The internet's impact on music megathread

[WashYourHands]

not you Shaka

 

[WashYourHands]

The point about live music stands, the frontline of performance but I hear as much innovation from forum members new tracks as any regular feed from more obscure electronic home listening menageries. Covid fucked so much temporarily. Can’t believe Zoviet France were so bad Woops left early

Variety of listening means peak listening - I’d take an all night music/mushroom horizontally levitating porthole into satori via a well paced, programmed mix pieced together out of past gold, than spin the bottle on upfront gash

Always looking for the new thing only gets you so far and culture has been diluted by Americans talking with and over each other for millions of hours over not very much courtesy of podcasting in recent years. If you’re looking at technology and innovation then engineeer something that delivers less of a net, not a prism darkly scanning. The micro age between 1989 and 2020, preceded by all all other human movements and works, has passed. Innovators innovate

 

[dilbert1]

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.

 

[shakahislop]

not you Shaka

I've called some of @Corpsey's bronx drill mates and we're coming round your house

 

[woops]

1> is actually decent music properly written and played
2> doesn't have nico droning all over it
3> yes ive listened to all the out takes and live stuff

which is why im so confident in asserting

loaded

 

[sus]

@linebaugh has very cowardly deleted a comment in this thread, in which he made various slanderous accusatory statements, and I would like him to apologize

 

[sus]

For the deletion, to be clear. Because I thought about it for weeks, turning it over like a sucking stone. Something was wrong. What he said wasn't right. It was bad, and misleading. But how? Suddenly it came to me.

 

[sus]

Now there is no comment left to rebut. Very upsetting

 

[sus]

you sound like youre sworn nemesis Padraig arguing that the NBA is exactly the same as its always been its just that inconsequential things have shifted atop an unchanging base equilibrium state

Phew, I have found it. I do not rescind my accusation that he is a coward, but I do rescind my claim that he deleted the relevant comment. I have also learned that cowardly is not an adverb. So I will say that, although he didn't delete this one, there may be other comments which he cravenly deleted.

 

[sus]

Here is my great realization while washing dishes in the sink.

I am not claiming that "nothing has changed." Clear the "rules of the game" have changed—cultural products are different, they're optimizing for different things. Nobody disputes this.

What You are saying is more akin to "This generation can't hoop."

Which as we know is just a ridiculous thing to say, like asking rhetorically "Can Jokic dunk from the free throw line? Checkmate."

 

[Leo]

meanwhile, the Lakers are 0-5, hahahahaha

 

[shakahislop]

more and more convinced now that our sense of where music sits in the cultural milieu is totally outdated. a filmmaker i know told me recently that movies are a dead form, that the world has changed and they don't make sense for a lot of people anymore, and while music isn't quite as defunct it has had some of its old territory taken over by other forms that the internet has enabled. doubt it has much impact on fashion anymore for example. as a political form it feels totally moribund, there's no need for it anymore, if you want to communicate slogans and vague political sentiments there are way better ways of doing it. the idea of a musician as some kind of idolizable or instructive figure also feels impossible now, there so many other ways to get guidance on how to live (like reddit forums, for real) that the thing of people emulating the gallaghers or kurt cobain or whoever is over. insta influencers and that sort of thing are what people try to emulate, they're the thing that people find glamorous rather than touring musicians.

 

[shakahislop]

i've said it a million times on here, people have closer relationships with podcasts than they do with bands now, podcasts have that kind of libidinal energy thing going on

none of this is particularly to say that any of this is a regrettable change but more that the late 20th century configuration of the broad art world was something quite contingent, but which represents a natural default in a lot of our imaginations

 

[Corpsey]

I agree with some of that but I think music still has a big influence on what's deemed cool and glamorous by young people, at least, I'm thinking more of rap and pop artists than bands, I don't know of any huge bands these days (the 1975?). These massive artists like Post Malone, JuiceWRLD, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, etc. (These are probably all quite dated selections but I'm out of touch.)

Obviously YouTube/TikTok creators and podcasters are sometimes massive stars themselves now and that wasn't around when I was younger so as you say some of the territory once occupied by music is probably taken up by other things now and music's role has changed.

I guess we covered this earlier in this thread but there's definitely less of a 'mainstream' now. There's stuff that everybody's heard of and millions of people like (/despise) like Ed Sheeran or whatever. But there's so many options now for people looking for entertainment that you can easily occupy a niche and have only the faintest idea of anything that exists outside of it. In fact, that's presumably the default mode.

It's the same thing for TV—there are shows that everyone in your circle will be talking about (everyone in mine is banging on about the white lotus, e.g.) but it's rare that you'll get a show that really is being watched by a significant chunk of the population at large.

I suppose nowadays more than ever before if you've made a movie or released a song or whatever you're concerned with marketing that to a highly targeted group of people, rather than aiming to get into the top 10 box office or chart—unless you've made a massive tentpole movie with a big studio behind you or you're Ed Sheeran, backed by a giant record label and guaranteed to appear in streaming playlists and on radio (if radio still matters).

So yeah, under those circumstances especially the idea of music having a political impact seems fanciful. Cos only a small percentage of the population will ever hear your song, much less like it.

 

[Corpsey]

Perhaps that's because whereas music is being siloed into a billion streaming accounts there is still some degree of consensus around what the "important" films and TV shows are

contradicting myself here i see

I've probably just repeated a bunch of shit I or other people already said in this thread

 

[Corpsey]

The internet has probably made a lot of lonely people feel less lonely by providing them a link to other people like them, which is great (unless they're neo nazis, obvs) — but on the other hand, it's probably made a lot of people feel quite isolated, encouraging less IRL socialisation, and I wonder if the erosion of the mainstream might also foster a feeling of atomisation, of not belonging to the society you're living in, because we all have less and less in common.

 

[WashYourHands]

Look at all the ambient being rediscovered on YT alone even here

Started learning an instrument under lockdowns, had to really to come down from difficult work shifts, whereas it’s usually been getting on a bike riding any cortisol off

1st obvious statement - you can find the various instrument tabs to anything now
2 - even with a specific instrument there are dozens of tuition options, which tbh kind of kills the fun of fumbling your way through learning stages but still better than endless scale exercises (even though you have to incorporate a few)
3 - instrument forums, fuckin ell, endless
4 - acoustic instrument equivalents
5 - history of the instrument as seen through the lens of its respective players
6 - no divorce, not just yet anyway
7 - I have an actual excuse for man-cave time, it used to be the shed and horticulture but times change
8 - the internet convinced me to have a crack after weighing it up for too long

 

[thirdform]

Too Many Songs, Not Enough Hits: Pop Music Is Struggling to Create New Stars

Music executives say that a deluge of new music — and the difficulty of influencing TikTok's algorithm — has made artist development and building an audience harder than ever for new acts.

www.billboard.com

The steady disappearance of a musical mainstream, 80k new tracks a day (is that an exaggeration?), TikToks erosion of attention spans, remember the good old days of buying a CD from HMV and discovering later on that it's shit, etc.

I entirely disagree with this assertion.

 

[Corpsey]

Please elaborate

 

[thirdform]

Please elaborate

Go through now that's what I call music 1-13. a lot of it has dated terribly, outside of the hip hop, rnb and er, Samantha Fox.

The 60s idyllic pastoral childhood which pop music is ultimately dependent on was already disintegrating by the mid 80s.