One of the unexpected consequences of the technological revolution is the death of the popular music industry. The sale of physical content has just about disappeared, outside of the vinyl subculture. Even if you count downloads, the gross sales of music decline more than ten percent per year. On a per capita basis, popular music revenues are a little more than half of their peak fifty years ago. The biggest drop in sales started with the introduction of the mp3.
Unlike the newspaper industry, which thought they could make money giving their content away on the internet, the music industry always saw technology as a threat to their business model. They famously fought the introduction of cassettes because it would make it easier to record and transport music. If you could copy that album and give the copy to a friend, the music industry reasoned, there would be no reason for the friend to buy the album.
The music industry went to extraordinary lengths to protect their cartel, but they simply could not hold off the flood of technology. They treated downloaders like the Israelis treat Palestinian civilians, but it failed to deter people from downloading free copies of the song they wanted. Eventually, the industry gave into reality and started selling single copies of songs, but by that point, the horse had left the barn. There are too many ways to get a copy of a song free of charge.
The hope was streaming services would stem the bleeding. Instead of loading up on free music maybe people would pay five bucks a month to have access to everything all the time from anywhere. That did seem to work for a while, but then it just further cratered the music sales side of the business. There is also the fact that the public does not listen to as much pop music as in the past. Part of it is demographics, but part of it is the collapse in the quality of content.
This is starting to damage the last area where money could be made in the music business, which is the live show. For the first time in a decade, excluding the Covid years, live shows are in decline. The popular excuse is to blame the ticket sellers and the secondary market for pricing people out of the events. The claim is the ticket sellers are gouging the consumer with demand-based pricing, which is like saying no one goes to a restaurant because it is too crowded.
One reason for the decline of live shows is Covid. A weird thing happened during Covid and that is people discovered that they could live without things they suddenly could not have due to the panic. Restaurants never fully recovered from Covid because people got used to not going out to dinner. Something replaced it. Live events are another thing people did not miss as much as expected. Pro sports have had to work hard to regain their crowds and college sports never fully regained them.
Another reason live music is struggling is the quality of the product. As the industry relies more on technology to create listenable content, the less able they are to stage compelling live shows. This is not a new problem. In the golden age of pop music, they often used studio musicians to record the songs. The “band” often could not play their own music at all. This limited the “band” to doing studio shows where they could lip-sync to the recorded music.
This changed in the 1960’s when bands could play their own music and insisted on recording their own music. They also did live shows where they could actually play their stuff and not sound like a bag of cats. Technology has reversed this so that the performers are no longer able to produce the songs live in any way that sounds like the recorded material. Technology has made it easier to make music, but that has resulted in fewer acts that can do live shows.
Here is where you see the damage done by hip-hop. This is content easy to create in the studio, but it is hot garbage when performed live. In a small venue, the tight spaces and use of drugs can result in a good time for the audience, but in an arena it is often hilariously terrible. It looks like that homeless guy who yells at passing cars got on the stage and is yelling at the audience. Whatever the merits, there are none, hip-hop does not make for a compelling live show.
Another issue for live music is young people are not being socialized in the meat space, so live shows fall outside of their comfort zone. A generation used to interacting with their peers through internet platforms is not going to see the live show as an opportunity for socializing and dating like the old days. They would rather hear the music while cartoon characters perform the concert online. For a generation that prefers the indoors, the outdoor music show may as well not exist.
Of course, the music business was always a racket. The golden years of pop was when the music companies ruled with an iron fist. They could make you buy the album when you wanted just one or two songs. They forced radio stations to play the songs they wanted played. Most important, they we free to rob the music acts. Technology nibbled away at the music cartel eventually freeing the consumers and the music creators from the clutches of the music companies.
One result is there is probably more music available now than in the golden age of popular music. Creators can make good stuff from their bedroom and make it available to the world via the internet. The other side of this is the days of the rock star are coming to a close. Taylor Swift is probably the last mega star and her fame is mostly due to her general weirdness. Her songs are popular because she is popular, not the other way around. Her music is secondary to her act.
Otherwise, the golden era of popular music, especially rock music, will be viewed as a strange artifact of the American empire. A generation from now that music may sound as weird and alien to young people as Chinese opera. They will not understand it, because the people and culture that produced it are as alien to them as the people and culture of China. The concept of the rock star will disappear with memories of phone booths and quadrophonic sound.
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Another problem is that rock music is generally too masculine for this limp-wristed age of ultra-feminization. Anything that bears even a whiff of testosterone scares people.
More accurately, white masculinity. Whiteness plus masculinity equals toxicity for the pomos and sundry other hysterical cowards and nut-jobs.
Exactly. Black testosterone is extremely heavily promoted.
Thuggish masculinity permeates today’s culture, along with sluttishness. Good, honorable, decent masculinity is condemned, along with decent femininity.
Here’s a sample of contemporary thug “music” for the edification of you old white dudes:
Lil Loaded – 6locc 6a6y (Official Video) [shotbydonzo] – YouTube
Thanks, but I’ll take your word for it. 🙂
Rock music (as opposed to R & B and later hip-hop and [c]rap) has been almost exclusively melanin-deprived since the 1960s (Jimi Hendrix having been a very rare exception). So the whiteness of the masculinity is implicit when discussing the topic. While I agree that white masculinity is especially despised in this degraded civilization of ours, masculinity appears to be held in low esteem in general. After all, leniency toward black thuggishness notwithstanding, the term “toxic masculinity” does not specify a particular race. I think it advantages the powers that be if men in general are weak and ineffectual. Of… Read more »
The reason white masculinity is condemned in particular, is because the Power Structure wants us weak and defenseless. If we’re willing to stand up and fight, we’re a threat. If we just lie down and take it, we can be eliminated at will. That genocidal motive does not operate against non-white males.
Agreed. Nevertheless, hostility toward masculinity in general and considerably greater hatred for white masculinity in particular are not mutually exclusive of one another. Keep in mind that the “Me Too” craze disproportionately targeted members of a certain tribe distinct from white goyim. The push to anathematize normal straight male sexual desire is more effective if it doesn’t too obviously focus on one specific group.
‘After all, leniency toward black thuggishness notwithstanding, the term “toxic masculinity” does not specify a particular race.’
Can you think of a case of “toxic maxulinity” that doesn’t involve a white-ish man? I can’t.
