If you look at the pop music charts for the last decade or so, one of the things you will not notice is the modern nature of the big bands. The reason you will not notice how bands have changed is that there are few bands on the charts. In fact, bands have just about disappeared from popular music. The few bands you see on the music services are those from a bygone era. The biggest selling bands are often those that no longer exist or still kick around playing for old people.
Instead, what you see are solo acts or the occasional dance group assembled like a Broadway play to perform to manufactured content. Even the “boy band” has faded from the scene for the same reason bands have disappeared. That reason is it is much easier for the music industry to create and produce a solo act than to find a band and then develop it into a top attraction. The same is true of “boy bands” which require some degree of organization and management.
Of course, as the doors to bands have closed in corporate music, the selection pressure for musical acts has changed. If a young person has any musical talent, she is better served investing her time in imitating the corporate acts, using software tools readily available to everyone now. She then posts her material to YouTube, hoping to get a following and then maybe catch the eye of corporate. Learning to play instruments and perform in front of a crowd is pointless.
One reason for this change in popular music is money. The music industry, like every industry in America, is fully financialized. This means everything about it is driven by factors like interest rates, return over time and investment opportunities. A “new act” is not judged on musical ability, novelty, or the personal tastes of the industry people, but by the accepted financial models of the industry. Just as wind tunnels made all our cars look the same, finance homogenized popular music.
For example, now that Taylor Swift is packing on pounds and years, the search is on for a singer who will do the same act for the same audience. The “same audience” in this context is age, sex, race, and economic model. The next wave of that demo is not going to get excited by a portly spinster, so they will find a younger model with a slightly different look to do the role. Even if she is not as popular with the target demo, the math of the model is predictable and safe.
The same sort of math affects the live show business. The people hosting the show want predictable sales and returns. The people producing the tour also want predictable sales and returns. The reason for that is the investors want predictable sales and returns, so the live shows follow a proven model. Since the money comes from the same source in terms of expectations, the effect has been a narrowing of the music industry around highly predictable products.
Another reason for the narrowing of the business around controllable solo performers is the market has changed. People spending hundreds of dollars on live shows want a predictably good time. They are not going to invest in an unknown, because that might mean not having the expected good time. In a culture that prizes safety and security above all else, bands are a high-risk proposition. The culture they represent in popular music is an affront to the culture of the modern audience.
Another fact is the death of radio. Once all the pop music stations were consolidated into a few massive corporations, the result was corporate slop. The first to go were the music directors, then the disc jockeys were chopped. The soundtrack to the modern age is the monotony of corporate radio. The legendary “shock jock” Anthony Cumia talked about this in a speech he gave at American Renaissance. Corporate radio is now as dead as the garage band.
Young people still want to play instruments and make music and the tools for producing good music are now freely available. The days of needing a studio are pretty much over as far as producing professional audio content. That means interested people can create bands and put their content out to the world. In theory, the same democratizing process that we have seen in other forms of content applies to music, but for some reason it has not democratized pop music.
This suggests there is something different about popular music compared to writing, podcasting, or livestreaming. Anyone can make music if they desire, just as anyone can publish a book or create a political talk show, but the latter forms have been vastly more successful compared to the music variety. Music needs social proof to gain an audience and that is manufactured at the same place the music is now manufactured. Without corporate, it is impossible to be a pop star.
There also may be a larger cultural issue at work. The concept of the pop star is a 20th century phenomena. Prior to that, entertainers existed on the fringe of society, generally regarded as low status. The 20th century is when this flipped around, and we got big stars from the entertainment world. We may be reverting to the norm as entertainment declines in both quality and status. The disappearing band phenomena is not just an American thing. It is thing everywhere.
What we may be seeing with pop music, and maybe movies and television as well, is the end of a peculiar cultural phenomena. These forms of entertainment were spawned in the 20th century. As that time recedes into the past, the culture of that time follows with it. The important parts of that culture, like the rock band, are fading away as well, to be replaced by whatever the next culture desires. As the West finally leaves the 20th century it is leaving behind its culture.
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worth mentioning is the practice of lip synching supposedly live performances, and having all or some of the backing music being recorded. and people are paying hundreds of dollars a seat for this slop.
a much better value, IMO, is going to see tribute bands. some of them are really decent musicians, able to recreate the live shows of the original band.
I was offered a free ticket to the rolling stones a while back, I like the band, their best songs are close to perfect imo, but I turned it down because its a stadium gig. Once a band starts playing stadiums it’s kind of pointless. Unless it’s a band like Rammstein which does work on a large scale. I find the Taylor Swift BS funny, I don’t know any of her “music” so I can’t comment on it from that angle, I don’t think her fans actually like music, there is something else at play, they need to be part… Read more »
That’s the real thing. I actually kinda sorta “follow” Taylor Swift, because she / her team have figured out how to be, for lack of a better term, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a Wagnerian “total art work” (but fake and gay, obviously). Her biggest fans by far are at the far end of “the demo” — in their late 40s, as opposed to their mid-teens. I don’t know if they actually listen to her songs; the songs seem to be an entry point for the entire soap opera that is The Taylor Swift Experience. She’s like a walking, talking soap opera —… Read more »
‘the NFL is rigging games just to get her more screen time, because the NFL is desperately chasing the AWFL dollar like everyone else’
Like pigs at the Empire’s Trough.
The past 4 decades have seen an immense transfer of wealth from males to female. The spooks say that the Future is Female for a reason.
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/personal-finance/women-will-get-124-trillion-great-wealth-transfer-rcna196076
Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots.
