Why so many celebrities have died in 2016
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I am a fan of rock and heavy metal, and it is clear that rock stardom is literally dying off. The days of filling American arenas with rock concerts are quickly coming to an end, and that deeply saddens me.
Where are the twenty-something kids with attitude who will replace a band like AC/DC? Is Justin Beiber the best we could do? It's pathetic. Even a guy like Bon Jovi... Who is next in that line?? Seems like nobody. It's depressing.
This is why I'm going to as many shows for bands like Iron Maiden as possible right now. When it's over, rock and roll may truly be dead.
This is one of those moments where I realize I'm getting old. I never understood life extention and the quest for immortality. As things change, eventually they leave you behind. Find me a 90+ year old who really cares to stay. And that's how I'm going to feel when rock and roll dies.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-weird-global-appeal-of-heavy...
And then you've got the heavy metal bands in Iran that are far more hardcore, facing jail time or execution for their music:
http://www.metalinjection.net/metal-crimes/iranian-musicians...
I've personally started listening to a lot of German bands - Rammstein helped lead me to Oomph, Unheilig, Eisbrecher, Donots and others. It feels great to love bands that have had #1 albums overseas, and yet hardly anyone has heard of them where I live.
Katy Perry might has "equaled Michael Jackson in terms of number of hits in the Billboard Hot 100" but those hits now came with much less sales than in Michael Jackson's era.
Ever worse, at MJ's time, if you had a hit, everybody heard it -- the channels were few and not that fragmented. Nowadays you can be Katy Perry, have a #1 hit, and half of the country wouldn't even know it, much less know how to sing it.
The cultural impact of Katy Perry is thus reduced to some teenage (or early teenage) kids, and tabloid gossip people reads and forgets that very minute.
And of course now there are 100 other things for a young person to do, between gaming, mobile, social, internet, anime, etc -- back then music was much more crucial.
>If you think these aren't as significant as [fill in your favourite act from decades past] then you're not the right demographic.
That's the thing though. You didn't have to be in the right demographic to think the Beatles significant. And even in the same demographic, you can have like 90% of people not giving a shit about Rihanna, whereas you couldn't for the Beatles.
No earlier generation had anything like X Factor or the Kardashians. They are phenomena as large as or larger than the nearest equivalent cultural omnipresences of earlier days (Elvis, The Beatles).
Hell, I'm having trouble figuring out what teenagers are listening to today. Radio will not tell you that. Apps like hypemachine may tell you what's popular on blogs, but I can't figure out a pattern. It's like there has been an explosion of artists and I can't understand the music landscape.
And the discussion about pop (and that's what pop ways, after all: a big discussion) is poorer/reduced, as fewer people participate to it per segment of "popular" culture.
Like them or not, past musicians, due to the centrality of pop music to everyday life, the huge amplification of their message (not easy to escape in micro-niches), and lack of alternative diversions, were part of a huge cultural discussion. Not encompassing everybody of course, but still huge, which gave added meaning (even if it was just an "interpretation" and nothing inherent) to their work and news, and especially gave it potency beyond "affecting a single person".
"It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation."
― Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
- Spring King
- Hinds
- Royal Blood
- Diiv
- Cloud Nothings
- DMA's
- Beach Slang
- PUP
- Dave Hause
A lot of brands that have carpet-bomb "get everyone hooked at once" marketing campaigns, like Old Spice, end up with this effect where nobody wants to use the product since it's what their dad uses, and they don't want to smell like their dad. So Old Spice has set upon the strategy of letting its marketing go quiet for a few years, and then, pretty much once per generation, running a new fleet of ads claiming that Old Spice is "not your dad's deodorant", but is in fact best associated with buff 20-something men.
The same happens in clothing (look at e.g. 80s clothing coming back into fashion just as everyone's mom had finally stopped wearing it.)
Now, I've never seen anyone cite explicit evidence of it occurring in music as well, but it would fit the general mechanism. It might be why e.g. disco has mostly stayed dead (it's survived in the public consciousness with the image of the aging, pervy "uncle", a white guy with an afro wearing white suede and rollerblades, trying to retain his relevance); while genres like jazz are perennial (getting once again associated with being "young and cosmopolitan" at each turn of the clock.)
If rock can truly die—if we can let go of "classic rock" music stations and dads sporting worn-to-dishrags "rock concert" tees—and allow the ground of the genre's image to lay fallow for a bit, we might be able to sew something new there.
"The original. If your grandfather hadn't worn it, you wouldn't exist."
