music disillusionism

[entertainment]

I'm increasingly convinced that as a cultural site, music has lost its relevance. It doesn't feel essential anymore.

The meaning of what it communicated--something once self-evident and immediate, something that always acted as an internal guiding principle--has dissipated. Leaving us with an assortment of scripts determined to follow their own sovereign logic towards unlistenability.

This is what happens when you stop asking an artform to justify itself.

 

[william_kent]

music has been dead for almost a decade literally no one likes it any more

 

[shakahislop]

i think its blatantly true. that's not the same thing as saying that everything is retromanic and that there's no good music anymore. but it's lost the place that it had from the 70s to the 00s. probably a better way of thinking about it is that in the western world music was an unusually strong cultural force. it had an economic model which raked in the cash so there was a lot to go around. it was an industry where you create what is essentially some intellectual property that can be endlessly and cheaply duplicated, which is also both mass market and a new and important cultural form. it's pretty obvious that the energy drips out of forms when there's no money left in it.

the other thing that that period of music had was that it was at the forefront of tech. both in terms of the distribution and in terms of the machines used to make the music itself. things like guitar pedals or obviously for dissensus drum machines and sampling and so on and so forth came along comparatively quickly one after the other. other forms are really better suited to the current wave of tech, music really isn't.

 

[shakahislop]

probably an interesting question is: well what has been lost if music isn't as relevant as it was. and the answer is really about whether or not the forms that have replaced a lot of the roles that music played, ie micro-shortform video, tweets and reddit are any better. and the jury on that is out i think. in social / political etc terms music proved to be weak and neutral force overall. and you can make an argument that it was a negative force in a lot of ways as well.

as an artform in and of itself however obviously everyone that's posting on here has probably got a huge amount out of it.

 

[Corpsey]

I have no idea if this is true but if it IS true one reason will be that there is so much competition now for people's attention, especially young people's attention.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Boomers gonna boom. Last time I was in town every club was booming out music, nobody seemed to be complaining.

Overall, people love music. There is no objective evidence that they are listening to it less. As far as economic cultural sway is concerned T. Swift can move national economies.

Here's a very recent one that should appeal to the typical Dissensian (loads of rhymes!). Enjoy!


Sorry, I meant this one:

 

[germaphobian]

There is no technological paradigm to which music could attach itself - like it attached itself to piano and acoustic instruments, then, when it was getting really exhausted, it could attach itself to electricity and after that also got old it reinvigorated itself by attaching to computers. But where do you possibly go from there? It's just an unproven assumption that things don't have an end point.

 

[version]

Yeah, recent technical innovations seem to have been mostly to do with accessibility and distribution - carrying a virtual studio around in your phone/laptop and being able stick stuff online from anywhere. Can't think of anything particularly game-changing re: instruments since Max or autotune.

 

[germaphobian]

Yeah, recent technical innovations seem to have been mostly to do with accessibility and distribution - carrying a virtual studio around in your phone/laptop and being able stick stuff online from anywhere. Can't think of anything particularly game-changing re: instruments since Max or autotune.

I think that there's nowhere to go but backwards which is exactly what has been happening for quite a while already.
Another possibility could be return to some sort of collective ritual in which music is an integral part. Religious people have that advantage in a way, because in their case the question of novelty and justification is non-existent.

 

[version]

Seems to be a point at which things spread out rather than progress. You can do more or less anything you want in music and literature due to the various innovations of software and modernism/postmodernism, yet it feels like a wall's been slammed into and what's left are the shards, pinging off in all directions but forward.

 

[other_life]

Boomers gonna boom. Last time I was in town every club was booming out music, nobody seemed to be complaining.

Overall, people love music. There is no objective evidence that they are listening to it less. As far as economic cultural sway is concerned T. Swift can move national economies.

Here's a very recent one that should appeal to the typical Dissensian (loads of rhymes!). Enjoy!


Sorry, I meant this one:

damn that's crazy, i just took something out of your house