'The Endless Refrain' asks: Do we even want new music anymore? | Hacker News Reader

'The Endless Refrain' asks: Do we even want new music anymore?

washingtonpost.com

17 pointstintinnabula22 comments

> Rowell is quick to note that by “we,” he means people over the age of 25, and that he’s focused on “the hold rock and pop music from the past has on us.”

Pop is timeless almost by definition, and rock music is pretty much dead. Beyond being the general trend, I'd bet one reason rap is ascendant is that it's so damn easy to get started - you don't need to gather up friends and buy instruments, everything can be done on your own with just a phone. Running a sequencer or a synthesizer doesn't require the kind of physical talent and training that playing musical instruments does. You don't need to have a great voice or vocal training to spit bars worth listening to.

There’s still plenty of new rock music though. Olivia Rodrigo is selling out stadiums, Chappel Roan isn’t far behind and The Crane Wives are still knocking out incredible album after album.

"You don't need to have a great voice or vocal training to spit bars worth listening to."

No, you also need something to say, worth listening to, which is increasingly missing to me with modern rap.

And a good artist would be a good poet at the same time. Able to play with words and rhytm to get across his message.

So yes, rap might be easier to get started with - even before the time of smartphones, you just made the beat with your mouth.

But it is still not easy to make a good rap song.

The "rock is dead" take will never cease to confuse me. As if I can't go out and find several venues to listen to live rock music on any given night in $major_city...

What are some prominent new rock artists?

Would, to generalize, heavy metal be considered part of rock genre? If the answer is "yes", then oh boy, does it have quite a stream of new bands...

I don't think so, in my mind heavy metal is pretty distinct. I do agree that that's not dead.

Dirty Honey, The Black Tones, Greta Van Fleet.

It's easy to find more with modern music streaming services.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are both popular and novel.

Love these dudes

The 1975 are huge, and The Dare are getting huge.

And there’s a thriving middle class of rock artists: Alvvays, Future Islands, Fontaines DC, MJ Lenderman, Yves Tumor, Alex G all play large if not stadium-sized venues.

You can find classical orchestras everywhere too, but the earshare of classical music isn't much in the non-musician population (and even that is probably artificially propped up by forced exposure in schools).

I want new music. I look for new music and recommendations all the time. There's plenty of new great music, single songs. Finding a whole album that is coherent and amazing though, that's unusual. That requires a group of people who are creative and working consistently together for some amount of time. And they probably need to produce bad music before the good music before the amazing music. I suspect people want the last step but we've lost being able to support bands through the first steps.

Also, there's little incentive for albums now. Current music distribution channels favor singles.

Yes and I feel like without albums you don't get those gems that are under appreciated at the time but go on to outshine the better selling singles.

I recently had the following song enter the rotation of my automatic playlist. I am nearly 40 and I am pretty sure it falls firmly into "Gen-Z music" but it is without a doubt the most fascinating thing I have heard in maybe a decade.

https://youtu.be/fWYg9fFwLNM?si=2vfmn_MRFRLEeYGw

I've had a handful of other supremely weird and interesting young artists come into rotation as well. The thing I find most interesting is that the majority of them when I begin to look into them do not have actual albums. Just a series of singles. Talking to a friend about this, he believes the construct of "putting out an album" is falling by the wayside with the younger generation.

All this is to say though, yes we still need new music. Just maybe not what passes as mainstream these days. The kids do have interesting things to say.

https://archive.ph/0Owya

I recently wrote an article on this topic, focused on the power law dynamics that leave such a small amount of room at the top of the industry: https://www.quantable.com/analytics/power-laws-why-our-new-a...

I don't personally think it's new vs. old as much as the power law distribution coupled with the fact that old music is more available and promoted than ever. Plus the algorithms are focused on giving us more of the same thing we have shown it we like rather than new music discovery.

Tiny desk, always fresh, wow mega wow performances of stuff you never heard and then I stumbled accross a couple of sd cards with +- 100 gigs of live dead shows and sometimes they just chug along and then they will reach deep into there 1000 song tickle trunk and rip a good one cant quite imagine the mind of someone questioning the reality of the human need for novelty and excitement

Art in a humanity where artifacts do not decay, is a loosing game. You play against legends, all day, every day. Add to that low income and now AI generated art - and its a suckers game.

Us vs the Beatles - is a great band name- but it will never be a business model again.

> Art in a humanity where artifacts do not decay, is a loosing game. You play against legends, all day, every day.

I think that might require more than just artifacts not decaying. It might also require culture to stop changing. If future culture is too different from the artist's culture those future people might largely not be able to understand the art. They will prefer art from artists of their culture, or recent enough cultures that they still understand them.

Due to (over?)-connectivity music has gone extreme at both ends. We have the Taylor Swifts and Ed Sheeran's etc. at one extreme and the amazing voice of Elizabeth Fraser (Cocteau Twins, the vocal on Teardrop by Massive Attack etc. etc.) still putting out new stuff [1], with only 6.51K subscribers.

Rock is not dead, its just competing with stuff that didn't exist before it did and is having a hard time competing with everything else created since, to enable its reach to the younger generations. It still reaches some of them though.

Take me back to when music was valuable and not-on tap (i.e. pre Spotify/Napster etc.) and they gave it space to breathe - no loudness wars, no taking up all the bandwidth, instead space - which was a relatively recent production trend that made it hard to sample new music, but also made it fatiguing to listen to, to the point I'll just go back to older stuff. You can see the bandwidth taken up if you loud a track and look at the waveform in a DAW or Audacitity or similar and it mostly peaks at the same level. Older music never did that.

When it was released Radioheads OK Computerhead (1997) sounded significantly louder [2] than any other CD you'd put on your home system. Albeit, they did it with intention and discretion, but set a new loudness bar which had to be reached at the cost of quality, because other bands couldn't afford the cost/time/experience of Radioheads audio-engineers.

I want my ears to be able to learn to discern between 1,2,4,5,7,8,11 rather than just have 2, 6, 10, 14 as options when it comes to dynamic range. Just because the latter sounds louder and drowns out other songs, doesn't mean its better. It's actually worse. Its basically the same as yelling your point in a debate makes it more meaningful - no it doesn't - your noise to signal ratio has increased to obfuscate them meaningfulness of your signal and you just come across as angry/tiring.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@elizabethfraser3796

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic/comments/qmcse3/why_i...

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