bitflipper
I'll challenge the old "musical tastes are carved in stone at a young age" theory. And I'll go as far as to suggest that we truly are currently at a low point in the musical landscape.
Most of my favorite music is stuff that came along long after my impressionable years. Yes, I still enjoy classical music and traditional jazz and 70's prog as much as I did when I was young. Even more so now, because I hear more in it that would have gone over my head back then.
But I also like folksy stuff that I would have dismissed when I was in my 20's. I am a late-blooming Rush fan. I enjoy (some) modern Country when it doesn't try to be formulaic. I even appreciate some of the 80's hair bands now. I listen to a nightly radio program that features all blues, discovering that that genre has a whole lot more creativity going on than I once presumed. Ditto for Big Band and Swing.
My musical palette literally spans more decades than I have been alive. And most of it discovered (ior re-discoverd) during my adult years.
But the last 10 years have contributed very little. It all seems terribly derivative now. When Kanye West is hailed as a genius, it would seem the world's drunk some kind of mind-numbing kool-aid.
Same here - though I can live with the possibility that I've become an old fart. And I too just recently "got" Rush, after decades...
Until relatively recently, say 8 or 10 years ago, I was constantly seeking and finding new music that I liked. I despised the idea of nostalgia, I hated tribute bands with a passion and I was adamant on the need to create instead of re-creating.
That being said, I had already moved away from traditional drum-bass-guitar type of music at that point because I felt that that format had practically been exhausted. I certainly felt like I couldn't contribute anything new to it.
But eventually, I've exhausted those other options as well. The talent just seemed to be diluted to a point where I could not pretend to enjoy it.
Yesterday marked the 16th anniversary of one of my favorite albums ever, The Fragile by NIN. It was an occasion for me to look back and try to understand how I'd gotten to where I am musically.
Retrospectively, as exciting as the early mid-90's were with the grunge movement and all, I feel like that's when rock music "died" and that it never really got out of that pit. While I appreciate that the whole movement was a reaction to the opposite excesses of the previous few years, I look back and see that, for exemple, in "commercial" rock music, that's when it became "ridiculous" to actually display any musicianship and to throw a brilliant guitar solo in the middle of a song - it's all about "texture" now. Kurt Cobain killed the idea of a traditional guitar solo. (I love Nirvana by the way).
I know for a fact that there are brilliant, highly educated guitar players out there underplaying, because, well, that's what music is all about these days. Of course there are exceptions, but mostly, I feel like a lot of bands are just perpetuating grunge or the music of bands such as the Deftones, Korn and all those guys.
Our relation with any display of virtuosity has become so warped that one of the only way to re-integrate it into the scene is via pastiche, with bands such as Steel Panther. I guess there is a nostalgia for an era when rock was glamorous, before the likes of Pearl Jam made rock so beige and so PC.
Anyway, it seems that, more or less corresponding with the iPhone age, we've finally fully embraced the idea of lowering the bar as much as possible, so much that we are now praising stupidity and not just ignoring but downright dismissing "intellectuals". I don't think such a culture is equipped to assimilate much more than a beat and some guy with the vocabulary of an 8 year old rapping over that beat.
I'm wondering how aliens would react if they'd sample our history and see how we went from Bach and Goethe to Jersey Shores and the current crop of talentless pop stars.