‘Swift BS funny, I don’t know any of her “music” so I can’t comment on it from that angle, I don’t think her fans actually like music, there is something else at play, they need to be part of something’
Elevator music for the Hive.
She makes them feel beautiful, hot, desirable, sexy. Since she is extolled as such, while being attainably so. Allowing millions of borderline attractive aging single cat women to believe that they also are, or could be. If she is, then they can be too! Tell me why else she dresses like a cabaret dancer to perform in front of audiences of mostly women. It’s not because they’re dykes (I don’t think).
“Tell me why else she dresses like a cabaret dancer to perform in front of audiences of mostly women.”
Others have talked about the differences in male and female cultural likes. Generally stated, males want someone they can relate with, females want to insert themselves or believe they’re the person in the book, movie, or whatever.
Yeah, I’ve never been into stadiums.
I find the best musical experiences are ballroom and concert halls of a few hundred people.
You know what they say about fools and their money.
Saw Carl Palmer & “An evening with Emerson Lake and Palmer” a few weeks ago. Despite the fact that Lake died several years ago, Palmer found a singer who does their music justice. It was a great show!
Saw him in 2019, he had Arthur Brown come out and sing “Fire!”
Good lord, that is about the most menacing and demonic song ever recorded. The organ in that song… **smh**
Doesn’t Carl Palmer also have a guitarist playing the keyboard parts of the late, great Keith Emerson?
My first concert ever as a teenager was ELP playing Soldier Field in the “Super Bowl of Rock” with a 70 piece orchestra. They dropped the orchestra after several shows because it was extremely expensive.
ELP were an ambitious band pushing the boundaries, blending rock and classical with virtuoso musicianship and were very successful. Record companies would give some leeway on bands doing different, original things back then.
Parts of those pieces, yes. Although I’m not sure I would classify it as a guitar, as it made sounds that are identical to a keyboard. Until that show, I had never seen it before and I’m not sure what it is.
I think you’re thinking of the Chapman Stick his bass player sometimes uses. Which can be processed to sound like a keyboard (was when I saw him)
Someday, fifty years into the future, there will be Tribute Bands to Tribute Bands. “American Originals” are a thing of the past.
These days, the music business is all inside baseball. Taylor Swift’s father managed a hedge fund, she was a millionaire before she opened her mouth to sing note one. Britany Spears started as a Mousekateer for Disney. Billie Elish came from a Hollywood family. The A&R people no longer haunt the clubs scouting for talent, because they now grow their own. The days of 4 kids from a Liverpool slum or a truck driver from Mississippi walking into a recording studio and changing the world are long gone. It’s become like being a funeral director. If you grandfather isn’t one,… Read more »
A current star who looks like she’s moving into Swift-like popularity, Sabrina Carpenter, started as a child actress on some show on the Disney Channel.
I hope she’s a little fatter than the last noteworthy Carpenter…
In all seriousness, Karen Carpenter had one of the very most beautiful Contralto voices in all of 21st Century music.
The internet seemed to think she could go a full three octaves.
What a beautiful beautiful voice she had.
What a terribly tragic life she lived.
No question about it. I admire her talent greatly.
Autotune could have only made her worse
She was plagued with a Showbiz mom who made her life miserable.
If you listen to Rainy Days and Mondays on a good set of headphones, you can feel her breath on your ears.
Many such cases. The mouse-to-masses pipeline includes Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Hilary Duff, Miley Cyrus, Raven Simone, the Jonas Brothers, Dylan Sprouse, Demi Lovato, and now that intolerable Zendaya. Nickelodeon has a similar pipeline which foisted Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Nick Cannon, and Kiki Palmer on polite society. There’s some crossover between the two groups. Pop stars are much easier to control when you’ve been training them since kids to be compliant and obedient to the system. As the Good Book says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he… Read more »
They all suck! Cookie-cutter mediocrities for an idiot demographic of spiteful mutants. They are product, not artists.
The entertainment business is a minefield that has ruined many lives. I would never encourage a child of mine to enter it (with the possible exception of classical music).
I think Country Music may prove to be the exception here. The audience still craves some “authenticity”. Some of the bigger stars – Eric Church, Chris Stapleton, Luke Bryan, Luke Combs et alia, even the sketchy Jelly Roll – seem like regular guys, at least to me.
In pop music, we will live to see AI-generated stars. They are more dependable as investments than Kanye or Diddy lol.
Country music is as fake as everything else. Their audience does seem to be more trusting, probably because their communities held higher levels of social trust than other parts of the country. The old school legit country singers have hated what the industry has become for 30+ years.
I always found country music to be the same as rap, over produced and stupid for the most part. Bluegrass had a revival in the early 2010’s, that is what i was listening to back then. Not sure if it is still as popular today.
https://youtu.be/uZz9bAp44fA
I don’t know who they are but I like Z’s intro music for his Friday podcasts.
Nashville country is awful and has been the last 30+ years. But there are independent country musicians–Sturgill Simpson, Jamie Johnson, etc.–who are worthy of respect. At least their music, unlike the Nashville frauds, sounds traditional and genuine.
Agree and I would add Billy Strings, who was just on Rick Beato’s youtube show. Remarkable talent.
You can have the crown!
Saw him live when he was an unknown in the early 2010’s. Opening for Devil makes three (great band by the way) He started playing that and i started paying attention.
https://youtu.be/gRk4-sIaL7Y
Yes. Add to that list Chris Knight and if you haven’t checked him out he is highly recommended. Caught him in a small venue–as far as I know he has never played a large one–and it was a bittersweet reminder of how good country once was.