They’re going after that “P Diddy” fellow, and before that, Fuentes’ friend Kayne, but I haven’t heard the epithet “toxic masculinity” used in either case.
You’re not wrong. Since you raise the point . . . it seems to me the progtards aren’t using “toxic masculinity” much to describe anyone these days. They tend to have short attention spans and a propensity for concocting fresh absurdities that crowd out the staler ones. Go back roughly four or five years ago and I guarantee that “toxic masculinity” was being thrown around a lot more frequently than now. Perhaps it’s lost much of whatever cachet it originally had.
Hendrix is an interesting case because he showed that whites were willing to make a black guy a star, if that guy made music within the rock tradition. I find it interesting that few followed his trail.
Although there were a few acts like Prince, Lenny Kravitz or Living Color who followed in Hendrix’s footsteps, almost all chose not to follow.
I can think of many whites guys I’ve known who would have loved to make a black guy who played rock a star. They love Slash. Lots of black musicians left money on the table. Did they know this?
Yes, Ostei, we are drowning in estrogen, to our detriment. But the laugh is on the gals. They and their delusions and obsession with material items and what-do-women-want were used by the corporations and globalist males in charge of the West to disrupt the social order and benefit the state economically, as well as place more state control over women’s lives (indulge me in an LMAO). The Rockefellers (see link below) knew exactly which buttons to push – “our bodies”, “empowerment” “toxic males”, “don’t need a man”, ad nauseam. And here we are. (2) The Sad Truth of Modern Feminism… Read more »
Great to see you again, SAGEB.
Back atcha, Ostei.
Old too soon, smart too late.
Best line ever. So hard to fix.
Some of my grandmother’s wisdom.
Gals from a certain part of the world have a particularly keen wit, and they make great fried chicken.
Wrong wrong. The best rock in the world is coming out of Japan, with mostly female bands. Band Maid in particular,,,pure US-centric myopia
BAND-MAID / from now on (Official Music Video) (youtube.com)
Metallica in dresses?
(And that’s not an insult)
They played well. Very crisp, was like classical music in metal. They are pretty good. Clothes do not match the sound. They may be actually… Cool.
I like these folks. Leave it to the Japanese.
Eddie Van Halen would approve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMBcqJnCi9w
Thanks. That was interesting. I liked it edgy, good and different. Mono-culturism, seems right.
Oh please. Go sell your nonsense somewhere else.
No sell. Music thread. Go look. It’s good. Be happy.
Rock and roll is quintessentially masculine. Women can ape it, but not create it.
Rejected.
Nya nya, kawaii doki-doki waifu-san.
Let’s ponder that a moment. Why do/did guys (and let’s be frank, it’s usually guys) form bands in their youth? What’s the biggest motivator for young guys once they hit puberty? Hmm, I bet it has two X chromosomes. And a cute butt. Even the worst garage band you can imagine (that sounds like a stand of pots and pans falling over when they play) can manage to get some interest from some girl somewhere. (Heck, maybe she’ll be enamored enough to sing with them 😂) When I were a young lad (checks belt to see onion 🧅 is secured)… Read more »
The groupie strategy still exists for men but it’s based on being a streamer. Same principle applies, if the dude appears to be popular by having a lot of viewers that tricks the woman’s brain into thinking the guy is high status and all women want more than anything else is to be attached to a high status guy in order to one-up their friends.
Every neighborhood used to have a garage band.
Many years ago I had a friend who played in a bar band, mostly in SoCal but also across the western USA. He was manic depressive and when the depression would hit him he would get religion and seek guidance from ministers. He told me about one session with a minister when the discussion got around to my friend’s sexual sins. When he gave the minister an estimate of how many women he had intercourse with, the guy thought he was pulling his leg (he wasn’t).
My college roommate was the bass player, so, y’know:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NobodyLovesTheBassist
He did have a girlfriend. And at least one fling. That I know of.
Joe’s Garage, by Frank Zappa.
This.
(C)rap ‘music’ is black, inner-city rebellion.
Female ‘artists’ like Taylor Swift and the unending slew of likewise is feminist rebellion. Athough this is pretend-rebellion: feminism conquered the culture, the church, and both political parties many decades ago. It is the Establishment, pretending to be edgy rebels.
Swift is just the latest in a long line of. Pringles.
Tart up young girl
Teach her to suggestivly gyrate on stage while lip syncing teen sexual angsty nonsensr.
New pringle
Repeat formula.
I hated Pringles. Tasted like cardboard with salt on it.
The gol’darn kids today with their crap music. That’s a song old as, well… songs. To be fair, the rap shite is epidemic among many youths but I think maybe you should interact with young people more. Metal is popular from older bands like Iron Maiden to newer ones like Sabaton. Particularly among the gym-going bunch. Folksy type newer music is also catching on. I was whistling a tune in the locker room and two young men looked at me surprised and asked, “You like ‘The Dead South”? When we do get younger singers at the VFW karaoke night they… Read more »
I agree with your defense of younger people; as part of Gen-X, I readily admit that my generation and the Boomers have failed today’s kids in many ways. But my original comment in no way slandered the youth. I won’t hesitate to concede that there are still young men out there who prefer masculine content. In fact, it’s something of a minor miracle that they do, considering how much feminization has been heaped upon these fellows. Anyway, as an old rock song told us, “the kids are alright.” I did not intend to suggest otherwise.
It says something about the quality of today’s pop that many youngsters are listening to stuff from the 80s and before.
Old s××t is good.
Just standing up for younger folks. Get a little tired of hearing us geezers heap the woes of the world on them. Nobody is heaping anything on anyone. People are noticing objective reality and then commenting on it. 1945 : The White Cliffs of Dover 1955: Teenager In Love 1965: White Rabbit 1975: Convoy 1985: Come On Eileen 1995: I’m Just A Girl 2005: Gangsta’s Paradise 2015 :Boats and Hos 2023: Wet Ass Pussy If this list does not convey anything you consider to be meaningful I don’t know what to tell you. Except that “Oh, there’s been fuddy duddys… Read more »
Boats *and* Hos, you say?
Way to be a Broke-ass Nigga. Fail-safe yo.
