Reunions and the State of Popular Music - Music

murmur

I think it would be hard to find someone even paying cursory attention to recent releases who wouldn't acknowledge that we've had a huge surge in reunion and re-emergence albums this decade. My Bloody Valentine, Swans, A Tribe Called Quest, David Bowie, Aphex Twin, The Avalanches, and to a lesser extent QOTSA, D'Angelo, and Radiohead have all risen from the dead to seize AOTY titles 5, 10, 20 years or more after their last critical success. Hell, LCD Soundsystem have barely been broken up a few years and they're already gearing up for a reunion! Now, I personally have found all of these albums middling to bad, but I get why people would enjoy them and don't really want to make this a thread about whether these albums are good or bad. More what I'm interested in is what you think it says about the state of popular music right now that idols from decades past are churning out the "best" music right now? I personally think that a big part of the success of these reunion projects is a music journalism moment focused more on nostalgia. Music journalists, critics, and fans have become increasingly homogenized in their listening and haven't challenged artists to innovate or give us anything new, so it makes sense that the vanguard of decades past can sort of shake their creaky bones and produce something that comes off as magical still. On the other hand, music journalists now probably cut their teeth on blogs founded because of a love for one or more of these acts and see them as mythical figures from a time that their word was worth more because there were fewer music journalists. I also think that these acts are easy and obvious brand investments for big music journals, and they're marketable on a lot of levels. They also can demand higher ticket prices at concerts (or Conde Nast-run festivals) and have cross-generational fanbases that still buy music on overpriced physical media. Because of these factors, it makes sense for the industry to invest more resources and thus get their albums in more people's ears than whatever god-awful seventh-wave indie post-punk math rock blah blah bullshit band that might as well be some creepy Bandcamp EP-generating algorithm.

Does it upset or frustrate you that these acts continue to re-emerge from the woodwork and take a lot of year-end list and overall critical and commercial attention away from emerging acts? Does it worry you that popular music (specifically rock, as most of these are rock or rock-adjacent acts) is wheezing its last breaths of creativity if mainstays from the '70s, '80s, and '90s are still making better music than contemporary acts?

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Gender: Female

Age: 40

There's new stuff happening, but people don't usually like it because it doesn't sound like old stuff. I am very satisfied with the amount of established artists pushing their work forward and new people putting fresh takes out there.

Applerill

Autistic Princess <3

Gender: Female

Age: 31

Location: Chicago

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/985...earch=true

One of the best books I've read in the past few months, and it details this phenomenon extraordinarily well. It even has a chapter on shibuya-kei.

RoundTheBend

I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

Applerill wrote:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/985...earch=true

One of the best books I've read in the past few months, and it details this phenomenon extraordinarily well. It even has a chapter on shibuya-kei.

Fascinating!

I think this has always been a fad/thing though.

Every decade has relived the past in some way, yet still managed to have a totally unique landscape.

I think the 2010s have a unique landscape too... and I think for the first time artists don't feel like they have to make pop music if that makes sense (oversimplified statement).

I don't have the time to really describe what I mean by this so I apologize if it doesn't come out right:

I think a complex combination of the interwebs (both pirating and streaming services), capitalism, generational culture, the death of the importance of a record label, all have attributed to our musical environment today to be different than it has been in the past.

I mean every decade wasn't the same either in regards to the topics I briefly mentioned above, not assuming that they were.

murmur

I mean, I have a lot of stuff that I like that's come out recently and see the past six years as possibly the best years of music ever, particularly the last two or three. I just mean to say that a sort of vintage paradigm of like capital-r Rock music following Robert Christgau's generation of rock canonization (what I would term popular music) seems to be fading, or rather maybe eating its own tail at this point. And I think it's a bit more than just fad revivalism. Sure, artists had blast-from-the-past album releases in the '80s and '90s and older conceits were tried in new ways (Flaming Lips channeling Floyd, for one of hundreds of examples), but something seems fundamentally different to me about the current landscape.

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I think a big part of what's different is our relationship with the past. It was less accessible before the internet, moments happened because people were forced into them. now everyone is much freer to focus in on something particular, so there's less overall consensus, but the power of the dead monoculture brings more people in on the old ppl and the people who like it but don't love it push it to be the most visible music happening.

RoundTheBend

I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

murmur wrote:

I mean, I have a lot of stuff that I like that's come out recently and see the past six years as possibly the best years of music ever, particularly the last two or three. I just mean to say that a sort of vintage paradigm of like capital-r Rock music following Robert Christgau's generation of rock canonization (what I would term popular music) seems to be fading, or rather maybe eating its own tail at this point. And I think it's a bit more than just fad revivalism. Sure, artists had blast-from-the-past album releases in the '80s and '90s and older conceits were tried in new ways (Flaming Lips channeling Floyd, for one of hundreds of examples), but something seems fundamentally different to me about the current landscape.

Oh of course... hence the somewhat derogatory term of dadrock. And yes I agree it is more than ever before.

Quick 5th grade read I find kind of interesting... having a hard time articulating why this is so interesting, especially the last paragraph bringing the generational discusion together (but that's only 20% of what I'm trying to say):https://www.theguardian.com/music/short...-pop-music

RoundTheBend

I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

Tap wrote:

I think a big part of what's different is our relationship with the past. It was less accessible before the internet, moments happened because people were forced into them. now everyone is much freer to focus in on something particular, so there's less overall consensus, but the power of the dead monoculture brings more people in on the old ppl and the people who like it but don't love it push it to be the most visible music happening.

Very well said.