Yes. Noah Gundersen as well. Country and other genres have bifurcated. In country there are some people who are making some of the best in the genre and also pushing it forward. Stapleton is fantastic. Then there is the product which is just cliches and stereotypes and utter garbage. The same has happened in things like progressive metal. There is some incredible music and talent out there. However, unlike country that genre presents formidable challenges because of the economics of touring, massive headwinds to band formation … … I think AI will kill of the rest of popular entertainment which… Read more »
I have a friend who works in the music industry down in Nashville. He told me CEO’s and producers who actually like country music check out local, authentic acts in small venues but would never even consider signing the performers, no matter how good. That’s insane.
Have you tried listening to the “2nd South Carolina String Band”?
They sing a very high energy version of Our National Anthem:
https://tinyurl.com/rbwaafmb
There are some real musicians, such as Chris Stapleton, whose guitar work and voice are amazing. Hard to believe that he started out writing songs for other folks when he has a such an amazing voice.
There are other acts, such as Midland, that recall the glory days of real country. But the vast majority of them are like the pop music, this time churned out by the Nashville system.
I don’t know, country seems very formulaic to me as well. Nothing new there since the Nashville sound, it’s all “bro country” and has been for a long time.
“It ain’t all drinkin’, cheatin’, and truck drivin’!” ~ Wynonna Judd
Nowadays it’s all girls, trucks and the ‘Murkin flag. This is how the Nashville music industry has defined traditional whites.
Songs about me
And who I am
Songs about loving and living
And good hearted women, family and God
Yeah, they’re all just songs about me
Songs about me, yeah
“Three chords and the truth!”
In my observation Country music has totally been coopted at this point. Most of it sounds like rap with a southern accent. All of the new stars look like they are straight out of central casting with a cowboy hat. Those clowns with tattoo’s all over their faces are “country”? nah. Those guys were getting buggered by David Geffen when they were teenagers.
Lol. It’s all relative I guess. We’re not going back to Merle Haggard and Waylon, that’s for sure…
“Those clowns with tattoo’s all over their faces are “country”? nah. Those guys were getting buggered by David Geffen when they were teenagers.”
LOL! I had a beat-up hat, I was covered in haydust, and had real manure on my worn-out boots. Those fags sure as HAIL warn’t country!
There are only two kinds of country: Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline.
Patsy Cline ahd another GORGEOUS contralto voice.
Beautiful beautiful voice.
Tragic life, just like Karen Carpenter.
It’s at least as formulaic and astroturfed as any other form of popular music today. Nashville has been a fake Southern city since modern memory and it’s fitting that it’s the capitol of Country Music. They’ve been sneaking a lot of rap elements into country of late (something that nobody requested) and have been busily ramming this down everybody’s throats. There are some genuine performers, but the “image” of lifted pick-up trucks, hunting, and bailing hay is at least as much of an affectation as noted homos in rap like Usher surrounding themselves with scantily-clad women. It’s an image they… Read more »
People don’t realize how many NYC and LA types have migrated to Nashville over the years.
Hey, Nashville-based star Ben Shapiro will reassure you that Nashville is totally real and based.
I’m surprised there aren’t already AI pop stars. Maybe there are and I just haven’t found one?
I mean, there are several decent examples of AI generated pop songs.
There are also several AI chatbots that use anime avatars of young women to stream.
Why not combine the two?
There are in Japan.
Captain W, I have no disagreement that there are some decent coutnry singers outer out there, but no bands: No Asleep at the Wheel, Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker Band, .38 Special etc…
And, FWIW the names you give are all fairly corporate…
I remember Swift saying she was bullied in school in an obvious play for sympathy and to seem like an ordinary girl. Then it came out the reason some of the girls didn’t like her was she was a rich snob. The whole persona is fake.
And AOC stole tips from others when she was a bartender and from what i’ve heard essentially auditioned for her seat in congress. It is like one of the best books i read on rome and its fall (written by a soviet of all people). When addressing the question of where the good men had gone and why they didn’t stop the corruption of the republic and empire, he pointed out that the system did not select those types anymore. It’s all fake and gay.
Every star these days has to have their victim story. I read the other day how actress and Anya Taylor-Joy, born to a wealthy, politically connected family, was “bullied” as a child and “shoved into lockers.” Yawn.
There was always a huge degree of fakeness like that to pop music, which was always one of the criticisms. The issue nowadays is that there isn’t anything else, there just isn’t enough cultural cohesion anymore for music acts to grow organically.
I noticed this when the models of the 1980s and 1990s – think Tyra Banks, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, etc. – aged out of the business and were replaced by their children. The days when a talent agent would spot a beautiful woman walking down the street in Prague and turned her into a global name died long ago. But it almost feels like an inevitability when I can go on Instagram and see a functionally limitless number of beautiful women. How does one even sort that? Easier just to go to the people you know have good genes and… Read more »
over saturation comes to mind after reading your comment. Too much of something always devalues it.
Well, one of the core issues is that the market value of talent is not high. It never has been, really. Tons of people are talented. Whenever I am in Nashville or Austin I am astounded at the musical talents there, but ultimately they are playing in a bar at 3pm on a Wednesday for tips. As mentioned in this thread, the pipeline that used to sift out bands for larger consumption (local radio, A&R, etc.) has largely broken down, but even when it was there, what made band X hit and band Y miss is impossible to define. But… Read more »
All celebrity culture must die. In the past, a handful of women become supermodels as chosen by those with THE POWER. Today, any girl can slut herself up all over the internet.
Either way, it is IDOLATRY and it ALL MUST END!