I never understood the appeal of post-WW2 American popular culture and music as a child, although I tried to fit in and listen to what was at the time the all-consuming balls-out longhair power rock of the 1970s and 1980s. I despised it. In 6th grade I mocked Led Zeppelin in class and was accosted on the playground afterward by two morons, both of whom now live in Florida selling real estate. In 12th grade I wrote an op-ed for the school paper running down the Grateful Dead and the 1960s in general, and had the same unpleasant experience with… Read more »
I hear you. Most of my cohorts listened to Van Halen and Aerosmith; and I was listening to Maynard Ferguson and Jeff Lorber Fusion. But I did enjoy power rock from time to time. I had to be in the right mood for it.
My conversion to rock took place in fall of ’79 when I discovered what I later learned was called “prog rock” (ELP, Yes, Genesis, etc.) on the album oriented rock station in my city. I had never heard of prog rock before and found that I liked it as much as fusion jazz.
Interesting to note that Phil Collins had a side project called Brand X which played fusion jazz.
Phil Collins was a terrific drummer, one of the best.
Phil Collins is also a tremendous vocalist. When Gabriel left Genesis, it was amazing that they had a vocalist in the wings whose register was so similar but who also had a much better range.
When Gabriel left Genesis, they auditioned about 100 singers, with drummer Collins instructing them how to sing the parts. After awhile the band members noticed that Collins sang the songs better than the auditioners, and asked if he would be interested. Collins’ first thought was, “I’m a drummer, dammit, not a singer!” He eventually warmed up to the idea and the rest is history….
Brand X was awesome.
JLF’s “Wizard Island” is one of my very favorite jazz albums. It is one of those rare record that is both unabashedly cheerful and musically formidable.
JFL’s recent stuff is good. The Drop came out late last year. It is quite good.
You probably know this, but Jeff Lorber Fusion’s sax player was Kenneth Gorelick, who later was “Kenny G.”
Oh yeah. He produced only one album I like–“Gravity.” And I think that was his first.
Around 1979 is when suddenly progressive rock became out of fashion with the emergence of punk and new wave. Yes and Genesis survived by changing their style to fit the times, but bands like Emerson Lake & Palmer did not, and overnight, sounded dated. And I say that as a fan of the genre.
Very true. Actually, I think prog rock fell out of favor a little earlier than that, around 1977 or so. Nevertheless, it is what I discovered on that rock station in fall of 1979. Punk and new wave bored the hell out of me.
That album oriented rock station stopped being album oriented in summer of 1980 and just played whatever hit rock songs there were (AC/DC, Pat Travers, etc.), then replaced by a top 40 station in 1984. Oh well.
I am very much a fan of classic rock–and classic pop, generally–but I cannot gainsay your points. Culture, and perhaps music especially, may well be the leading indicator of what’s to come in the political realm.
As I say in several comments here, it’s the effect upon the soul — the barbarism — that was the point of rock and roll. Not the skill. That was the hook to get you in. Next thing you know, you’re laid out in the back of your truck ballin’ a chick listening to “Stairway to Heaven,” knowing goddamn well her father would’ve ripped your head off if he’d known what you were doing.
That was 50 years ago. Now we have descriptions of analingus on FM radio. Who could’ve seen that coming?
Very well put. I was there back then too, and I saw exactly what you’re talking about. Rock became a very primal, tribal thing, with all the negatives that involves. And while I liked some of rock–the Who, Blue Oyster Cult, etc.–the passions that became wrapped up with it said something disturbing about us. No matter how “edgy” the group was, there was a great deal of conformity involved. I watched a video recently of a hard rock concert, with all the jumping up and down and writhing and head-banging and other mass behavior, and it really hit home to… Read more »
This will be an unpopular comment here, but Allan Bloom was correct in his re-introduction of Plato’s strictures against music and the young soul. Can’t do anything about it now, though. Most on this site will fight to the death that “their generation’s” music was authentic and had no effect upon them, but the kids today, oh yeah, bad stuff, not good for them. I read “Hammer of the Gods” about LedZep when I was 8 or 9 and figured it out then. Rest of my life since then has been spent with idiots who listened to that garbage and… Read more »
“the lifestyle glamorized by those musicians was the point — not the music. And the lifestyle and morals they fostered are what became our culture.” Another great point. You’re not alone! I too was convinced by a lot of what Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, including his critique of rock. And as “uncool” as it is to say, those old preachers had a point about rock and roll being the devil’s music. Again, I fell heavily for rock in my teens and twenties. And for a while I was considered to be very much “in… Read more »
Well, the rock group Rush was certainly not the devil’s music. The themes to Rush music were very uplifting.
I liked what I heard of Rush (didn’t keep up with them after the early 80s), including their themes, like you said. A bit like them, Blue Oyster Cult was another group that wasn’t PC, and which was actually talented musically. Some of the other prog rock appealed to me, but a lot of it got too overblown. Anyway, I just think that people need to be more aware of how manipulative the actual styles of rock music are. They do affect us physically in ways which aren’t always good. I know I sound like a holy rollin’ preacher with… Read more »
Incidentally, “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” is possibly the most evil song ever written. The lyrics speak for themselves.
And curiously enough, most BOC fans at the time the song was released, said that it sounded nothing like BOC. And the guy who wrote the song–his name escapes me–said he just woke up one morning and the song was in his head. I believe Satan implanted it. And I’m not joking.
There’s certainly an argument to be made for that, especially considering the effect the song might have on troubled, impressionable people. Well, that could be said for the various effects which a lot of popular culture has had since ca. 1965, couldn’t it? And you might be referring to the BOC guitarist Don “Buck Dharma” Roeser. He seems like a bright, thoughtful and overall good guy. I think he also said something along the lines that he was horrified anyone would take the song as an encouragement to suicide (not that I want to excuse where the song might come… Read more »
With respect to Roeser, I don’t see how anybody could listen to the lyrics of DFtR and draw any other conclusion than that it was an injunction to joint suicide. It’s really plain as eggs.
I dislike that song as well. It came out on their “Agents of Fortune” album, which marked their decline to me. I liked BOC’s earlier stuff. “On Your Feet or On Your Knees” is my favorite BOC album.
Thing is, musically, DFtR is tremendous. Inspired, even. And that’s precisely what one would expect of a song that had been crafted below.
As usual, you were able to effortlessly put into words something I was struggling with formulating, except to say that I have pressed the accelerator down just a little further several times to that intro.
Aye. In spite of itself, DFtR is one of the greatest rock songs ever recorded. Top 50 by any reasonable standard. Possibly top 20.
“Buck” Dharma
True, but Gary ‘Geddy Lee’ Weinrib’s constant invocation of ‘The Holocaust’ ™ is tiresome.
