Quote:
|
Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi
That was... surreal. Did you really say "trendsetters and tastemakers"? Are they today's John Peels? How do I find them - do I have to Tik the Toks?
Thanks for naming a new band, but I'm afraid if I give you a detailed opinion of them it'll only reinforce your rather twisted opinion of me. Can't help saying this, however: I want, in fact I need, new artists to come up and innovate and game-change shit, but if that's dds then we should all shoot ourselves in the face.
|
I'll take you on your merits here - yes, that's exactly what they are. And it's one of the things that gets me to idolise what musical culture was back in the day. The alternative scene in the 1990s was new and exciting, and it made a lot of breakthroughs in terms of expanding what rock could be, what music was viable to create and listen to and still have some semblance of success. But things hit their limit, stagnation set in, and the idea of innovation in guitar music is just a dead end.
Take Black Country, New Road - a band formed in 2019, a band whose debut record received instant critical adoration and got about as popular as any new indie band could get. And their follow up record
bettered it (in the eyes of many, I disagree). As wonderful as the band has been so far, it's hard to convince yourself that there's anything
new to them - they know this about themselves, they call themselves a Slint tribute act in one of their songs. There's really only so much that can be done with a traditional rock band line-up, and if you take a cursory look at the big records of yesteryear, the 1990s pushed things about as far as they could go. So today's aspiring young rock acts have nowhere to go - bands like the Strokes (forgive me, but they're a good example) took their influences from garage rock of decades prior, but a new band in the 2020s is just going to listen to the Strokes and not anything further out than that. And I feel that that's a big part of why older people bemoan that there's no good music anymore - there are young bands making music in the styles that they like, but since there's no evolution from the better bands of thirty years ago, their aspiring fans may as well just listen to (say) Bob Mould anyway. And that's where the excitement of his new record comes in, and the dismissal from a younger and more cynical generation.
Zoomers don't really have a John Peel (the closest we have is Anthony Fantano - while I'm one of his defenders, this is possibly the most depressing thing I've ever written on this forum). Pitchfork doesn't have the clout that it did in the 00s, and while it may be a good thing that they can't kill off careers anymore (and it's definitely a good thing that they've stopped being exclusively snarky white rockist college boys) it means that we have an atomised, fragmented atmosphere to try and find new music in. You can't find the signal for the noise, at least not until the snowball's become an avalanche and everyone on Twitter is posting about the new Injury Reserve LP. In the 1990s you had a chance of getting your band on MTV, in the 2020s you have to get lucky to get anything
close to that. Rock just isn't a TikTok medium.
I don't really listen to death's dynamic shroud, although I've tried a couple of their albums out. But they're something
different, something that doesn't just rehash music that was tired years before I could discover it. And it feels like we want two impossible things sometimes - we want artists to open up our eyes and give us something we haven't heard before, but we also want it to sound like stuff that hasn't been innovative since the Clinton administration. And I give in sometimes - of the ten artists I listened to the most last year, the most recently popular of them is Modest Mouse. But learning about new music, new bands, is something that's at the very least worth
trying for. Every artist you've posted here was new once, doesn't Geordie Greep deserve the same luxury of being able to coast off his old fame for decades to come?
And P.S., I've never been on TikTok in my life.