Utter hogwash!!!!
I respectfully submit the following as proof of the increasing quality of our corporate music providers:
Arnold Sings I Wanna Dance With Somebody https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/svg/1f602.svghttps://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/svg/1f602.svghttps://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/svg/1f602.svghttps://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/svg/1f602.svg MUST WATCH!! Schwarzenegger Fubar Whitney Houston
Haha! This is gonna be as epically great as “Conan, the Opera” I’ll bet.
Update:
Egads. Just as Severian warns us, the clip was followed by a Whitney Houston Tribute!
Elvis impersonators I get. Even Micheal Jackson impersonators I get.
But for gosh sakes…
That was HYSTERICAL.
There’s a meme about this. It goes “Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or an ‘Indie pop star’ why their parents names are blue on their Wikipedia page.” This alludes to the fact that almost all “local talent-turned world-famous” musicians had parents that were connected and important of their own right enough to warrant their own Wikipedia pages, which generated a hyperlink on the star’s page. Whether it’s simple nepotism or the music industry wanting to deal with people who are more easily controlled than a pack of dirt-people who found themselves in the spotlight is… Read more »
About a decade ago, I was helping a child learn to play a musical instrument in the band, and the Middle Skrewl Band Director wanted the kids to choose a song and play that song [solo, in front of the entire band] for their Quarterly grades in the Band Class. So I went back through a decade or more of Billboard Top 40 charts, trying to find something reasonably “contemporary” for the child to play at the end-of-Quarter “recital”. My God, the Top 40 charts comprised just dreck upon dreck upon dreck. Horrible cacophonous sheer 120dB White Noise [with maybe… Read more »
Modern art?
Modern movies?
Modern architecture?
Modern music?
Crap
And I can’t get no satisfaction.
When i’m driv’ in my car,
And the man comes on the radio
He’s tell’ me more and more
About some useless information.
No no no.
Another factor is the decline of church music, reducing everybody’s sense of quality. The Protestants started it, with their horrible “Christian Rock,” which somebody said isn’t Christian and isn’t rock. Then Catholics followed after ditching the Latin Mass in 1969. There’s actually an Elvis movie about that, also from 1969, “Change of Habit,” starring Mary Tyler Moore as a with-it nun who leaves the convent, ditches her habit and goes to work as a social worker in the ghetto and gets romanced by the King and his songs before middle-age-spread and banana sandwiches bloated him.
I would be happy to bring back Gregorian Chant and Elvis….
Oh man. Gregorian Chant and Elizbethian Baroque, such as the prelude to Masterpiece Theatre. Or modern songs done in archaic styles, thanks youtube.
As to Elvis…
So there was this girl in a small college; all cowgirl, all Nevada.
It was “Triple Thursday”, three songs in a row, on the radio.
Spooning, had gotten to third base, everything off but the panties.
Those panties were glued on, I swear. Waited, and waited, and waited…
Then, Elvis came on, a triple set…and those panties disappeared, like magic.
I think that also worked in Sinatra’s day.
“Wise men say, only fools rush in”……….or something 😉
I listen to a lot of Gregorian Chant. No y’all wouldn’t want to. It’s the classical music of Sacred, which is not to most people’s taste.
Not sure why you got a downvote, but from my exp. that is where people generally got their first exp. being involved in music. Sunday at a church, at least when i was a kid in the late 80’s early 90’s. Hardly anyone goes to church anymore so i could see the correlation.
‘Tis a sad fate, indeed, to get bloated by nanner sandwiches…
“Then Catholics followed after ditching the Latin Mass in 1969.” The Latin Mass in 1969 had a lot of contemporary music, because most of them were low Masses. I will grant that many contemporary hymns from the early 20th century are not bad. But they are not Gregorian chant, which is has not been universally popular for a very long time. The tiny, and probably overproduced, older liturgies of today didn’t really happen in the early 20th century. If I want to find real people singing real songs that mean something to them today, I just need to go a… Read more »
The Boomer rock bands are either on their way out of the door to the nursing home or are already in the cemetery and the next few years will see the last of them. The rise of grunge in the 1990s when I was in high school was the last time that music was a dominant part of the culture. Only one of those bands from that era, Pearl Jam, is still touring and making albums, with the rest claimed by heroin overdoses. Ben Folds (an awful leftist goon) did a good job skewering the love of black “gangsta” rap… Read more »
For as long as I can recall even the biggest acts made all their money by touring. It doesn’t help an act to have 50,000 fans on YouTube if they’re spread all over the planet and can’t sustain a tour.
I think that has only been true since about 1990 or so (when coincidentally ticket prices suddenly did a big jump). Before that, it used to be that acts (and/or their record labels) made the majority of their money from record sales, and frequently took a loss on touring in order to promote more record sales. It was around 1990 when this started to flip. Nowadays you make all your money playing live and practically nothing on “record” sales (unless you’re Taylor Swift). And you put out “records” just so people will pay to come to your live shows. Whereas… Read more »
That’s spot-on right, it was a 180 degree flip.
Napster and streaming did it for the record sales, but it was greedy Michael Jackson in 1984 who did it for ticket prices with Thriller.
He jacked up ticket prices to $40 for his shows, when they were still $9 for such monster bands as the Police, Journey, and Ozzie.