There is truth to this. But there are examples of rock music with positive themes. Rush is one such example.
Yes, 100% agree. As a young student I learned a bit of guitar and bass and aspired to be a rock-n-roller. After all, these people were regarded as important, people thronged to see them, and playing music all night and getting chicks and free beer sure beat getting up at 5 a.m. for a shift in the steel mill, right? But after trying to form a couple of pick-up bands I quit cold turkey right around the time I read Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” and never looked back. When analyzing pop music to try to learn it, I… Read more »
AND 8-year-old girls being taken to Taylor Swift concerts by their parents to hear all her lyrics excoriating males. I was on the elevator with one such eunuch of a father the other day and it was all I could do to keep my mouth shut.
@schlomo pines
So I take it your type of music was perry como or Johnny mathis?
Judging by his username, I’m thinking a cross between The Klezmatics and John Denver…
I’d say that musical forms have changed twice in the last half century. The boomer rock was the first change, hip hop was the second. If Plato was right, we’re just beginning to see the regime change relative to the latter.
besides the insane ticket prices, a lot of popular acts use recordings to lip sync while on-stage. so for your $500 ticket you don’t even get a live performance. poor milli vanilli, they were just ahead of their time…
Ha ha! You amused me with your Milli Vanilli reference. Technically those clowns didn’t even use their own recordings on-stage; they used recordings performed entirely by other musicians and singers. You could definitely credit them with being innovators in the art of fakery.
I blame it on the rain, myself.
I remember the Milli Vanilli fiasco in summer of 1989. I also remember one of the reasons it blew up was due to a father who was dragged into taking his ‘tween daughter and her friends to the outdoor concert that took place. He really did not want to be there in the first place and was in a critical state of mind when the recording jammed and he, along with everyone else, saw the performers were not singing at all. It was this father who went to the media and then sued the concert promoter. That’s how all of… Read more »
Fake and ghey has been with us for quite some time.
prunes like Robert plant tour with whoever krause and charge too much. Grace Slick was correct, “rock stars over 50 look stupid”. Witness mellonhead and shitsteen they look like old women.
Aside from the swifties, its the classic rock shows from the 1970’s that make the real money touring. As long as boomers are willing to pay several hundred dollars for a seat, classic rock will continue to tour. Some of these guys are getting too old for the road. Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry starting putting on a lackluster show 15 years ago. I think they have retired from the road now. Mick Jagger had some sort of medical issue last year, resulting him in retiring from the road. I think the Stones are really out of it now. I… Read more »
Dusty Hill died a couple of years ago and I think ZZ Top has hung it up.
Nope, I could have heard ZZ Top last month at the same venue The Mrs. and I heard Chicago and Earth Wind and Fire at this summer.
The Doobie Brothers put on a hell of an energetic show in July in Tulsa. Tom Johnson sounded no different than he did in his younger days.
mmack, have you checked out Leonid and Friends’ Chicago and EWF covers on YouTube? Magnificent. It is almost an insult to call them covers, especially the Chicago cuts.
Those Leonid and Friends covers are fantastic. And their singer Ksenia is proof that the perfect 10 does exist.
Yes, she is gorgeous, and dresses and conducts herself like a lady in all their videos. Would that American girls could summon some of her class.
Reminds me of my buddy remarking about seeing a super geriatric Frank Sinatra in Vegas and how it was humiliating for everyone involved.
Pop culture stars rarely bow out with dignity. They’re so addicted to their celebrity that they hang onto it long after their looks and talent have declined to sad levels.
American culture has never really been good at the whole “aging with grace” thing.
I’m sure there is some degree of the intoxication of being on stage with 10s of thousands of people clapping and cheering. But you also have to wonder how many of them need the money. The music industry is worse than the mafia.
Undoubtedly some do. But not ol’ Blue-eyes.
You should see/hear Frankie Valli. It’s like if Joe Biden were a pop star. He’s wondering around the stage, looks lost and sounds terrible.
You have to wonder how much they robbed him. Can he not let go of being on the stage, or does he need the money?
All those people on the stage need the money. Elder abuse.
On geriatric musicians shilling way past their expiration date I agree. One notable exception are the final complications of Johnny Cash in American Recordings. His voice, much withered but still unnervingly deep, is achingly wonderful. He works through a catalog from 1940s Vera Lynn to Nine Inch Nails. I don’t know if he or someone else devised the song selection… but it is a masterpiece. It’s as if someone had the wisdom to recognise they had one brief moment before he was gone, to capture that voice and apply it to decades of other’s music. The age and gravel is… Read more »
I never understood the appeal of that assholes music. He was/is nothing but an overgrown bar band on steroids.
have you ever actually listened to him sing?
If so, he certainly fooled millions of people. I suppose you think he sucked as an actor too.
I think Plant is slightly overrated, but he did have something close to an ideal voice–and diabolical scream–for heavy metal.
To wit: Immigrant Song, Since I Been Lovin’ You, Black Dog, etc.
Dazed and Confused, Hey Hey What Can I do?, No Quarter, In the Light, Achilles Last Stand
He was a troubled soul. Not a saint. He seemed legitimate though. The man in black.
My standard observation to my wife when I see some superannuated singer or band is going on tour: “He/they ran out of drug money.”
Rock stars don’t age well for the obvious reason that they lived so hard in their youth. Strangely enough, however, and excepting those killed in plane crashes, they seem to be fairly long-lived. The fact that Keith Richards is still alive and kicking is surely one of the great mysteries of this century.
Two words: plasma transfusions.
Mellenia
I’ve seen a number of former stars in small hayseed venues. What a shock it must be to them, once having tens of thousands in a jammed stadium with young women throwing their undergarments at them, and now singing to a handful of gray-hairs in the Nowheresville Opera House.
I saw Robert Plant and Jimmy Page performing at some recent event. It looked like two British grandmothers on stage.
And oddly enough, Page looks less awful now than he did ca. 1978.
I wish Joe Elliott would lose the silky pageboy haircut. His hair was magnificent in the 80s, but now he’s a big old rugged guy needing a crewcut. ‘
All that aside, Def Leppard still puts on quite a live show. Saw them last year outdoors at the University of Tulsa football stadium, along with Alice Cooper (!) and Motley Crue, the latter with which I could easily have done without.
