We’ve all heard friends like this. “There’s no good music around any more”, they say, like Homer Simpson. We know there’s all kinds of wonderful music out there in every genre from prog-rock to death metal to alt.country to electronic to solo bass to many many more that most people have never heard of. But they only know of the ITV Indie and Asda-pop of the commercial mainstream.
Steve Lawson said on Twitter
Ever heard anyone complaining that there’s no good music around any more? Those people are insane. Ignore them.
But I think Steve Lawson, thought he has a point, is still being a little bit on the harsh side, and although the people he rails about are indeed quite wrong, I can understand where they’re coming from.
When these people were in their teens and early 20s, they had plenty of time to discover new music. All the best music was well outside the commercial mainstream; they listened to the radio late at night, bought music papers, went to gigs, traded tapes with friends, all of it to discover the good stuff.
Now they’re older, with jobs and mortgages and kids, and they no longer have the time do that. All the new music they hear is the lowest common denominator slop served up by the mass media, drivel like X-Factor or daytime commercial radio.
What they forget is the mainstream media always was rubbish. At their seventies peak even huge selling acts like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin were conspicuous by their absence from TV or daytime radio, and people who weren’t active music fans were unaware of their existence. TV was filled with the likes of Brotherhood of Man and The Nolan Sisters in the same way as today has formulaic landfill indie.
Same as it ever was, if you want good music, you have to go look for it.
It’s not like you have to look very hard now though, is it? Nothing like the effort required in the 70s. The tricky bit is knowing when to pause and take stock.
Yes, they’re certainly lazy. But it does take a bit of time and effort to find the good music amidst the much larger amount of dross.
“Insane” might be a bit much, but it is certainly a cry for help. And they may not be listening to the mainstream as such – it is hard to avoid it sometimes. But if the “alternative” parts of the mainstream (“Later….” etc.) don’t deliver either, then people can get a bit frustrated. I’m speaking from relatively recent experience on this. In retrospect, I was making a very poor job of finding new music, but I needed some kind of “filter”. Classic Rock Presents Prog solved that.
Maybe it’s not so much that there’s no good music as that there is even more crap. Yes, crap’s always been more common, but now there’s even more of it. (I don’t have stats but just the fact that you can have like 12 different station formats, most of which have some new music on them every week, whereas when I was a kid there were far fewer). Even if it stays the same proportionally, it might hit some kind of critical mass where there is just too much crap. The thing that bugs me sometimes is that I’m pretty sure there is some music out there that I would really like and will probably never ever hear.
(And I definitely have the ‘not as much time for music’ problem.)
radio late at night, bought music papers, went to gigs, traded tapes with friends
That is exactly how I got most of my best music as a teen. (Also a few super popular bands I read about in books, like the Clash.)
If you are despairing, here’s some deeply beautiful music that’s wrenched out of the gut and the cerebrals
https://vimeo.com/86499992