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Where Have All the Rock Stars Gone?
by noteworthy at 12:44 pm EDT, Jun 23, 2007 |
It sometimes seems as though this new technology is the major change in the popular-music scene. People may therefore assume that the continuing decline in CD sales represents merely a shift to music downloads. In fact, the decline is greater than that explanation would allow. People are buying less music today than in previous years. While the effects of downloading are often discussed, it's not just the music-delivery system that has changed. What we have long considered to be mass culture has increasingly become a collection of niche cultures.
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RE: Where Have All the Rock Stars Gone?
by flynn23 at 5:10 am EDT, Jun 24, 2007 |
noteworthy wrote: It sometimes seems as though this new technology is the major change in the popular-music scene. People may therefore assume that the continuing decline in CD sales represents merely a shift to music downloads. In fact, the decline is greater than that explanation would allow. People are buying less music today than in previous years. While the effects of downloading are often discussed, it's not just the music-delivery system that has changed. What we have long considered to be mass culture has increasingly become a collection of niche cultures.
I do lament at this factual little nugget: Early hip-hop stars like Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy were at least as critical of American society as Dylan ever was, and they led some commentators to imagine hip-hop artists as authentic and politically significant spokespeople for poor, urban African-Americans. But in the last 10 years or so, even though hip-hop artists like Jay-Z are popular music's most innovative contributors, the form has become less political, and its performers seem less culturally central.
But I think the real instigator in this phenomenon, the root cause if you will, is the fact that people don't have the time to partake and participate in music the way they did. We are a nation built on toons because we don't have time to sit down and listen to an entire album end to end anymore. As my good friend Luke said, it's a decadent luxury to spend that much time on something like reading a book or listening to an entire album by one artist. It makes it that much harder for an artist to convey their message and change your perception and lest we not forget that we live in a much more complex world. I just recently listened to an entire album end to end about a week ago. It was probably a full year or more since I had done it before that, and another year before that for the previous one. That's just wrong. |
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Where Have All the Rock Stars Gone?
by k at 3:31 pm EDT, Jun 24, 2007 |
Those performers and others of their era had broad cultural currency; they had meaning for people who did not like or even listen to their music. Is there any figure who has emerged recently in popular music of whom that can be said? This is not meant to be one of those laments about artistic decline, in which the younger generation is compared unfavorably to the great achievements of past ones. I have no doubt that more recent generations of performers may be more skilled and at least as talented as their musical forebears. Rather, my point is that the cultural position of popular music and its stars has diminished.
This is related to a point that I made a few months back, though my analysis led to a different conclusion. |
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RE: Where Have All the Rock Stars Gone?
by skullaria at 1:13 am EDT, Jun 25, 2007 |
I always thought that MTV and the music video format killed it. Suddenly, you had to be a good dancer, good looking, with a good production crew and good editing to become popular. As MTV played fewer videos, fewer stars rose, and add to that the grunge movement and people started looking closer in to their own communities for their musical heros. Top that with the Internet, which introduced all sorts of new world music, in case you didn't like what was being played locally, and we have ended up with one big mess of everyone going every which way. Rock was dead for sure when Paris Hilton went into a studio drunk one night with a good soundman and come out a singer, following that with a sexy video...and the nail was in the coffin. |
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RE: Where Have All the Rock Stars Gone?
by k at 11:58 am EDT, Jun 25, 2007 |
skullaria wrote:
I always thought that MTV and the music video format killed it. Suddenly, you had to be a good dancer, good looking, with a good production crew and good editing to become popular. As MTV played fewer videos, fewer stars rose, and add to that the grunge movement and people started looking closer in to their own communities for their musical heros. Top that with the Internet, which introduced all sorts of new world music, in case you didn't like what was being played locally, and we have ended up with one big mess of everyone going every which way.
All of that played a part, but I think the primary cause of this change the democratization of transmission technology. You're now exposed to a thousand or a million times as much information as your forebears were in the 1960's. This necessarily alters your relationship to it. Such bombardment almost assures that stardom is, if not antiquated, then transformed into something more fleeting, more limited and, perhaps, more arbirary. At any rate, to me this all is good news, because I see more value in 10,000 second tier stars than 10 first tier stars. This is an judgement I'm willing to admit is subject to personal opinion. Rock was dead for sure when Paris Hilton went into a studio drunk one night with a good soundman and come out a singer, following that with a sexy video...and the nail was in the coffin.
I'd rather not call that "rock", but "pop" and that fragmentation happened long ago. Go back to the majority of 70's and 80's music and honestly tell me that we're worse off now. No fucking way is 2007 worse than 1987 in terms of the quality and vibrancy of the music scene. |
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