“And you put out “records” just so people will pay to come to your live shows.” This is the “Asian” model. I found out about this 30 year ago. We had an Asian student with a large amount of pop music on one of our systems. Those were the days of automated “take down” notices and threats of suit for copyright infringement. I called him into the office and boy did I get a lesson. Seems all his music was on the net for *free* download. It was not “pirated”. Asian pop stars owned their music and put it out… Read more »
Back in the 2000s, one of my girlfriends met the drummer for a popular band that had cracked the top 10 in the Billboard 200 a couple of times. He revealed that the record company paid salaries (his was about $250k a year) with a few incentives for selling out gigs and a small percentage of royalties for record sales. They were employees performing tasks and receiving bonuses rather than artists, essentially.
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at Neil Young. I guess he got PO’d with Spotify over their politics and told them to smarten up or he’d pull his music away from them – was it a flap about the environment or one of his shitlib political hot buttons? I can’t remember… but the guys just laughed at him and said “Okay, Boomer…”
Neil got all bent out of shape because Spotify was hosting Joe Rogan who had guests questioning the Covid faux vax.
He’s touring with a new band this summer.
But in general the death of rock music is greatly exaggerated. There are tons of bands out there playing creative music out there performing in all sorts of venues, from small clubs through theaters to amphitheaters and arenas.
Neil Young gives America every right to invade Canada.
(Me, I’d do it just to steal Phoebe Bridgers/boygenius and Allvays.)
Oh gawd… he’s Canadian???
I haven’t been this traumatized since I discovered how they make hot dogs…
I have a notion that the death of boomers and boomer bands is going to put a real crimp in the live music business. They can’t manufacture enough Taylor Swifts to fill all the concert halls that need to be filled, to give the ticket resellers something to sell, to give the promoters something to promote. How many non instrument playing non singing acts will people be willing to pay big bucks to go see in person? Obviously more than I ever would have thought. But still not enough. I remember as a kid watching Buck Rogers in the 25th… Read more »
Above and Beyond sold out House of Blues when they came trough town, and for those unfamiliar with the act, their songs are pretty good but it’s and EDM act, so no live music is involved (so far as I know, I’m too old to go to EDM shows).
Never too old for EDM. My crew in Orlando wanted me to go to the big EDM festival and be the old dude on the stage!
Looking at the top 20 tours of 2024, it looks like the generational changeover is happening. It’s not dominated with boomers like it was a few years ago, a lot of Gen X and Millennials in there. I don’t know, people will continue to enjoy live music long into the future. That said, I have long thought that some of these bands would just keep touring forever and replacing members like Theseus’ ship. Like, KISS will be doing tours into 2050 long after all the original members and fans are six feet under. But we still have Queen touring, and… Read more »
I see Yes occasionally mentioned in this forum, and there’s a real possibility this happens to them. There could very well come a day when “Yes” continues to perform with nobody who was in the band in the 20th century.
I am going to see Jon Anderson and The Band Geeks play the very nice Fox Theater in Oakland in a few weeks. Lead singer for Yes – that band has had a series of faux Jons over the years so real Jon found a backup band.
I’ve heard it’s a better show than the Steve Howe “Yes” tribute band that’s still touring
The Glenn Miller Orchestra is still going strong, despite Glenn himself having disappeared in 1944.
https://glennmillerorchestra.com
Its all fake and gay. Politics, Music, Movies, TV, women, none of it is good anymore. The more you consolidate and centralize power and money, this is what you get. The strangest part is that any kind of underground hasn’t really emerged or if it does it gets bought up instantly.
and how could i forget sports!
I wholeheartedly agree. However, the NCAA basketball tournament has largely retained its integrity and interest. May lose my Tradissident card for saying that.
Maybe, but I can’t think of anything I would like to do less than watch a bunch of tatted up, entitled negroes chimp out with a ball for 48 minutes.
There’s plenty of great white players in the game, too, these days. We passed peak negro in basketball about 20 years ago.
So you’re not all by yourself I’ll admit I just filled out a bracket. NCAA tournament can be a lot of fun and drama with the one and done and going from 64 teams to one in three weekends.
I played BB and still enjoy watching the game. I miss physical competition.
It’s a rude shock when you step out onto the court after not having played for about 20 years. I did that in 2018 and the results were not pretty.
The pop stuff was never good. Why WOULDN’T pop be fake and gay? That’s the nature of pop.
There’s plenty of good music, both now and then, you just have to mine it.
Have not attended any music venues (not counting bars) since they all tried to make vaccine cards a right to admission. Gave up on most of the country since then. More and more i have the feeling of being a prisoner on death row, waiting for the fateful day.
I attended both a Donny Benet and Timecop1983 show in Orlando this year. They were both great, full of energy, and it was a Tuesday night for both. Just a bunch of hipster whites (like myself) listening to bespoke music.
I wonder if the biggest live draws in the next 20 years won’t be “tribute” bands. The metro near me has been advertising its big show of the summer, which is basically the Alternative Also-Rans of 1994. Which means those guys are at least in their fifties, if not sixties. The bands doing Vegas “residencies” — which very few can afford to see anyway — are pushing 70, e.g. U2. The Cure recently did a tour, I heard, and Robert Smith — who again is 65 years old — tried to get “cheap” seats at like $30 a pop; Ticketmaster… Read more »
Def Leppard is playing at the Walmart Arena soon, with Bret Michaels and the chick who played Cindy Lou Who in The Grinch.
I first saw them warming up for Ozzy and they stole the show. Now it will be the typical soft rock crap from their later albums. Sad.
I live near The Villages, FL. This is ground zero holy land Mecca for tribute bands of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. If you can learn the chords of Boomer Chartbusters, you’ll make some bank here.
