I'd like to take a brief moment to bitch, once again, about the state of music. I won't argue with you about whether the music of today is any better than it was back in the sixties, seventies or eighties.... that's a matter of opinion. But there can be no denying music has not changed one iota in at least fifteen years.... that's an objective truth.... and it makes me sad.
You play some hip-hop from the early nineties and compare it to today.... it's not changed significantly. The same goes for that Brittney Spears brand of girl pop. She hit it big in 1998.... how different is "Baby One More Time" than anything being released by today's chick singers? That was 12 years ago!
You could go down the list of genres, and the principle holds true without exception. Rock music may in fact be the most stagnant and the biggest disappointment. Thank you Nickelback. Nothing significantly new has come from rock and roll since the "slow-hard-slow-hard-- repeat" template of The Pixies and Nirvana. What the hell has happened?
Do the record companies have such a stranglehold on creativity that they won't permit novelty and change? Or, as both George Martin and Billy Joel have posited, we have simply run out of chord variations. It's not like classical music where there is an almost infinite variation possible..... rock music is much more finite in its scope of possibilities. We've simply drained the well dry.
Whatever the reason, it's a damn shame. I only hope that twenty years from now things sound at least a little bit different. Dare to dream.
