I've probably made the point before, but I find it tough to tease apart personal cynicism and an objective decline in quality.
Everything feels faker and lazier and more soulless, but is that because it is or because I've heard enough music, read enough cynical critical theory and been around long enough that I'm just recognising the repetition of techniques and patterns that's always occurred and mistaking it for some unique doomsday scenario?
Just going to shit out some responding thoughts here…
This cynicism/‘this has been done before and much better’ jadedness is in the collective consciousness. Even very young people want and recognize the original genuine article, the original breakthrough, and I don’t think its because they’ve been trained to think ‘old is better.’ It excites them on a visceral level, its from another world and thats evident even on a purely sonic level to relatively fresh ears. Greater part of 21st c conditions for art making are a mixture of socioeconomic austerity and cultural saturation, so a shrunken space for cultural production within total visibility and ease of access leads to risk avoidance and uncreative imitation of what was great. Every producer or person in a band or group deliberately working in a particular style knows deep down they aren’t carrying the torch from their idols, their influences aren’t a point of departure; they know its a diluted second hand repetition, a faint echo that could never imagine measuring up to what once was, and this cosplay is challenge enough for them, it is impressive artmaking simply to show everyone that you recognize bygone greatness by optimizing a re-enactment of it, and that’s the best anyone can hope for, to ‘nail’ a sound. We can call it lazy but people try very, very fucking hard at this. And idk, are they wrong to not be grasping at some other option? Is there all that much left to innovate beyond derivation, save for more interesting synthesis, or synthetic departures, detournemont… Maybe we are so stuck in the above rut and overexposed to all past music that we overestimate how ‘novel’ and ‘other’ the new ought to be, we fetishize a modernist mode material and psychic conditions have long rendered obsolete, so it now either comes out as dissatisfyingly obstinate, or trite ‘weirdness’ that could never be enjoyed sensually/un-intellectually, or else is ‘new’ is subtle ways we don’t have the patience to appreciate and can’t desperately emphatically praise and hastily evangelize about so as to ward off our sickness of the same
I think the most important thing is the decontextualization of music. Lifted outside of its album, its local scene, any biographical context, put on a playlist. Massive compilations of amazing amazing tunes from every era and geographic local all next to each other in The Stream. What does that do to our sense of tradition and lineage, how does it allow new hybridities and cross-pollinations, how does it change the sense of vibey aesthetic "appropriateness" of interlocking parts
Sorry, I’m sure no one here needs this lesson, but this is where one must take some personal responsibility, and it should be encouraged, perhaps mandated, as it once was in terms of being forced by circumstances where algorithms were less pernicious. I can’t stress how much devolution in basic cultural acumen re: music taste and history I’ve witnessed amongst similarly aged peers. Ten plus years ago I felt we were all a lot less lazy and a lot more competitive at finding (to our generation) obscure stuff, patiently mapping scenes and comparing their surviving participant’s narratives, piecing together contemporaneous influences, rifling thru label discographies or some older head’s record collection they put up on youtube or mediafire (and with no guarantees of quality and so to often no avail other than character building), priding ourselves on these autodidactic journeys, like having discovered something long before your time and years before it was re-issued was a sign you were on a fruitful path, organizing it all historically, by quality, cultivating different registers of appreciation, and you could do this all over again once you put it all together in one place and figured out when things ossified and vital energies cropped up elsewhere. And maybe this is at a dead-end and there’s a finiteness to these practices as the internet ages… maybe… but jesus christ, the incredulity, the almost intimidated responses I’m met with when I tell these same people now I still ***actually download*** music. What gratuitous effort, what an uphill climb to not have the algorithm, the ‘recommended’ and the robot playlist do all your discovery and curation for you, you must be some kind of pretentious try-hard! So having “everything at your fingertips,” I don’t know if that necessarily destroys a relationship to music… not even using your fucking fingertips anymore, that certainly does.