Recently for an upcoming episode of Six String Bliss, I recorded a piece that looks back on how music became such an integral part of my life. In my nostalgic look back I viewed the time in which I grew up as being very different then today as far as how music was brought to the world. See, back then MTV exploded on to the scene and began pushing music and video to the masses. Bands like Guns n Roses were made overnight successes because of MTV. Then came the grunge movement. Again with MTV behind it Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, changed the musical world.
Now we live in a very different era. MTV, well doesn't even really do much of anything and we get our music through the web, downloaded to an mp3 player. In some respects this is amazing, any music we want to listen to is literally at our fingertips. However we lost something huge in this change.
I hear so many people say there are no new bands that are taking over the world. Some people even go so far as to call today's music stale. Honestly, I cannot buy into this thought process, and if you listen to a fair share of new music you would have to agree. Music is as alive today as it ever has been. However, today there is no medium that truly pushes music to us.
If you go through history of music in America there has always been a force shoving it to us. Elvis didn't change the world when he sat down at Sun Records and recorded That’s All Right, it was when DJ Dewey Phillips played it on his popular radio show. It was at that moment that people heard it and at that moment that Elvis began to change the world.
This push of music exists everywhere. Even if you look at the California punk movement, which is traditionally looked at as a grassroots type of movement, the push is still there. The reality is that if California DJ Rodney Bingenheimer hadn't played Social D and the Adolescents to first fuel that grassroots movement it would have never happened on the scale it did.
So I come back to today. We have all the music in the world at our fingertips, yet nothing shoved in our face. There is no beacon to point us to the new music that could potentially rock our world. Now I for one had the ideal of mindless people walking toward the bright light and being unable to make our own decisions on what to listen to, but I do feel we need something, music needs something, something to take the bands that really rock and cut them through the masses.
Talk Hard, Play Harder!
-Pipes
2 comments:
Interesting stuff. Not thought of it that way. There is one major "shove" you are missing though, which as just as powerful today as it ever was: peer pressure. My kids (17 and 20) and their friends don't seem to have any problems coalescing round new bands and genres as they appear.
Is it that we're less susceptible as we get older? Perhaps we're irrelevant? Maybe we're less open to something new?
I think we're just as open to new stuff, it's just that we've found stuff we like. Comfortable stuff. Stuff that reminds us of our youth or the crazy times when you were going through a breakup or something like that.
I also think it has something to do with peers, like Dave said. A lot of friends grow up together listening to the same music and anything new is pushed to the other friends, but eventually you fall into that comfort zone and you're less inclined to look for new music.
A benefit of doing the show and talking to Pipes and PT is that even though we have a ton in common and grew up in the same generation, we have different bands that strike our fancy and we can share them with each other and very rarely does one reject it. We're all pretty open to listen to band we've never heard of's music.
Personally, I don't mind the lack of guiding light because it's so easy to chase the music you like and get deeper and deeper into it. Internet message boards or even a band's liner notes that thank the bands that inspired them can lead you down this path that only spreads out as you go on.
The BEST part about not having this guiding light is that fans feel like they have something that is theirs - something exclusive - and this breeds a sort of fanaticism that is lost when the whole world likes the same thing.
In the end, I would rather have passionate niche groups than a mass of people who just accept it.
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