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Comment by bumbada | Hacker News Reader

What killed rock n roll is the same thing that "killed" every other music genre before: Demographics.

People get older and young people want to differentiate themselves from older people, so they just do different things, including listening to different music.

This even happened with what we consider classical music, from Beethoven Eroica to Stravinski Rite of Spring and specially Operas.

Old people will consider a new style an "scandal", specially established musicians and young people will adopt it.

It is not different from Einstein being a revolutionary against the Elders and then being the Elder against Heisenberg.

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Classical music is 300+ years old. I also love Opera as do my parents and grandparents.

I think it is more about what gets played on the radio. The music is good and new. That tricks our brain into pursuing it.

Eventually each genre finds its own classics that basically capture most of the attention.

Do you think radio still matters?

For people who drive, yes. It does to me at least.

Most of the time when I'm driving, I'm streaming music. I'd be okay if my next car had no radio as long as it has Android Auto or CarPlay.

I find it super convenient to turn on one of the streaming radio stations such as WFMT in Chicago. It eliminates all of the organizational overhead of curating the music that I listen to, and it's good enough. I certainly hear a lot of stuff that I've never heard before.

Also, re streaming, I have a throttled cell phone service, so my data usage isn't unlimited.

I don't have unlimited data either, but have found that streaming doesn't seem to use up all that much data. I think it's something like 100MB / hour.

Is the classical you all listen to all "top 40" "oldies" from folks like Bach and Beethoven or do you listen to anything reasonably new? I'm talking 20th or 21st century classical. Say John Adams or Kaija Saariaho, maybe?

That's the classical music that I enjoy that my mom can't stand. And that is the difference this is talking about.

The new stuff. My mom introduced me to Hindemith and Bartok.

"I'm talking 20th or 21st century classical"

I can't consider anything so recent to be "classical" -- it might imitate the style of older music, but to call that 'classical' makes the word basically meaningless, or that it's only a style (however that would be defined). To me, 'classical' means that it has survived and thrived across _many_ years.

> . To me, 'classical' means that it has survived and thrived across _many_ years.

Classical is either all of Western art music or a particular style within that body whose original heyday was between that of Baroque and Romantic; creating a third definition doesn’t aid in communication.

>To me, 'classical' means that it has survived and thrived across _many_ years.

I believe that would normally be referred to as a classic.

The music is classic?

Yes.

Classical music?

No!

I thought the same way and referred to modern classical music as symphonic music or composition. But a professor friend and composer taught me that modern symphonic music is referred to as classical music. Probably because the approach is a classical one, even if the composer is Stockhausen.

I am close to people who write and play compositions with these traditional orchestral instruments today and they refer to these pieces as “new music” although most people would hear them as “classical” pieces. Most people call a wide swath of several centuries of music “classical” but in the music world, there was technically a very particular Classical music period in the 1700s and early 1800s. When musicians today study at top music schools, no one there calls “classical” what most people outside that world call classical. They refer to the particular time period because they distinguish unique traits between each in the way we might distinguish fairly similar genres today. So, as I said, if some composer today comes up with a new concerto the people in that world call it “new music”.

I like modern classical.. some of it.

There is a radio show with some interesting modern classical I check out weekly. (They archive the shows on the wmbr site for 2 weeks.

https://wmbr.org/cgi-bin/show?id=6708

"it is more about what gets played on the radio. The music is good and new"

But is it good?

That's a matter of taste.

Why hasn't rap died?

It's been popular for multiple generations now.

Hip hip is the philosophy of survival in a racist culture. It dies when the racism dies.

I hope it doesn't. I'd like to see a world without racism and with hip hop. Also, there have been so many changes in the popular sub-genres of hip hop, with each new generation of musicians altering the popular form (maybe not always for the better (RIP DMX)), that it's almost like rap has died and been reborn several times since the 80 -- a bit like rock between the 50s and 2000s.

Oh come off it. Little to no mainstream hip hop addresses racism in any meaningful way. It’s still mostly sex, drugs, objectifying women, glorifying the rich, and violence.

It doesn't have to address racism in any meaningful way to fulfill the function of being centered around identity. When that identity becomes meaningless, the culture around it will lose meaning as well.

The Martians and the Belters will have their own music.

Since when has mainstream music been what is listened to outside of White American culture? Beyond the marketed artists is a voice you're not hearing and it speaks from a culture emerging out of lies told about itself and shunted from economic stability. The economic situations of 99% of the readers of HN is science fiction to large portions the economic underclass in the United States.

That's just silly and I have to question your exposure to the genre. Some of mainsteam hip hop's biggest hits have dealt with racism: This Is America, DAMN, The Black Album, KOD, and hip hop artists have been outspoken about Black Lives Matter and racism.

Let's say hiphop started in 1980 so it's abouyt 41 years old. That's the begining of the 90's for rock music (if we consider it's origins to be the early 50's, though of course none of these dates represent hard boundaries) which feel about right. Hiphop and it's ofspring are the dominant forms of popular music but the tide of creative progress has perhaps slowed somewhat since the peak. Maybe. I don't necessarily believe this because the technological/ cultural landscape for music is so different from the late 20th century that making these broad comparisons doesn't really make sense. I guess my point is that 40ish years isn't that old for a musical genre to still be hanging around.

Jazz also had a long rein as the apex genre for something like 50 years but then fairly quickly succumbed to rock and disco in popularity. I would guess hip hop is past its peak already and it’s also splitting and merging with other genres so it gets hazy

Also note that rock had a back-and-forth influence with country, and rap is now having a back-and-forth influence on rock (and country to a lesser degree).

It kind of has, at least as a mainstream music genre.

What passes for rap (or hip hop) in 2020 is far removed from the golden era of the 80s and 90s.

The Grammy's nixed The Best New Female Raper.

(I don't know why though? I hear Rap everywhere. Well a year ago.)

> The Grammy's nixed The Best New Female Raper.

That seem unsurprising lol. This is why proof reading is so important.

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