gek-opel said:
There are endless reasons why I suspect we cannot go back... I wrote some screed on this in an email to Mark K-punk a few months back... he put it up here...
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007342.html
I think you're spot on about the self-fulfilling prophecy at work here. It seems to me that the point where this really started to rot was when the established music media didn't manage to handle the inventions and innovative broadness of rave culture, and classified it all as
part of the very PoMo culture that rock had degenerated to, rather than the antidote to it that it actually was. I'll maintain that in the nineties rave/techno/electronica came up with the greatest amount of musical innovation
ever to have occured in such a short time, but the official story is still that the 90s was all about hybrids and revivals and recombining parts of the past in slightly novel ways (drum'n'bass isn't
really something new you see, because it's all samples of old music! Using samples is actually
by definition just PoMo eclecticism, right?), and therefore grunge and britpop is seen as movements signifying the decade, more interesting than 'ardcore or trance, and the "important" electronic records are the rock-critic-friendly crossover albums that confirm the hybrid myth, rather than the tons and tons of stuff contradicting it.
I'm not really sure if this happened because the rock critics simply couldn't hear the new thing going on in rave, or if they deliberately tried to silence it, because they just couldn't live with the fact that they were unable to like the stuff changeing everything, and preferred that there was no innovations at all, rather than innovation that exposed their inability. Maybe it was preferable for them to reduce
everything to PoMo? 'Yeah, rock didn't come up with anything new in the nineties, but that's because nothing new really happened in the nineties at all!' This is why rave was never a punk-like revolution: The music media
didn't change its outlook, and the old punk-orthodox critics more or less kept their monopoly.