Taylor Swift is worth close study in a lot of ways, and yeah, I know how that sounds, but it’s true. There seems to be an entire business model of “Instagram influencers” trying to be pop stars now (e.g. Addison Rae). The prototype isn’t Swift, but Justin Bieber, but still, that’s one interesting attempt to re-energize pop music, and Swift has certainly shown them the way to do it. The problem, though, is that Swift pretty much IS the Millennial-and-under archetype. She’s it. There’s no money to be made by being a cut-rate copy of Taylor Swift, because she’s everywhere.… Read more »
The implications of the way she dresses, to dance in front of crowds of mostly heterosexual women, seem underappreciated.
Somehow Taylor Swift’s songs, her beats, her lyrics, simply hack young female brains, and I’ll loosely define “young” in that context as anywhere from 6 to 28. There’s no other way to describe it. Her lyrics aren’t terribly engaging, the musical compositions are just barely serviceable, but somehow she hits that stream-of-consciousness rhythm that must be very close to how a female brain tends to think, and so the ‘hack’ occurs and a Swiftie is born. Then, as you say, she pairs the songs with some kind of through-the-looking-glass projection of what said young female brains think qualifies as “HOT”… Read more »
That’s not it. It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with what females think males want. It is about what females think they themselves can achieve and attain. Back in the day, movie actresses were beautiful, because the men who were paying for the tickets wanted to see beautiful women. This is what got us Marilyn Monroe, Raquel Welch, and Farrah Fawcett. As women moved into the workforce, they started having their own money and buying their own movie tickets, and they find beautiful women like that intimidating. So beauty had to be redefined for the female moviegoer, so… Read more »
“Because Hollywood said they are [beautiful], they are on the screen, it must be true”
This, I believe is the heart of it. The influence of Hollywood, and the rest of the mainstream media, which includes TikTok, Facebook, and other social media.
Yes. Is it slut haradinism. Trashy none the less.
I’m one of the old dinosaurs who still buys CD’s. As with digital books, I don’t have confidence that there will be a long-term availability of certain kinds of digital music, including classical. Until recently, at least, if you “bought” a digital book, you still didn’t own the full, permanent rights to it. Considering how much our Betters disapprove of everything from our ancestors, and the continuing statements from people like Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry about what they think of free speech, I would much rather have hard copies of books and music, even if they are… Read more »
This is a good idea with movies, as they now remove original funny lines from the digital versions because they are politically incorrect.
Yes. And Gone With the Wind has been altered in recent DVD printings. In at least one instance, Pork, a black slave who is sympathetically portrayed (like most of the blacks in GWTW), has his speech censored.
When Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben have been cleansed because allegedly offensive, you know that no portrayal of a negro by whites, no matter how fawning and worshipful, will ever be encomiastic enough.
Encomiastic. Thanks for introducing me to a word that in my longish life I had never heard before.
Yes. Watched “History of The World Part I” with my son last summer and was surprised to hear the line “Ok faggot, what’s next?” during the Roman era skit. They haven’t ruined everything, yet.
Books, too. The latest release of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels and short stories have been disemBowdlerized, and the bloody Ian Fleming Foundation claims Fleming would approve the mutilation! These bastards deserve a visit from a real life Blofeld.
They’re probably right. Fleming, being a creature of the intel community, would no doubt sing the company line along with the rest of them about how we need to defeat the racisms, protect our democracy from misinformation etc. etc.
I did recently have no problem getting the entire Fleming Bond collection in its original form, used, for about $100, between Thriftbooks and Ebay.
But Fleming was a racist, and he suffered fools uneasily. There is no way he would have countenanced a pack of Leftist hacks doing a hatchet job on his life’s work.
I still record my old cassettes onto CDs with my aged Sony CD player/recorder. It finally died and I discovered that such units are no longer made. I was able to find a little company in Arizona that reconditions old stereo equipment and they had a repaired model of my old Sony. I’m back in the recording business.
Smart man. I’m constantly adding to my CD and DVD collections for the reasons you cite, in addition to simply being a tactile kind of a guy. I want the dam’ thing in my hands, not in somebody else’s ether.
Good point. The sense of owning a physical item in your hands is another thing that’s withering away and not for the better
One thing you are leaving out is that this pop music is pumped into every public place all the time. Every retail store blasts mostly 20-40 year old pop music at its customers. Sporting events have it playing constantly when there is not live action happening. The quality of newly produced music is way down and it is noticeable even to the average person. They have oversaturated public spaces with bad music and people want a break from it.
Yea, i got some free tickets to a pro baseball game last year and thought that i could have a beer and talk to my buddy while watching the game. Nope, they blasted negro rap crap on the loudspeakers with a heavy bass between innings. Never again, not even for free tickets.
Same thing in football. Never again!
They do it at NHL games, too, with an audience that is nearly 100% white.
They’re going to do it especially when an audience is nearly 100% white.
Like every effing white wedding reception I’ve attended in the last 20 years.
It’s a nice day for a black wedding…
They play loud terrible music at sports events, malls, restaurants, bowing alleys to disorient the customer and cause them to overspend and leave quickly. Heaven forbid, the customer gets a second of peace and a chance to enjoy himself!
As ever in AINO, the wants of the masses are irrelevant. All that matters is what the elites desire. And if they want to punish us with ghastly garbage played louder than a 747, that is just what they’ll do.
As a Boomer, I was used to major changes in pop music every couple of years: Elvis, the Beatles and Stones, acid rock, prog rock, punk rock and disco, etc. But since rap “music” started taking over five decades ago, there have been no changes. Come to think of it, even new innovative jazz and classical music died around the same time.
Every decade had “new” music starting around 1910. The 2000’s was the first decade that had no “new” music. Same for the 2010’s. It was about 7-8 years ago I gave up hoping for new music.
Jazz declined dramatically in the early 80’s. I’m not sure why this happened. Only smooth jazz survived. Smooth jazz died in the late 2010’s.
David Sanborn was at one time a neighbor and he hated going far away for gigs but he did many in Japan ($$$) as they loved any kind of jazz-real or smooth.
David Sanborn was good. I used to listen to him as well. He and Tom Scott. I believe David passed away just recently. Tom Scott is not active these days. Jeff Lorber is definitely active. I bought his last album (mp3 really), The Drop. It is quite good.
Well, that’s terrible news. Didn’t realize Sanborn died, but he did five months ago.
