Growing up the dominant critical narrative that I was aware of in popular music was that musicians who synthesized previously isolated and separate styles or strands of music were idolized or priveleged as being "better" - innovation was a desirable goal, increasing the possibilities of what was considered popular music (or jazz or rock or whatever) was a hallmark of a good musician, an "original", someone to be admired and emulated. Whether it was the Beatles or Sun Ra or James Brown or John Cage or Kraftwerk or whoever - they were praised for "pushing the boundaries" of music and and its definitions.
Is this concept dead, and if so, why? Is it just that technology and aesthetics have expanded so far that they have reached the limits of human hearing, and "innovation" is now no longer possible or relevant? On the one hand there's no real purists anymore (Geir excepted), so there's no real boundaries to buck against, and on the other hand there's no real "new" syntheses anymore either - every existing genre and subgenre has been revived and recombined in all the possible permutations. The definition of music now encompasses every conceivable sound detectable by the human ear. This being the case - it makes the old aesthetic of praising things for their "newness" or novelty or "promise" of a richer, more varied future seem pointless... so what's gonna take its place? Is a whole new aesthetic sensibility forming...? It doesn't seem possible that technology will enable any real new sounds, since we can already reproduce sounds that reach the physical limits of what human beings can hear.
― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 24 May 2007 18:17 (nineteen years ago)
what are some musicians who are pushing the boundries of RIP threads
― and what, Thursday, 24 May 2007 18:19 (nineteen years ago)
For one thing, there was the drive of modernism, but modernism reached limits beyond which it could not go - in classical music it was aleatoric music and total serialism and in rock and roll it was noise. (Jojo Hiroshige of Hijokaidan said, "Noise is the last genre.") In jazz it was free jazz, etc.
Creative expansiveness was more of a romantic principle and certainly reached limits, too - Wagner, Mahler, etc.
In any case, we're in the postmodern period which is not about expanding vocabularies or pushing boundaries.
― Tim Ellison, Thursday, 24 May 2007 18:24 (nineteen years ago)
humor me and tell me what you think it IS about...? I fear the answer will be depressing.
― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 24 May 2007 18:30 (nineteen years ago)
New technologies will continue to create innovations. There was talk on the Simian Mobile Disco thread about Reason, Audacity, mp3s, laptop speakers etc ripping the bass from the heart of dance music. Not that many people on that thread were buying it. Still, the Planet Mu/grime/hardcore stuff could not have came about without those technologies and there's a lot those programs can do that has not been properly explored. The Roland 303 was knocking about for years, essentially as a bassline metronome for guitarists, before someone decided to push it's limits and came up with acid house.
― everything, Thursday, 24 May 2007 18:38 (nineteen years ago)
No, it's not at all because it entails a more prioritized valuing of aesthetics as meaningful in and of themselves. In a nutshell, I think it's about style itself. Not as something new - we've already done modernism and futurism - but using a pre-existing aesthetic base.
xp
― Tim Ellison, Thursday, 24 May 2007 18:42 (nineteen years ago)
I highly doubt that any of those programs can actually create soundwaves/frequencies/tones heretofore unavailable through previous technologies. They may allow the recombination of various elements but that's not the same thing... for example, the first synthesizers produced sounds that were previously not reproducible by any other instrument or combination of instruments, they really were "new" sounds. Subtracting a single element (like the bass from dance music) seems like a minor "innovation" to me. More like an adjustment in the details of composition.
x-post
― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 24 May 2007 18:42 (nineteen years ago)
A new theocratic age! Art invites direct communication with the godhead! CCM assumes unprecedented importance?
― dr. phil, Thursday, 24 May 2007 18:44 (nineteen years ago)
so Tim you expect that the emerging pattern will be to invest old genres or reference points with new meanings...? I wish I could say I see this happening but currently it seems more common to just mash a bunch of shit together randomly with no real thought given to the overall aesthetic or what it might represent.
― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 24 May 2007 18:53 (nineteen years ago)
There's plenty of good postmodern music that really values the aesthetics in which it's invested.
I don't think it's an emerging pattern, really. Maybe it's still emerging. I mean, it was a leap for AFI to sound so New Pop on "Love Like Winter." I think in rock and roll the first major thing that was really primarily about the aesthetics themselves was the Paisley Underground.
Also, there's maybe some trouble with the idea of investing things with new meanings. The meaning is in the aesthetics.
― Tim Ellison, Thursday, 24 May 2007 19:01 (nineteen years ago)
xpost that's cuz people need practice
― bernard snowy, Thursday, 24 May 2007 19:01 (nineteen years ago)
Or the idea that it's about "investing things with new meanings," I mean to say.
(Actually, I think that AFI song sounds more like Asia or something, but it was still a leap.)
― Tim Ellison, Thursday, 24 May 2007 19:04 (nineteen years ago)
Only a purely conceptual level (and I know this sounds like I'm talking out of my ass, but I don't think I am), the boundaries were pushed about as far as they could go a long time ago. Cage's whole aesthetic of not making music a vehicle to express feeling is way more radical than most of what gets discussed here, for instance. (That's not to see I find Cage's idea attractive, I don't.) I feel that I mostly came to terms with this issue a long time again, while reading about concept art and reading Cage. Both of those things took away much of my taste for making a virtue of how far art pushed the boundaries. (Concept artist Joseph Kosuth said something like "That art is best which most questions the nature of art," or something like that. Well, baloney skins.) Okay, now I will actually read the thread.
― Rockist Scientist, Thursday, 24 May 2007 22:55 (nineteen years ago)
no I think that's helpful - Cage is major here obviously, in terms of how hard he pushed the "what IS music, really" angle.
― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, 24 May 2007 23:16 (nineteen years ago)
(That should have been "on a. . ." not "only".)
― Rockist Scientist, Thursday, 24 May 2007 23:17 (nineteen years ago)
Cage is major here obviously, in terms of how hard he pushed the "what IS music, really" angle.
Not just that, though - major in terms of modernism as well and the limits of abstraction.
― Tim Ellison, Friday, 25 May 2007 00:30 (nineteen years ago)
I think the shrinking palette of recylcyed culture might factor into the change of course.
With Hip-Hop, every year in the 80s saw a new technology come forward and push things further (drum machines, emulators, percussion samplers, etc). Then the sampling cases hit, and the Motif/Triton boards became the house piano for most Hip-Hop studios. Couple this with newly interested A&R depts, and the formula gets institutionalized.
However I've heard some of my electronic music friends cite the goal is little more than "invent a new genre". That taxonomy keeps growing...
Or maybe to some, post-rock was largely a bore, so go back to basics for a while.
― PappaWheelie V, Friday, 25 May 2007 02:25 (nineteen years ago)