Random word trivia: you want "sow" in the last line.
"Basements, bookstores and independent venues" dooms the practitioners to being hobbyists.
Do you prescribe this theory to hacker culture as well?
Perhaps EDM works like how hacker culture works. I just don't know much about that . But for more traditional musicians it seems harder to... monetize the work. But this was probably always true - it was not uncommon for touring musicians in the radio era before TV to take on sponsors. The span in which people were sustained mainly by record sales was pretty brief.
Plus, doomed to be relegated outside the mainstream culture, as a pastime for small circles of people with common taste (like polka lovers).
Discoverability remains a problem but even still, it's a lot easier to find new stuff than it was just 10 years ago. You still have to do some work if you want to find new examples in genres you like.
Arena filling artists are not all that different now than they were at any other time. It's pop music to one degree or another. The genres that are more popular get the bigger venus. AC/DC style hard rock enjoyed a run in the 80s but is currently 'out' but that does not mean it's dead or will die but the next Iron Maiden won't be shoveled to you via top 40 radio, you'll have to discover them and i guarantee you they're out there.
[1] see the never ending reboot movies.
ps: although I also have a strong feeling that classics are what remains even after an era goes. Timeless ideas like shakespeare's drama you know.
Attitude is not relavent anymore. We are all introverts now, people have wide varieties of musical tastes and preferences .there is huge amount of experimentation going on in music due to the fact that process of creating music has become much more accessible. There are tons of awesome music being produced everywhere you just have to dig deeper.
I would claim all you need to rock is a guitar. Good electric guitars have never been as cheap or accessible, nor have pedagogical offerings as advanced.
Exceptional ability really does not create huge artists nowadays as much as marketing does.
Outside of big bucks marketing I would claim all sorts of music is thriving.
Kids already have computers and with a cheap USB mic can make non-rock music that is ready to be released on the radio in their bedroom for $200.
But if you want to record you don't need expensive equipment. I recorded my first band with Cubase on a shitty home build tower PC. I had no audio interface. I had a headphone splitter than I plugged two mics from a 'sing star' (rock band for singing) PS2 game into and used those to mic the bass drum and throw one over a rafter in the garage as an overhead mic. Quality obviously wasn't great but listening back now it's actually good enough and if I had the mixing experience I do now could be a whole lot better.
And I think it's that last point that's key. If you want to make electronic music you need a DAW with decent VST's (so Logic at £199.99 is your best value) - then you need to spent a long time learning how to write, how to mix, master, sound design. As someone who has been in bands and produces electronic music the latter is much more difficult to get started in. You can get with two other friends in a garage, learn three chords on a guitar and start writing songs or playing covers of other songs and have a hell of a lot of fun. Electronic music is time consuming to create, requires a much steeper learning curve before you can create anything good, and it's pretty solitary.
It's a very personal responsibility to feel relevant as the world changes, and it's assuredly more work than staying with the familiar.
"Rock is Dead" -- The Who
Isn't this good?
Neither the baby boom, nor the huge growth of the media industry (radio, TV, recorded media, etc) after the fifties are "random".
And then there's the fact that the earlier real stars we have now (as opposed to merely people famous in the past but already forgotten) are in their 70s and 80s (e.g. the 60s and 70s musicians and actors etc, all still quite relevant for modern audiences thanks to vinyl, VHS, tape, TV, CD, DVD and cable distribution, and --something previous generations lacked until recently-- instant access to all their works and news from the streaming, YouTube and the web).
This is no clustering illusion, it's the inevitable combination of life expectancy + tons of people becoming stars en masse with unprecedented global distribution at more or less the same time that sees them now in an advanced age.
The steady yearly increase is what's important.
Lots of pages out there to read about it, here's one that might give more insight than my comment: http://www.thepokerbank.com/strategy/other/variance/
(Some people, like Warren Buffet, do more; but if you know enough about their strategies to differentiate between the people getting lucky and the people "playing smart", you know enough to do your investing yourself.)
In this case, I think we have both variance and a cycle. Given the age range of many bigger than life stars, the current cycle is just gearing up. Within that cycle we will have clustering and variance.
This year is likely just an outlier.
And now with the Internet making us aware of so much of what's going on and who's doing it, that trend is amplified.
And the more one focuses on that trend, or how long ago something happened, the older one feels.
Which is another reason that living in the moment is often a very good thing.
Your comment made me want to revisit Feynman's Letter: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2015/10/do-not-remain-nameless-...