Will Music End?

Loki

Well-known member
With people up in arms all over the shop about nasty retro-viruses in pop (off the top of my head: arctic monkeys, king of leon... - actually, don't mind either of them that much; good music for buying groceries) and the internet in a constant, breathless scramble for a genuine new scene/sound etc I wonder when anyone expects music to end i.e. will there actually be a time when there really are no new, unexplored, directions? Will music end and have to recycle or will it continue to adjust it's way through new technologies / drugs / supplements?

I'm looking forward to that CAKE music from Brasseye or maybe some kinda Emotional-Aggregate beamed directly into our pleasure centres?

But after that?
 

big satan

HA-DO-KEN!
no, i think the more music developes the more it will continue to develope. i can't think of the right term... like a vicious circle but good. genres will come go and run out of steam but if music was going to "die" i think it would have happened by now. will future generations not have original ideas? i highly doubt it.
 

big satan

HA-DO-KEN!
yeah, and apart from being the idea of proclaiming music to be dead being absurd, it betrays a lack of imagination and laziness in regards to searching out new stuff, and that annoys me. not that that's what loki did, i'm talking about music journalists and other assorted twats.
 

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
I was thinking along these lines the last couple of days (not uncommon I reckon), more of a "what is the next unknown, what is the next sound to be heard?"

This in light of broadsheet articles on the return of British folk (The Times today, The Guardian yesterday (I think)), prog (today), the really tragic return of "guilty pleasures" type music (think the worst zaccharine shite possible from the 70s) that gets another mention today, a piece on Goth today in The Times (yeah it's my favourite omnipresent piece of cellulose) nicely coinciding with the return of Bauhaus in London next Friday and some of the darker side of The Romantics today on BBC2.

The sound of current Britain (grime) is one of the reasons that bought me here in the first place almost exactly a year ago.
Grime seems to be heading nowhere in terms of major press and when there's nothing new going on - people head for the old - ie folk, the 80s, the lamest parts of the 70s, crooning (Melua, Robbie, Peroux and the like) and in my case looking forward to the next Gillian Welch record.

So ladies&gentlemen - where is the new and radical stuff?
 

micmack

My Little Pony
Its a relavent question in the light of everything being 'in'. Thinking of Hegel (and later Marx and even Fukuyama's claims of the dialectical ending with global capitalism).

If you look at what has happened to the visual arts and its availability (reproduction) and effacement. There must be aspects of visual arts that are modern (as oppossed to post-modern). These Like grime, dubstep etc. are forces of modernity.

I dont think that modernity or new creativity can end, but I think the popularity and critical mass not being there for grime et al is more about the demographic of the west. The ageing of populations the west won't nurture revolutionary modernity. Think of the critical masses of the 60's, punk, rave generations. There's nothing like that now. Real modern cutting edge movements in music or any of the arts are going to be more and more underground affair as the demography of the west becomes more and more grayer.

I suppose the real next modern movements in art will have to come from developing countries, where the demographic trends are younger.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Ness Rowlah said:
, the really tragic return of "guilty pleasures" type music (think the worst zaccharine shite possible from the 70s)

well, I agree it's not great, but it's not as depressing as the Arctic Monkeys/ the fact that the Stone Roses were voted top album by the NME. At least the guilty pleasures lot DO feel guilty, unlike Indie Poptimists.
 
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