The Year the Music Died
thecritic.co.uk
thecritic.co.uk
I don't think the divide between commercial and independent has ever been so prominent and deep as it has become in the past few decades, again, both in music and cinema.
Rock music is an indie phenomenon. That said though, I'm not sure if it died its natural death like jazz music did, or it was the result of said commercialization. Or maybe both.
Yes there's still indie rock music alive and marginally thriving, but can an indie rock musician beat your typical commercial pop star in terms of fame and popularity? No chance. Marketing money beats everything and everyone. It destroys genres and whole cultures. A lot of the times underground music is better and more interesting than what the industry will try to sell you and yet it remains underground with relatively little exposure.
That's the change that happened sometime in the late 1970s and into the 1980s.
It's as if somebody were to declare that house music died in 1990, with the only evidence being an analysis of records from that year, and everything subsequent to that year simply ignored.
That is not to say that there's nothing wrong in these scenes, but we then get to the sort of economic arguments he dismisses at the outset; eg, the effect of gentrification on night spots, and so on.