from records/turntables and, later on, digital samples. Disco introduced the drum machine and beatmatching. Dub brought us the remix and talkover. All huge changes from the singer-songwriter + guitar model. Amongst other things, each involved the misuse or unconvential use of existing technologies that were already on-hand.

So what's going to be the next major shift (or why won't there be one)? Is it something that we can really foresee? Will it necessarily involve a PC?