That’s what I mean. At this point, who would you rather see: Maybe one or two of the original lineup of [insert 70s, 80s, or 90s act], plus whatever hired guns have replaced the others, and everyone’s just going through the motions; or a “tribute” band where everybody is working their asses off to make sure it looks, sounds, and feels exactly like what Kiss would’ve sounded like on their very best night back in 1978? The real Gene Simmons would break a hip, but the “tribute” guy can rock as hard as he needs to. One of the Alt… Read more »
Good points. Teens of my generation loved Sublime. I’ve found that Sublime tribute bands are better than the actual Sublime which survived after Bradley’s death. I refuse to watch my beloved bands in their late middle age as they still perform, like The Pixies. I prefer them frozen in time as when I first encountered them.
I wonder if the next step would be to make it an “immersive experience” to truly make it whatever year said band is representing. Like you build a club where you can’t get in unless you meet the dress code, which is literally “dress like it is 1988”. You have to check your phone at the door so the show isn’t ruined by a sea of glowing handheld screens. The club is decorated with vintage 20th century stuff, so you leave Clown World behind for an hour. And I can’t imagine what the women would do if they had to… Read more »
Good golly yes. That is a fabulous idea; I had an extremely rich friend who came across, and bought, a speakeasy beneath Cincinnati. It had been sealed since Prohibition, everything in it was original. Just imagine the possibilities.
Jeez, that picture. I’m sending it to the granddaughters.
Perms were in, MTV was on, Reagan was President, and it was glorious.
The smell of Aqua Net was everywhere! Farah Fawcett should be a minor deity for that reason alone.
And leggings. What the heck happened to leggings?
I would never go see a tribute band. I’ve seen George Jones with his wrist broken, and Emmylou Harris with her voice shot. That’s the real deal, even though the performances were lacking. I cherish the memories.
Who ever bragged that they shook hands with an Elvis Impersonator?
Definitely.
If health permitted, I could busk off of Sixties and Seventies covers throughout Latin America. Just set up where the gringos congregate, beach towns are especially juicy. There’s always a bar or restaurant that’ll employ me.
Might make two or three hundred a night. . . prince’s wages in this part of the world.
As I mentioned below, small venues in music-oriented cities like Nashville, Austin, LA, etc., are having something of a renaissance and feature new, obscure and often excellent bands. The house band, as it is, though, inevitably will be a tribute band. Tickets are cheap and these places tend to be packed to the rafters with a disproportionate number of musicians in the audience. As Z mentioned, the industry in these cities is corporate slop and ignores the local hot bands, which wasn’t the case very long ago. We can hope that changes but until it happens the tribute band will… Read more »
You are killing me. I missed the glorious B52’s when they came to our town ten years ago. Next thing you know, there is a Journey tribute band in Baton Rouge.
I couldn’t. Can’t bear the thought. The Greatest Armenian, Steve Perry, is a local son, and I’ve chatted with the band members. Just working tradesmen, really, great joes.
I thought Perry was Portugese?
Steve Perry is Portuguese.
Ah, the B-52s. I saw them live in 1984. It was the livliest, danciest concert I’ve ever attended. The crowd was wild and dancin’ that mess around! Nothing like high energy dance-fodder to get a room rocking.
This April, Metallica is playing Syracuse with a reconstituted Pantera and Suicidal Tendencies.
The cheapest nosebleed ticket is $138.
A ticket for the Snake Pit in the middle of the circular stage is $1164.
I’ve been rebelling against Top 40 pop music since I was a teenager. Favorite songs were played to death; Freebird! is a well-worn joke. New bands would have big debut albums and once they got popular, they would go Strictly Commercial.
I used to go to the big shows, but I’ve come to hate crowds. Give me some no-name band playing greasy blues at the local dive bar.
Rock concerts in the 70s- Aerosmith! Nazareth! Frank Zappa! Emerson Lake & Palmer (the guy actually walked on onstage carrying a piano on his back and playing it)…Fleetwood Mac! Stones! KISS, Destroyer!
Absolutely over the top, no holds barred, always some poor fat chick being chased by security during intermission. All for $7!
Smoking! Weed! Bellbottoms!
Now, you get searched for effing bottles of water.
Jeez. What the kids will never know.
About 7 years ago I saw Carl Palmer of ELP do a show with a couple of sidekicks, playing instrumental versions of old ELP songs (which were mostly instrumental to begin with), and to my mild surprise it was worth every penny. Best drummer I have ever seen in person, hands down. But there was no smoking, weed, or bell bottoms. Just a bunch of boomers who probably used to.
I’m with Ducati.
I mean, the Motels, at a small supper club venue.
There is Martha Davis, standing at our table, singing to me.
We are seeing a decline in the admiration and influence of traditional entertainers. Even women seem less enamored with the entertainment industry than they were 20-30 years ago. I know very few men who care about it. One problem is that it some of this is shifting to online influencers. Most of them are just as dumb and vapid as the people in the entertainment industry. It appears many women especially are more likely to take their advice because that is what a lot of the content is built around. It is like they are carnies 2.0.
I never would have dreamed that bands who haven’t released new music in over 30 years would be so popular today. Nirvana, the Police, Queen and the Beatles get from about 30 to 50 million listens per month on Spotify. The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd are also very popular. Clearly that kind of music has appeal. So where are the new bands?
It’s weird, but back when I was teaching college kids I assumed they were wearing their Nirvana etc. t-shirts ironically. But they weren’t. I remember having a serious discussion with a kid in my office hours about Guns ‘n’ Roses. It was surreal — first that a kid half my age was listening to this stuff, and second that he was talking about it with an old geezer like me. Not in the “humoring the old man with the grade book” way, but fan to fan. Kids These Days are risk-averse in a way we can’t really grok, so I… Read more »
Maybe it’s simply a case of merit, like beauty and truth, eventually willing out. As long as superior music is readily available, the sentient segment of the population will prefer it to postmodern, corporate pap. That’s the optimistic take, anyway.