Regardting Tom Scott, he played the sax in McCartney’s “What the Man Says.” As the story goes, McCartney was getting ready to record the song, sans saxophone, when somebody told him Scott lived near the recording studio. McCartney told him to give Scott a call and see if he’d be interested in helping out with the song. Scott showed up, sax in hand, in less than an hour, and contributed an smashing impromptu solo that took the song to a higher level.
So you’re saying he was Big In Japan?
https://youtu.be/tl6u2NASUzU?si=FW5zRUSy_5Ve3KP7
I’ve got several Sanborn albums. Any critic who sneers at him because he’s a smooth jazz musician is immediately discredited in my eyes.
AFAIC, the last worthwhile decade for pop music was the 80s. I tuned out in March of ’92 because there was simply nothing being produced I wanted to listen to anymore. And I gather it’s only gotten far worse in the intervening years.
As for jazz, I think much that was worthwhile continued being recorded well into the 90s. Beyond that, perhaps precious little.
Jazz died because it requires actual musical talent.
I got a courtesy ride from the Toyota Dealer ship. The driver was a jazz musician. He went on an angry [and fully justified rant] that the local jazz club wanted HIM to pay for the chance to play at the club.
“I have more education than a doctor for crissakes! And they want ME to pay!?”
Anyone who thinks they can make a living playing music nowadays is going to be sad.
Jazz and orchestral music were buried alive in academia. They were recategorized from trade to profession, and innovation ended soon after—as far as the public knows. There’s a fringe of interesting new things but nobody hears about them, as in all the school-bound arts. Popular music is suffering a related fate, but the death of radio/etc. is more a part of the broad death of corporate innovation—America’s progress from Bell Labs to Sweet Baby Inc—caused not least by “HR.” The innovations of the rock era were almost all the work of normal losers, now systematically excluded from the business. Every… Read more »
This is a complex topic. Miles Davis went to Julliard and dropped out, after all. I think it’s more about the changes in modern academia. What do you think?
Country music ain’t doin’ so hot, either.
It sure isn’t. Whenever I hear it, I’m embarrassed to be listening, same as with any other form of pop.
Let me flip this around, what has gotten better in the last ten, even twenty years? Not much
Time will tell, but learning languages maybe.
I have friends who refuse to learn Spanish because their cell phone can translate live. They don’t see the need for learning. In this way I think learning and mental tasks will go the way of manual labor.being knowledgeable will become as rare as being physically fit. “What’s the point? My phone can do it”. And obesity will be joined by ignorance (more than is already the case).
I think there is a movie that came out some years ago where everyone is stupid and obese and the machines do all the work.
Wall-E.
Movies – Nope.
Cars – Nope thanks to federal regulations designed to eliminate them. They spy on you and all of them have 2.0 liter turbo four-pots that will blow up 100k or less.
Music – Big nope.
Sports – The quality of play is awful and the politics that have been inserted into something that was once a distraction from life have made them unwatchable.
That’s why I like fly fishing, deer hunting and camping. All of those things remain great, even in this age of awfulness.
They haven’t been able to screw up the outdoors yet. But young people hiking use their phones as maps. Which is obviously not good
Agreed. I really hate the disappearance of paper maps. Not because I’m an old fogey, but it’s another obvious way that we can be controlled.
I had a boss who would drive hours out of her way to conferences, because the GPS told her so.
I vaguely recall reading a sci-fi novel or was it a short story? Can’t remember. Anyway, I think it was called The Door
and the premise was everybody used a star trek transporter to get around and the thought of going outside was terrifying.
We’ve been in freefall for close to 60 years. But because the West was at such an empyrian height, the decline went on for decades before even sensitive people really noticed. Now it’s only the very young and the very obtuse who don’t recognize that we live in the outskirts of Hell.
Phone cameras and microphones
The dirty truth of phone csmeraes is that they are partly digital paintings. There was no breakthrough in optics which leads to the question how lenses the size of large pinheads started taking high quality pictures. The answer was in software and early AI 3.0 (the current AI revolution). So they look good but at the cost of authenticity
My suspicions have been answered
Cordless Tools and LEDs
Being a very mediocre handyman I don’t use cordless tools do wouldn’t know. But I can believe that. LEDs yeah, I can’t really shoot that down. Do there are a few things, sure
The LS series is a great improvement over the SBC as a powerplant.
Modern Sporting Rifles: a colt used to cost $1500. Now, despite 100%+ inflation since 2004, a MSR can be had for $400. And you can make your own, which used to be virtually inpossible.
MIG welders and multiprocess welders are leaps better and cheaper.
End user powder coating
Metal roofing is far superior and much cheaper now. Ditto moisture barriers for house siding.
/pandering: used to be no Zman site. Massive improvement to the internet /pandering
“Otherwise, the golden era of popular music, especially rock music, will be viewed as a strange artifact of the American empire. A generation from now that music may sound as weird and alien to young people as Chinese opera.” It already does. It belonged to the golden age of the empire, when the young had a future full of promise, money was easy to come by. blue collar jobs were well-paid and plentiful, and there was some semblance of working-class culture. That’s all vanished in the post-industrial wastelands of the USA and satellites such as Britain. I’m reminded of Bifo… Read more »
In the past, bands used concert tours to promote record sales. The ticket would only be 2 or 3 times the cost of the record. Now they record music to promote the very expensive concert tickets.
If your band could sell 10,000 records, your band was a lower middle class job for four guys. Touring is how you got to 10,000 (and became an alcoholic with herpes). Current equivalent popularity is about a million plays on Spotify/etc. That’ll net you zero dollars or less—on average much less, negative many thousands sunk into services and supplies for musicians (our company store). The business only pays the business now. True capitalism has been achieved. The claim is the ticket sellers are gouging the consumer with demand-based pricing, which is like saying no one goes to a restaurant because… Read more »
The trick is to skip the big names. There are a lot of small venues playing B-list musicians where tickets can be had for $100 or less.
I’ve heard what folks pay to see a concert at a big venue. Outrageous!
We go to see a particular Russian cover band in a tiny venue every year for about $70 in the 8th row. They either play the tunes note for note by the original recording or usually better.
These giant mega-tours are another vestige of boomer culture that is on its way out. Believe it or not, the Rolling Stones were a top-3 band in terms of concert revenue as recently as 2021. They’re now dying off and just getting too old to keep doing it. Bruce Springsteen’s wife has a particularly insidious cancer that will unfortunately keep him off the road. Aerosmith had to call of its touring, permanently, because Steven Tyler’s voice is shot. While these concerts were filled with the young and old alike, it’s not like the old are going to now spend that… Read more »
Boomer nostalgia is the fuel of live pop/rock music now. The wife and I plead guilty on this count. She says she will swear off nostalgia, but she keeps making exceptions for acts we missed the first time around. Personally, I’m ready to retire to the basement and clean my guns while listening to Bach.
