The mere act of listening to music from before the late 90s and after makes Music Ground Zero so evident that even pop cultists are starting to notice.
NB: As you read the following, keep in mind that this is the bio of the account that tweeted it:
Observe the pop cultist–if not peripheral death cultist’s–insights.
The events our pop cult archivist relates are true. But his choice of starting point overlooks the upheavals that shook the industry in the late 80s. That omission suggests indifference to what came before the commenter’s time. It’s more indicative of Gen Y obliviousness than Millennial style contempt, thus supporting the later self-identification.
Record labels let popular but expensive hair metal bands’ contracts lapse in favor of singing cheaper unknown acts. Record companies manufactured the grunge fad with a few strokes of a pen–necessary context for what follows.
And there it is. Record labels strangled the thriving rock scene that had dominated since the 70s to replace it with a pale imitator. Only for the 1996 Telecommunications Act to administer the coup de grace.
Once again, an art form’s time of death is called in the late 90s. Cultural Ground Zero is undeniable.
Which goes to show that even the mushroom cloud in the asteroid impact aftermath has a silver lining.
1996? This guy may actually be a late Gen Xer. But remember, the formative experience model of generations is a continuum, not a graduated line.
Couldn’t put this one down!
I still remember listening to radio and MTV in that late ’90s and wondering what the heck happened when only a few years ago it felt like rock music was everywhere and every subgenre was thriving.
Even when I was listening to The White Stripes, The Hives, and the Garage Rock Revival in the early ’00s, it felt like they were holding on for dear life while the rest of the industry was trying to flush them out. It almost felt like a rebellion just to listen to the genre at all. And lo and behold, by the 2010s, they were all gone.
It’s easy to say “the majority of the past was crap” in order to justify the present sucking, but that really wasn’t the case. That’s more Sturgeon’s Law cope. Rock music actually has an objectively impressive streak from the mid ’50s to the mid-90s of consistent quality and variety. Suddenly, in the late ’90s, that ended, and by the end of the ’00s, after half a century, the genre just vanished from popular consciousness.
And, miraculously, the industry is now owned by a small cadre of record companies who rehash the same songwriters and sounds they have been recycling for the last quarter of a century.
Just like OldPub, the comic book industry, and literally every other creative space.
Imagine that.
There’s a music sales chart I’ve used on the blog before that suggests rock peaked in the 70s, but was artificially buoyed by the tech sector coming out with new audio media.
IOW the music industry owes its continued growth in the 80s and 90s to Boomers re-buying the White Album on cassette tape, CD, and mp3.
Patchen probably thinks that painting a hammer and sickle on the American flag will fix the music industry. He doesn’t exactly strike me as a distributist.
He still has a point. The lesson of the last 100 years is that capitalism untethered from the common good ends in corporatist tyranny.
They both have the same blind spots: seeing man as a purely economic being and having no moral qualms about consequential decisions being made by people who won’t really feel the consequences.
You mean you aren’t going partner with a megacorp to market the XSeed franchise? Don’t you want to cash out with a McMansion and a Tesla?
All you have to do is let Disney invert it and alienate your legacy customers—and possibly celebrate Pride Month instead of our Lord’s and our lady’s hearts.
“Which goes to show that even the mushroom cloud in the asteroid impact aftermath has a silver lining.”
ROFL! Good one. Reminds me of P..J. O’Rourke when he visited post-Soviet Russia and went to an outdoor art fair and remarked that it featured art the Soviets used to censor with bulldozers. Judging by what he saw that day, “the Soviets had it right the first time.”
My dad used to tell me stories about how he would go see live musicians at local spots in and around Memphis. He got to see acts like Billy Joel and Skynard before they published their first albums. Zero chance of that happening now. Nobody gets oxygen without signing their souls away to one of the big boys.
Rock music used to have an established career path. If you made it out of Dad’s garage, you played local bars for tips and free drinks. A fraction of bar bands graduated to playing the county fair and having a vanity record pressed on their own dime. A fraction of those bands would score gigs as state fair side acts; maybe as openers on the local stop of C list rock stars’ nationwide tour.
About 1 percent of those acts would land a deal with a big label’s farm league imprint. Less than half of those would break out and score a coveted 3-album contract with one of the majors.
Even then, it was considered natural for most bands that achieved gold record, coast-to-coast tour, headliner status to go back down the ladder. Think of the 80s hair bands that now play state fairs. It was normal, and smart artists socked away some of the earnings from their turn at the top.
Now that model is gone. No garage band that paid their dues playing bars will hit the big time. No contest winners will cut a first album that catapults them to lifetime stardom. Every top 40 act is put together from the ground up by Hollywood casting agents, cult high priest producers, and mercenary sound engineers. It’s fake like all mainstream entertainment.
It’s an unfortunate truth that the industry deliberately shifted itself into an idol factory (not the Japanese kind) in attempting to sell you prophets of modernity instead of entertainers. They’ve been working on it since Madonna, and finally perfected the form by the time of signing the underage Britney Spears.
The hedonism and nihilism tank ran dry in rock music back in the 1990s and therefore lost its usefulness. The genre requires too much masculinity, testosterone, and adrenaline, in order to be controlled successfully. Their last attempt at a rock idol, Cobain, killed himself. Much easier to control the sound, image, and personality, of your talents lock stock and barrel.
I think the advent of file sharing, streaming, and YouTube, completely derailed those plans, though. The recording industry devalued its own product so much that they even offer old albums and songs to listen to for free on YouTube. I can’t even remember the last time I’ve ever met anyone who listens to the radio anymore.
Today, basically, if you want to be a musician, I can’t see how you can do it aside from it being a hobby. There’s no money in it anymore.
“Their last attempt at a rock idol, Cobain, killed himself. ”
He knew what they were trying to turn him into. He saw this coming.
“There’s no money in it anymore.”
It’s like trying to be a professional photographer.
There were some great sounds from UK bands in the 80s using electronic instruments. I listen to them now occasionally if I remember one and it fits the moment.
Maybe the best cure for the disappointment of the collapse of culture though is to stop noticing it and its priests, and scrub the timeline for something better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEVG_HIr-zI
I really think automation plays an outsized role in the destruction of music. If you look at records made in the 1960s they were usually recorded with all instruments at once. If someone made a mistake then the entire band would have to play the entire song again, and musicians were thus very good at performing. Nowadays if someone makes a mistake, you can “punch in” and correct it. No need to play the song again, no need to even play your part again. Heck, you can just copy and paste from somewhere else in the song. The bar to entry is far lower, so the end result is of lower quality. Map this to every element. And this is just recorded music. If you consider the fact that recorded music itself effectively destroyed entire industries of live musicians in the early 20th century, it’s easy to see how technology both giveth and taketh away.
Audio engineer and session musician Rick Beato has made a side career of pointing this out.