No. Of course not.What a bloody stupid question.
But I hate the assumption that it is.
Why am I talking about this you ask...
Well. Firstly a great VH1 Classic promo tagline that says "Absolutely none of todays best hits"; and a Classic Gold (I didnt choose it, but it plays Beach Boys so its not all bad) promo that implies all that is old is good, and all that isnt, well...isnt.
Do new bands automatically pale to old bands? Of course not, every bit of music has to be judged on its own merits; yet people so often decry modern music without ever hearing it.
I recall a local tosser (ignorant, racist, annoying, obnoxious) who went to see Iron Maiden and complained the support band Bullet for my Valentine were "todally rubbiish". But you knew it had NOTHING to do with their performance or music, it was simply because it was new that he felt such a passionate hatred of it. Are we as a nation THAT scared of the new???
I understand these channels are appealling to older people; but does an artist's work automatically become rubbish as they get older?Is Homer Simpson's cry of "No new crap, just the hits" really how people think? Is Prince new cd terrible purely because it isnt 10 years old yet?
As much as a lot of modern music is crap (we are looking at you Westlife, 50 Cent, any one of 20 million dance-pop acts), we only have to look at Muse, Battles, Blood Brothers to see that good music exists. Rhianna, and to a lesser extent Lily Allen and co show that not only is good music alive, but good POP music is still out there; and it still sells.
6 comments:
this is a generational thing...we are by default as we age turning into our parents who as we all remember didnt like most of our music as we grew up and their parents before them and so and so forth back to the beginning of music and generation gaps.does that excuse it,nah...does it justify it...deffinately not...is it a pithy excuse for not moving with the times and settling into a comfortable rut rather then putting ones head outside of our comfort zone like some sort of agrophobis tortoise....yup.nuff said
Thanks Danon!
It is. I just find it completely nonsensical. Bah!
It's not just music. It applies to films and television as well - everyone going on about how we've lost the 'golden age' when we have stuff like Doctor Who and Jekyll on the BBC. The problem as I see it is that there is so much more being generated these days - mass production of music, films and tv programmes - that it can look a bit like throwing everything at the wall to see what will stick. So there probably is a lower signal to noise ratio, but that doesn't mean that nobody these days is capable of breaking new ground.
Absolutely Nick.
It is hard to find good music with the sheer ease of getting about now.
Id love one day to be able to start a record label and just put out albums by new bands that have something good to show.
Sadly the days of trusting a lable have gone, you no longer have that Stiff, Roadrunner etc style trust that everything a label does will be reasonable. Except maybe for Warp, and even its not total.
Id love to have a label where regardless of genre, people know it will always be up to a minimum standard of quality. Maybe the closest left is Epitaph in the US.
I get pretty much all of my music from bleep.com these days - they now have hundreds of labels listed, but there is a definite general level of quality on there. I'd rather randomly browse there than on iTunes.
Sounds good.
I tend to just pick up good tracks wherever I can find them!
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