I look out the window the other day and there were ducks swimming in the pool. I invited the ducks, or duckies as I like to call them, over for tea. It'll be ever so much fun. I'm off to purchase a tam so they'll like me. In 1909 William F. Ludwig invented the bass drum pedal and put half the drummers out of work. It's been a steady downhill slide since. The Mellotron was a tape loop based keyboard invented in 1963 that was the beginning of the end for orchestra. Nowadays top 40 is created on computers with midi synths and every instrument has been sampled and looped. DJ's rule the clubs under the fallacy that dropping the bass at exactly the right moment takes some sort of talent. Music control has gone from musicians to geeks and producers. Don't panic. This is normal. What fuels musical evolution is not innovation, but rather, irritation. Teenagers have a burning need to find an identity that usually involves finding music their parents hate. In the 50's when the parents burned Godless and sex promoting rock and roll albums kids knew they were on to something big. Those rock and roll kids from the fifties had kids. So the 60's kids upped the offense levels with drugs and free love. By the 70's it was getting harder to irritate the old folks, so for hippie parents you went disco, and for rock and roll parents you went punk. The 80's just sucked. Not sure why. Synthesizers and the Marshall stack sound were evolving and creating horrid everything. Candy metal and metrosexual synthetic disco ruled the airwaves with gay abandon. Towards the end of the 80's kids started realizing rap was irritating to old people, but it grew slowly because nobody was sure if drum machines and looped trumpet squeals combined with swearing was actually music. They had tried that in the forties with poetry and bongo drums, but it didn't take until they invented subs. The 90's saw a resurgence of potential with grunge, but the industry quickly killed it trying to apply formula to it. In Seattle during the early 90's anybody carrying an instrument looking morose and wearing torn clothing was immediately signed to a label. The airwaves were jammed with bad attempts at formula grunge until it died with Cobaine in '94. Disco evolved into a whole beatz club scene trance dub step thing. Main stream music hit the floor and shattered into hundreds of genres. The upsurge of country in the 90's was, I suspect, a backlash from rap and techno. Stupid people need music too ya know. In the 00's everything went to hell with computers. Kids started creating their own stuff without ever having to touch an instrument. Pirates attacked the record industry and they fought back by clamping down on the formula, thus strangling musical evolution in it's traditional form and taking radio down with it. So here we sit in this digital wasteland casting about for something to irritate our parents with. Technology and irritation combined with mass marketing has driven the industry bus since the forties, and said bus has crashed. There's nothing left. Bye bye Miss American Pie. Throughout this whole evolution of music in every era and genre there have been many moments of sheer genius that continue to this day. Go sit in the middle of a dance club with a killer system and just listen. The kids with computers have stripped music down to it's elements and built them back into hugely powerful music. Even rap has sociological elements that can't be denied. It has possibly driven change and awareness as much as anything ever did in the 60's. So... it's all good, but what's the NEXT BIG THING? Well, shut up and I'll tell you. Irritation continues to drive the bus. So in theory, the antithesis of computer created synth music would be musician created instrument music. Kids growing up now will be looking down their noses at anything done by computers and synths. The pendulum will swing. Country appears to be evolving into something along those lines, Nashville seems to be losing it's death grip on the genre and bands like Alabama Shakes and many others are adding various elements of 40's/50's rock and blues to it. Sort of southern rock with a country nod. There's a band out of Victoria called Current Swell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiOTGhPul8g that captures the vibe of which I speak. There's another band out of Vancouver called No Sinner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIhDILaxLxw that I think will do big things if they keep it together. Or maybe this whole thing is just me wishing it were true and justifying it all with endless drivel. WTF do I know? A lovely afternoon. Tea and crumpets by the pool while wearing my best frilly frock and sun bonnet. It was ever so civilized mummy! The duckies wore spats and cute bow ties and regaled me with adventurous tales. Then we sang songs and gaily danced about.
cosmictunes7