Second this take.
I had a similar experience at a trivia night. The millennials and GenZs had better knowledge than me on 60-90s music, and I lived and breathed it as it was happening.
Part of it is the spread of technology. One of the reasons Hollywood is extremely reluctant to take a chance on new IPs is that they want the name recognition of movies that came out when there were much fewer movies, both in the archives and actively being premiered every year. It’s the same thing for music. We’ve got an overabundance of music and artists and everyone is struggling to become a breakout hit. With bandcamp, youtube, and other formats, almost anybody can throw their music out to the masses. The sheer volume of material makes it tougher to attain… Read more »
Generally agree, but small venues in music-oriented cities like Nashville, Austin, LA, Seattle and to a lesser extent NYC are having something of a renaissance and feature bands rather than solo acts. Some excellent rock and country music can be found in these places performed by bands you don’t know. The question is if this can be translated into mass marketing and profit, and for the reasons you cited, that may not be a safe bet. We likely will see the good stuff confined to these corners unless a way around the slop machine is found. It still is nice… Read more »
Many years ago bands in those cities that gained a local following would eventually get played on a radio station in that particular city. The radio station had a program director who decided what to play. Eventually the band’s popularity would spread. That local program director is gone today and it’s the corporation deciding what music to play.
Yes. Since these cities had an existing music infrastructure, that drew in talent that would start in small venues and eventually get picked up. The renaissance of these venues may be more or less a cultish thing (like vinyl collection) and now foreclosed by corporate decision-making from spreading to a wider audience. You are spot on that the disappearance of local radio programming has proved a near fatal blow. I notice that in these places the audience is disproportionately musicians. It may prove short-lived and people who live near these cities should take advantage while they can.
Hell, in the early days of radio, DJs such as Wolfman Jack actually played a huge role in influencing public musical tastes. They chose what to play rather than playing a play list put together by the suits. I suppose the transition from the former to the latter started long ago, probably no later than the mid-seventies.
Think how quaint the old payola scandals were. EVERYTHING is payola now.
The easiest way to eliminate crime is to legalize it. Alas, a common approach in our crumbling civilization.
I welcome the decline of pop and corp-rock. It was always crap. Even actually-good big acts like Pink Floyd and Metallica who claimed to be anti-corporate were actually corporate. The coming reign of the atomized micro-acts is better for music. They can never be accused of selling out or whoring themselves for (((producers))). You just need to find a catchy genre, and start mining it. This is always better than being spoonfed goysound by HOT HITZ 101.
Hmpffffff. I never would have noticed had you not pointed this all out. My question is… is this really a bad thing…? I’m asking because I don’t know – not trying to be a dink or anything… but … ugggghhh. The boy bands? Rap? PBBFFFFT! I turned the TV AND the radio off decades ago.The bands were bad enough, but the programmers and DJ’s? The morning shows on a lot of the local stations just pissed me off in the morning. They’d do “banter” in the morn… which devolved into a bunch of fake cheerful idiots that were so stupid… Read more »
You’ve got to wonder if in this day of USAID scandal, government funding and influence has been shaping the entertainment industry all a long as well. I still can’t believe rap is a thing, let alone Marvel movies.
Govt. involved in the music and film industries during the modern era. Greenwich Village, L.A., and S.F. Film was the principal method of mass-conditioning, still is.
The Village, for example, spawned both the folk (pre-rock) scene and the LGBTQ scene. Meaning, a common factor at work.
As for L.A., research Lookout Mountain.
Mike Benz goes down this rabbit hole quite a bit.
I’d say it’s plausible. Music is incredibly powerful, especially for young minds.
As for rap: “How many words can we discover that rhyme with “w”itch?”
This research is taking decades.
One Piece chads stay winning
Trump won the young male vote even the non white one. I wonder what impact the rightward shift in young men combined with their increasingly being outcasts thanks to the gynocracy and H1Bs will have on music and other art forms.
Maybe nothing. I know a few teenage males and their whole personal life is built around playing games.
Maybe games (playing them and making them) fill that urge forming a band and listening to them used to fill.
Gaming has changed too, especially in the multiplayer segment. The divide between young ‘uns and geezers is present as well.
Young zoomer gamers are more antisocial and it’s often hard forming a group with them.
Indie-game development satisfies a personal creative urge and with modern tools it’s much easier to make one on your own. That’s one field where autistic guys can flourish.
A vast waste of talent and potential. Like the GenX and Millennial boys.
The future is XX. Don’t ask Y.
A childhood friend of mine attended the Iron Maiden concert in NYC last November. His very first concert was Iron Maiden in 1985 and he told me the band performed just as well as they did nearly 40 years ago.
Obviously, the audience at their “The Future Past” tour was as white as the snow. If Tucker Carlson’s aliens caught a glimpse of it, they’d believe the Earth was entirely white, as long as they steer clear of netflix.
My brothers and I took our father to see The Moody Blues for his 70th birthday and yes, they still have it as well. The flautist who performed the solo in “Nights in white satin” is no longer with us, he was replaced with a rather comely ninja-looking chick who did an outstanding job.
This is discussion is a strong argument that what’s left of touring bands are simply lip-syncing
Young people are all listening to K-pop. I know many middle-school age kids (kids of friends, neighbors, their friends, etc.) who are all K-pop fans.
