Here's a theory: Sometime back around the turn of the millennium, at the height of Napster and other file-sharing services, the bottom dropped out of the music industry. The public collectively decided that they were no longer willing to pay for music (why pay for something that could be obtained for free?) and the price of the commodity basically fell to zero. Record companies folded, A&R men lost their jobs, MTV started airing reality TV instead of music videos, and musicians found themselves without recording or other contracts.
To be sure, it was a hard time for many, and a lot of people suffered. That's truly unfortunate, but there was also a silver lining - with big mega-bucks no longer guaranteed to successful acts, a lot of the fakers, the copy-cats and con men, got out of the business. For a while there, the only people left making music were the true believers, the hard-core artists who made music because it was the only thing they knew how to do. It was in their blood, and they'd perform music for a group of friends at home or a small gathering at the local coffee shop just as readily as for a sold-out Madison Square Garden. No one expected to even turn a profit, much less get rich, so the only people left making music were the true musicians.
And the music they made was wonderful. Since no one expected anything to sell, the musicians were at last free to play anything they wanted, to play what they'd always wanted to play and not what the record companies wanted them to or what the execs told them. They didn't have to sound like whatever was the current No. 1-selling LP, and with their newfound freedom they played some truly beautiful and eclectic music, independent of the labels, the Billboard Top 100, or the demands of a now non-existent market. For once, creativity and innovation were valued over familiarity and conformity, and bands actively competed to break down old barriers and expand their horizons, rather than sell "product" to "the market."
This was the birth of indie rock, music that was independently distributed by individual musicians.
As noted in Part 1, I had been listening to rock music pretty much as long as it had existed - from the early Beatles of the 1960s up to late 90s alt rock. Taste is subjective and many people have their own opinions on what decade produced the best music. Boomers maintain that nothing good has been recorded since the 60s and 70s, while Gen X prefers the music of the 80s and 90s. I had the experience of having listened to music from all of those decades in real time, as it happened. The music of the 80s and 90s are as much a part of my life as the music of the 60s and 70s, so I'm not predisposed to liking only a single decade because that was the one during which I happened to have arrived.
Having said that, I'll state that I believe the the post-Y2K indie renaissance produced the best rock music ever, better than any previous decade. And not to put too fine a point on it, but as it took a couple of post-millennial years for that renaissance to fully flower, the best 10 years of music probably occurred between the years 2005 and 2015.
Every decade has produced some wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime music and albums. There's never been a year, much less a decade, when good music hadn't been created. But in that 10-year-span of 2005 to 2015, there was an exceptionally large number of outstanding records released, and the quality of the best of them probably surpassed anything else before. Think of a bell curve with its rounded peak at the year 2010, the mid-point of the 10-year-span, and tails stretching out to and beyond the years 2005 and 2015 at the two opposing ends. The y-axis is both the number of great recordings released in each of those years as well as the impossible-to-quantify quality of those recordings. It's subjective, I'll admit, which is why it's all "in my opinion."
But there you have it - the money dropped out of the music business, and musicians, liberated from the free-market demands of the industry, responded with innovative, creative and extraordinary music. After this movement peaked sometime around 2010, some people started figuring out ways to capitalize on the new sounds (streaming revenue, merchandising, the festival circuit, etc), and others dropped out of music altogether in order to get so-called "real" jobs to feed families and support their loved ones. This brought about a gradual decline, the back end of my bell-shaped curve, and now, while there's still some great new music being created - just like there always had been - that bubble has passed and the indie renaissance is over.
What I'm so thankful for, in addition to that renaissance even occurring in the first place, was that I was there to observe (actually, to hear) it.
As noted in Part 1, even before Y2K, the years were creeping up on me and I had stopped going out to hear live bands sometime in the mid 90s. At 45. I was just too old. What's more, my interest was increasingly in listening and re-listening to music with which I was familiar (the veridical), rather than the new (the sequential). But the chance encounter with that on-line Best of 2005 list, the soundtracks to Garden State and Stranger Than Fiction, and songs like Modern Slang and Young Folks, alerted me to the fact that there was something new going on, and I am so glad that I responded and didn't miss the gorgeous sounds within that bell-shaped curve.
Bonus points: rock music, having been around for some 50 or so years, now has its own traditions, idioms, modes, and language, and much of the music of the indie renaissance was post-modern in the sense that it quoted freely from and incorporated the sounds of the previous five decades. Unlike much of its younger audience, I was not only familiar with the sounds being sampled and quoted and extrapolated upon, but I had an emotional, time-and-place connection with much of the source materials.
But, as I said, it's all over and it's probably been all over for a full five years by now. Again, that's not to say that there isn't good music still being played (there is), it's just that we're now in the long tail of the bell-shaped curve and there's less of that good music being performed and the quality generally (although not never) doesn't reach the dizzying, stratospheric heights of the peak of the curve.
So now, in this science-fiction-sounding year 2020, I find myself, once again, listening nostalgically to music of 10, 15, and 20 years ago, ignoring the current scene and enjoying the repertory sounds of a nostalgic past. Live performances that interest me are far fewer and further in between than before, and most music festivals are now dominated by hip-hop, pop, and dance music. And let's face it - I'm now 15 years older than I was when I decided that, age be damned, I'm going to go back out and enjoy shows I want to see whether I fit in or not, and at some point, it's starting to get awkward. Last year, security was following me around at a show at the god-damned Masquerade because the bouncers couldn't figure out why an old man was there attending the show.
What does music mean to me? Not what it did 10 years ago, not what it did 5 years ago, not even what it did 2 years ago. I still enjoy music (I'm listening to the French post-rock band Natural Snow Buildings now as I write this) and I won't go so far as to say I've attended my last rock concert, but like the indie renaissance itself, I'm in the long tail of my bell-shaped curve.
So what does music mean to me now?
Damn if I know. I can't imagine life without some sort of soundtrack to it, and I'm still fascinated by observing the seemingly magical process of musicians conjuring sound on stage. I also suspect that even right now as I write, there's probably some new music scene emerging of which I am totally unaware but in a few years will be saying "Yeah, I was into that way back in 2020."
There's always something new.
No comments:
Post a Comment