We stopped in a store in a nearby tourist town a few weeks ago that advertised ‘rock’ t shirts (younger son is into ’70s – ’90s metal). Every single shopper had gray hair (with the exception of our son and the sales girls). The whole era of ‘following’ a band and obsessing about its music is a totally boomer phenomenon these days. I was never as into music as a teen as were my peers. I went to a few concerts in the ’70s, but the crowds and the huge indoor venues did nothing for me. My older son took… Read more »
In AINO, silence is impossible.
Bach and a blunderbuss–good show, old boy.
These giant mega-tours are another vestige of boomer culture that is on its way out. They’re now dying off and just getting too old to keep doing it. The Lovely 🥰 Mrs. and I went to see Chicago and Earth, Wind, and Fire at a local outdoor venue this past summer. EW&F was on-it. But EW&F has the sons of late former members playing in the band along with the surviving members. Chicago? Oh, they still have one or two remaining members, but their original lead singer looked like Joe Biden out there on stage. Forgot lyrics, forgot cues. At… Read more »
I have long theorized that some bands, like KISS, will just replace all the members and continue to exist as a brand for as long as there is somebody willing to give them money.
Didn’t KISS present hologram versions of themselves at their farewell show?
Gene Simmons pushed the covid-19 vaccine to the hilt. As I recall, you had to show proof of vaccination to attend their concerts in 2021. Same for Jimmy Buffet (Margaritaville).
“Gene Simmons” aka Israeli-born Chaim Witz…
Ship of Theseus paradox.
I’d pay to see a Zman live stream from a hip hop concert.
Does he have a GoFundMe account? 🤔
C’mon Z fans, Make. It. Happen.
I saved for a nice Pioneer system when I was a teenager and used my vinyl albums as masters to record cassettes I could listen to in the car.
As for live shows, we saw our favorite bands playing big colosseums. Today I would rather see an indie band playing greasy blues at a local dive bar.
I agree. A few of my friends and I saw Asia on their 25th anniversary tour at a small club – 200 seats – and it was a fantastic show. They not inly did their own material, but they threw in some King Crimson and a few songs by Yes as well.
I did the same and used to make cassettes for my gf. Eventually, she decided she would keep the cassettes but not me. Such is life.
You know you are old when you can afford the steroe system you’ve always dreamed of and you use it to listen to talk radio.
I suppose technology has also killed the garage band, as well, which, of course provided the raw talent for rock. Today, an aspiring guitarist can get online and play with a bassist from Japan, a drummer from Brazil and a singer in England. He’s not forced to find some local kids to play together and learn how to be a band like normal humans, in the same room, and play live in front of others with a human feedback loop instead of social media comments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUrHVWa3s2Y&ab_channel=FlakyKakes
Music is suffering from the lack of people who can play a musical instrument. In the 50’s and early 60’s the Detroit pub schools had a great music program. They produced the raw material that made Motown. The same thing led to thousands of garage bands spending all their free time learning to play guitars, drums, and bass. And rock was born. Rap is a response to a lack of ability to play an instrument. Just synthesizers and screaming to a background beat. It is amazing how the songs I listened to in high school and collage are making up… Read more »
In my blue-collar city back in the 60’s and 70’s, there were loads of opportunities for kids to learn music, in and out of the public schools. One of my big regrets is that I passed up a good opportunity to take piano lessons. It would have been very affordable too.
Even more opportunities exist for that today. The internet allows for basically anyone to learn basically anything for free, depending on how much of an autodidact they are.
There are those Internet opportunities, which I won’t scoff at, but I don’t think any of it reaches the one-on-one, personalized instruction of a good music teacher, who is there in the same room.
My son learned to play guitar using an internet website. He is actually proficient.
Sure. Become a Chello virtuoso and upload the tape to show us that’s true
Hello? That’s cello.
Piano lessons? Let me tell you brother: I learned to play guitar passably when I was forty. I got a keyboard. I don’t see how a human can master that thing. Piano players are not human beings.
Yeah, I might not have had the talent to go very far, but if I had a child who was promising, I’d want him to get personalized, one-on-one instruction.
I used to think I had natural rhythm, before I took up the piano. Like you, based on my guitar playing, I thought I was naturally musically inclined, before I took up the piano. I haven’t touched a guitar in years but I can still pick one up anytime and play some songs. Piano otoh is a bitch. After three years of practicing 2 hours a day, every day, I still sucked.
Hell yes. My poor piano teacher, oh my goodness… I could play the notes and chords, but my timing was terrible. She didn’t give a damn about the notes and chords, but about the tempo. And she was right; even with a metronome my timing was for shit. I quit out of sympathy for my piano teacher. As for the guitar, being a natural and total left-hander, but not being a Jimi Hendrix or Paul McCartney, who taught themselves how to play “the wrong way”, I tried to learn from the books but the whole reversal thing was just too… Read more »
I recommend you watch the movie Shine, about the life and times of concert pianist David Helfgott. Doubtless rather sensationalized after the Hollywood fashion, but still a remarkable exposition of learning and playing the piano at the very highest level.
His brother claims that’s all bs about his father treating him the way the movie depicted
Yes. That’s why I said it was probably sensationalized.
The “democratization” of popular music, a major consequence of technological change, ironically led to a massive decline in quality. Despite all the anecdotes about evil record labels, their executives risked a lot of money signing acts and producing records. Failure had career consequences. The editorial function worked in that era. Now, the lowest common denominator gives us Taylor Swift and an entire generation of no-talent hacks.
I had some thoughts along these lines some years ago:
“High music won’t displace pop music in a culture that’s become mob rule in every sense.
Re-organizing culture will require re-organizing society itself. To have a correctly aligned culture that effortlessly produces the highest of innovation and beauty at the top, the inherent breeds and strata of humanity must be restored to their rightful places. First, mob rule of culture must end.