I am not sure why, but this is where the masses are moving to. Also, new K-pop groups are popping up every other day.
Here is a K-pop song that young kids are all talking about –
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ekr2nIex040&pp=ygUTYXB0IHJvc2UgYnJ1bm8gbWFycw%3D%3D
also, to learn about the cutting edge for young people, you need to check TikTok. For example, I was on a long flight last year, and a young European-looking 20ish woman was sitting nearby. For most of the trip, she was watching TikTok videos talking about the struggle of Palestinians.
TikTok trendy music channels of teenagers are flooded with K-pops.
K-Pop is the only pop I’ll watch for more than 10 seconds. Korean girls rival Swedes, NGL.
The women are feminine and pretty and the men have that “adrogynous” look that young teenage girls seem to love. Kpop is basically the pop music we had in the 1990s, think Christina Aguilera, N-sync, etc. But our music moved away from that because we needed to be inundated with rap and hip and hop.
Music that is trending right now
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E2I70vviua0
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IrwG7owkldY&pp=ygUSdGlrdG9rIGRhbmNlcyAyMDI1
Once again, maybe these groups will all be forgotten in another two months, but the trend will last a lot longer. Also the trend shows the likes and dislikes of young people, who will be in their twenties 5-10 years from now and pay to see concerts.
Pop music has been corporate-controlled for a long time. This was particularly true of country music in the 1950s and 1960s — the producers actually made Waylon Jennings wear a coat and tie in his younger days, LOL. The phenomenon of pop music “bands” formed by average guys in a garage was largely a Boomer phenomenon and an artifact of the 1960s counterculture. Eventually a lot of these acts went mainstream and made tens of millions, but they all started out as stoned white kids aping Negro blues and thus bypassing the entire corporate/marketing structure. This genre is dying because… Read more »
Iyyy…want to beee…Anarchyyyy
Adam Curtis has an essay on how cultural expressions, like music, stagnated in the USSR in its terminal age. Reminds me a lot of what is happening now.
BBC Blogs – Adam Curtis – THE YEARS OF STAGNATION AND THE POODLES OF POWER
Nickelback was the last great rock band, and they were destroyed because of it.
I will die on this hill.
Neil Young! Nickelback!
Will Canada ever face justice for its crimes against humanity?!
Still, a rock band that includes the line, “when that b**ch bends over, I forget my own name” can’t be all bad.
Good article. The rock band concept appealed to the Boomer through Millennial generations. “Big Bands appealed to Silents. The new generations with their shorter than ever attention spans, prefer a single negro mumbling into an auto tune box or whatever. The cute white girls all make it because they were connected to begin with. It explains why the movie industry still exhumes guys like Stallone, Harrison Ford, and Tom Cruise to make action flicks: because most only the older generations go to see movies anymore. Even frauds like Steven Seagal can eek out a paycheck doing straight to streaming dreck.… Read more »
A person from 1800 would listen to whatever it is all of you are talking about (1950s music? 1970s music? 1980s music?), listen to a sample of each, and tell you it was all modernist urinal cakes, and you’re arguing over the taste of the puck as if it means anything.
I doubt the average person from 1800 had well developed enough musical taste to make such a judgment. The average person never has had, in any era
Dance pop gained traction in the mid-1980s so that mindless genre has been around a while.
In the late Sixties and Seventies, bands were everywhere. Garage bands on most suburban streets. Heck my eight-grade class consisted of ten or twelve boys. Four of them started a rock band. In 1965. Aside from novelty songs, songs didn’t get traction unless exceptional and, often, unique. Competition was ferocious. Yes you needed music industry types back then to get the tunes recorded, pressed, and distributed, but the ‘industry’ part was subordinate to the ‘music’ part. The past three or four decades, it’s been corporate swill appealing to a young, female LCD. . . essentially a profitable form of mass-mind… Read more »
I hate NPR and PBS given that they’re little more than mouthpieces for the elites to preach from. However, given the financialization of music, I don’t think anybody would perform Bach, Shakespeare, or other better art from a better time without serious subsidization. Unfortunately, these subsidies get split up among the loonies who engage in avant-garde tripe and insane political rhetoric which is equally mystical and impenetrable to the average slob, albeit less enjoyable. One of the reasons poetry doesn’t exist in our society is that we shifted from Edgar Allen Poe to Sylvia Plath to Maya Angelou and Allen… Read more »
I used to think Country Music was the last “real” music left. Not anymore! It went to hell along with Pop. Bluegrass seems to be holding up pretty well. Lotsa fresh new young acts appearing all the time. I listen to SiriusXm all day at work. However, I’m starting to notice a “formula” emerging where they’re all beginning to sound alike. Of course I don’t expect today’s young Bluegrassers to come down from the hills with their banjers and fiddles in a tater sack like they once did. But I’d sure hate to see the last real music, played skillfully… Read more »
Another thing that stands out is the almost complete lack of musical originality. The most successful music is now at least partly recycled. Either as a new version of an old tune or at least using sequences and samples from an old hit. Most of it is trash, but some of it is good enough to evoke nostalgia for the good old times.
All music producers are now using “The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)” by The Timelords.
I’m a beginning Boomer (’46) and began playing drums at age nine. When I came upon James Brown at age 17, I went to see him at the Apollo in NYC. I was the only white guy to be seen and once I’d seen him perform, the Beatles were like a hootenanny act. I still love his stuff, but for the past ten or fifteen years, I’ve gone back to the music of my childhood: classical. I have had no interest in popular music (other than Latin American) in a looong time.
“Portly spinster.” Ouch!