Future Classics?

[HoldenM]

More specifically, what songs from today, or even the last decade or so, will go on to be staples of "classic [blank] radio"? What songs will go on to canonization the way songs like "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Hotel California," or "Don't Stop Believin'"? Who is the next Bon Jovi, who has one album with singles that simply WILL NOT DIE, but are beloved by mainstream culture anyway? Are there any songs or tracks that you could see being used in a period piece about today that may not be particularly popular, but may inform audiences of the aesthetic of the era? Similarly, are there any records that have been relatively ignored now that one could see getting wide rebirth or reappraisal?

Thoughts? Ideas?
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Inversion Verses
https://thesplitinfinitives1.bandcamp.c...ion-verses

[Precedent]

i'm sure that in hip-hop, Drake, Kanye, and Kendrick will all have a few tracks that will remain relevant

from an unbiased perspective, i see Take Care being remembered as a classic album filled with classic tracks, but yeah

and for albums that could get bigger as time goes on, James Blake's self-titled, The 20/20 Experience, Days Are Gone, and Random Access Memories all come to mind

[Applerill]

"What's with music being so immoral today? Back in my day we had good clean music like Kanye West and Miley Cyrus and Drake."-Me at 65

[meccalecca]

[Precedent]

[AAL2014]

Agree on the 20/20 Experience, it's not one of my favorites, but it's not bad, and a lot of my friends (really into music or otherwise) really dig that album.

To Pimp A Butterfly will be remembered. I think Kendrick in general will go down as one of the great rappers of all time. Same with Sufjan Stevens in his respective genre.
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Attention all planets of the solar federation: We have assumed control.

[Satie]

I really think this is a weird question for this moment in time because it seems like the publications tasked with canonizing popular music are having huge identity crises in the face of how diverse popular music has become and the fact that there aren't as clear of social boundaries between fans of electronic, hip hop, indie rock, and even metal music (but the stupid poors can keep their fucking country the fuck away from us, seems to be the consensus on such sites). I also think that fewer music nerds rely as much on Pitchfork as they did even ten years ago and certainly not as much as I imagine the music buffs of the late '60s and '70s followed Rolling Stone, etc. So the question what counts as canon material and the question of what counts as stuff that will continue to be put under a fresh lens to be examined again and again as time goes on because of its singular depth are sort of different, in my eyes. Maybe even opposed? I'm more interested in the latter question, at any rate.

In that category of classic, I think you're gonna see a lot of mainstream crossover acts defined in such a way, though I think time will shed some of the critic fervor around their material during their crossover period and tend to focus more on their obscurities. Specifically, I think Daniel Lopatin and James Ferraro fit this definition best, and I think the starting point for Ferraro will stop being his passive influence on the stupidest fucking micro-genre of all time, so we'll stop seeing people listening to Far Side Virtual and instead opting for the stuff of his that grows out of industrial music and does hypnagogic pop better than any chillwaver. Lopatin might be a bit different, 'cause I think his music that's crossed over has done such because the zeitgeist has caught up to him as opposed to him dumbing himself down too much, but that might be bias on my part because I personally enjoy his most recent work more than the ambient noodling of yesteryear. I also think Arca and A. G. Cook's ubiquitousness will probably keep them in a certain pantheon. Unfortunately, most of the music Adam Harper is writing about, while being my favorite and I think the best area of music that continues to push the zeitgeist, will likely be divided into camps as footnotes on the legacies of the bigger producers who endorsed them, collaborated with them, etc.

For rock music, I genuinely don't see a single rock artist working today as standing the test of time. I think that as we get farther and farther away in time from Swans's latest material, more and more people will do what Scaruffi's doing and realize that it's ultimately bland, lifeless, and overdone material that doesn't really compare to their back catalog too well. I think that a general fondness for nostalgia in rock music, epitomized by groups like Tame Impala and Vampire Weekend, is going to doom this era to irrelevance in serious historical retrospectives of the genre. But the eighties somehow yielded a lot of great rock music that no one was hearing anywhere, so maybe I'm over-estimating the purview of the Internet to expose me to the stuff that might be dug up to match the Husker Dus and Butthole Surfers that happened in that venerable wasteland of decent rock music.

[Precedent]

I only see The Age Of Adz and Illinois being remembered from Sufjan

[Precedent]

Agree with Satie on Daniel and James, too.

[Satie]

Why Age of Adz? I agree though that Carrie and Lowell is going to go the way of Tallest Man on Earth and be completely irrelevant by this time next year (sorry, Mercury. none of my favorite music ever even starts being relevant, so don't look so down!)