-------------
Faced with the unutterable, words still disintigrate...
And ever new, out of the most quivering stones, music builds her divine house in useless space.
-Rilke
-------------
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
I am moody.
|
[I am not very good at html]
|
|
|
sometimes i wish... [a blog]
|
|
| |
Tuesday, May 06, 2003
So, someone asked me about where music is going...
I feel like today is a good day to make a prediction. And it is just that, a total prediction of which I have no way of being sure. So here it goes, as of May 6th, 2003, this is what I think:
There's been a great uprising of existentialism in music in the past few years--things about meaninglessness and such. I guess it sort of was an inadvertand reaction to overly sentimental "emo" type stuff. "Shut up emo kid, life doesn't really matter anyway." Heh. It works well with post-modern post-rock type music; as in, if the concentration is largely on the self-indulgent pretentious music itself, there is no need for meaning outside of the music. That slowly gave way to, or even coincided with, there is meaning in beauty alone. In the wake of 9-11 and the recent Iraq crisis, musician's suddenly see the value of human life and the importance of politics again. There will at least be some brief resurgence of political themes in music for a while--see Radiohead's new album title "Hail to the Theif," Sigur Ros's apocolyptic video for "Untitled #1," and various other recent releases [Godspeed You! Black Emporer's latest, Of Montreal's recent "If He Is Protecting Our Nation, Then Who Will Protect Big Oil, Our Children?" etc]. Political urgency will bring about more musical urgency. But that won't be all, there'll be an equal and opposite reaction to that with music focused on far happier elements. The dark, brooding elements of recent post-rock and will be replaced with more uplifting ones. Growing popularity of bands such as The Postal Service indicates to me a renewed fascination with electronic pop and how elements of IDM [the mind-bending blips and squeaks mastered by Autechre and the whole Warp Records crew] can fit into that. Instead of the garage rock trend, we'll have more of a retro pop trend with new bands such as "Saturday Looks Good to Me" at the forefront using trumpets and keyboards and the like. Every generation tends to hate the one before it, so there will be less 90's-angst and more 80's-pop in new music, only taken to a more complex level than before [coming from IDM and post-rock].
That's what my thoughts are on the matter. But I cannot say any of it is certain, or even extremely likely.
3:28 PM
|
|
| |
|
|
|