Until then, high music will remain mainly as a 18th-19th century style orchestra, a formidable ghost.”
https://wp.me/p2ouzT-1aI
With Taylor Swift, I’m sure that a tremendous amount of the appeal is because of the media hype. That has actually probably been the case since “pop music” began, although some big, hyped performers such as Bing Crosby, Elvis, and the Beatles actually did have loads of talent, and deserved the praise. Someone like Springsteen, though, was hyped through the roof, way beyond his abilities. I remember in the 70’s when the media seemed to do a coordinated Springsteen blitz. I know, he’s supposedly a great performer, etc., etc., and I know that some of these evaluations are subjective, but… Read more »
Even the classic acts like the Beatles are way overrated. St. Peppers is a good album. But I don’t care for any other Beatles music. You are 100% spot-on about Bruce Springsteen being way overrated even by the standards of being overrated.
I honestly do not understand why Taylor Swift is so popular. This is a complete mystery to me.
This is not a mystery. Don’t be dense. Taylor Swift is popular because she is a lovely blonde woman. If I had it to do all over again, I would be Taylor Swift.
There is truth in this.
She’s weird-looking, almost catlike. But not unattractive when she was younger.
Of course it is hard (for me, anyway) to objectively evaluate Sprinsteen’s music because he’s such an asshole. I admit that there are four or five songs of his that I like, but they’re all covers, my favorite being “The Fever” by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, which kicks ass.
I remember that media blitz, like when Springsteen made the cover of Time in 1975. WTF? No one had ever heard of the guy and suddenly he’s being portrayed as the next Bob Dylan. Had to be a psyop.
Yes. And he made the cover of Newsweek around that same time. He had already been performing and writing for a while, with a few albums out, and Somebody on High decided he was the next big thing. It wasn’t due to talent.
I like ‘Take it Inside’ and ‘Trapped Again’ by the old S.S. Johnny.
I will hunt down those tracks. Not familiar.
But “the Fever” was and remains in my shower repertoire.
Dunno that one. I will give it a listen on my youtube music. cheers
Springsteen is a psyop.
He’s gone on record several times that his musical persona is based on his blue collar father.
The truth is that the Boss is a vegan who hates his working class audience, hates America, and enjoys duping his audience out of their hard-earned dollars.
Springsteen is the suck and always has been.
Springsteen sounds like a seal in the circus barking for a fish.
Ha! And the seal’s lyrics are more interesting.
There is a huge blind spot in this essay: lifestyle. Even adults experience music differently due to the advent of technology’s impact upon how we live. Music used to be the one sense (just auditory) entertainment – for centuries. With the rise of MTV, and now smartphones, music became just a background adornment. Most people put on music now as background, rather than an event. For we who play music, we know the idea of sitting in a room, listening intently, focusing exclusively on the music. Most don’t. And even adults who used to sit with buddies and sip a… Read more »
With classical music, to truly get what it has to offer, one has to listen actively. Having it play in the background while you heat up your Spaghetti-Os may be pleasant enough, but you’re barely scratching the musical surface. And that may be one reason why classical music is slipping into the abyss–it requires attention, effort, and a certain amount of intelligence to appreciate.
As I learned more about classical music, I was stunned, in a positive way, by how much real intellectual effort and analysis is involved in much of it. And those intellectual aspects often create and enhance the beauty, in areas like harmonies, counterpoint, etc. I’m very, very far from being a musical expert, but I wish that more people understood how rewarding classical music is. A reasonable amount of working-class people used to understand this. And it often used to be promoted in the early decades of TV! Some Americans back then would yawn and scoff at the “long-hairs” of… Read more »
In the 50s most families would have been ashamed not to have at least a couple of classical music albums in their music collection. Nowadays must adults couldn’t tell the difference between Beethoven’s 5th and a fifth of Old Crow.
I assumed that the Jews running the music industry decided they don’t want the kids listening to rock.
I do find it weird that rock is basically dead while country music is doing fairly well with young artists releasing new music. I’ve been to a couple of country shows, usually the act does a rock song or 2. I think many of them would rather be making southern rock if there were still radio stations that would play that stuff.
My understanding is that country has been popular since the early 90’s and continues to be so. Since I don’t listen to country, I have no idea of its happenings.
There is a lot of evidence that the Nickelback hate campaign is a psyop orchestrated by our fellow white people.
“Taylor Swift is probably the last mega star and her fame is mostly due to her general weirdness.”
TS found that maintaining even the schlockiest fake “country” image was way too difficult in terms of peer pressure. Poof! She quickly caved into the conformist’s ideal. Plus being a bureaucrat class worshipper pays far better. (She could be far worse of course, but reading her diary to some repetitive tones isn’t exactly musical genius.)
There seems to be some channeling of feminist anger these young ladies find instructive.
She is a product, perhaps we don’t like music anymore because most of it is just that.
https://youtu.be/_Aqr_tuQa24
Taylor Swift seems to have been molded for decades to be the perfect bugwoman. She started as a country star, got some fame, moved to NYC, started extolling the virtues of the city life instead of the hick country world, started getting pumped and dumped by prominent celebrities (both chad and bugmen), and then as soon as needed she was activated and started pushing for globohomo liberalism and abortion.
Both of her parents were investment bankers……….she is a product, a corporate product that manipulates tweens. Don’t ask questions, just consume product!
I’ve listened to a hell of a lot of country music but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a single Taylor Swift song. Can’t name any of her pop songs either. If you offered me a million bucks to name one of her songs, either country or pop, I couldn’t do it.
Hey, bud, just cool it with the braggadocio, whydontcha?
Technology, hip hop, and lazy people made it easy to destroy popular music. The 60s/70s white pop or black soul/R&B artists worked with excellent songwriters and excellent musicians did the recording sessions. Rap and disco put an end to that. And Pop was always different than Rock. Most rock bands had very good musicians even if they couldn’t read music. For the most part, the only modern musicians capable of reading music charts are horn sections, keyboard players and orchestras and it’s hard work and takes a long time to be proficient. Any idiot can make “music” now.
Black music (Earth Wind and Fire, Commodores, etc.) was good. In fact, the black music was better than most white music, excepting for prog rock of course.
I wouldn’t go that far, but sometimes… yeah. In any case, yes, black music used to be good. And then you had Ella Fitzgerald who wasn’t strictly speaking a “black music” singer. Her vocal range still amazes me when I listen to her stuff with Louis Armstrong.
You’re right. There used to be a lot of higher-quality black music, both with blacks doing their own thing, and blacks performing in more white genres. Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Charlie Pride, Motown–just a few more examples.
Jazz was loaded with actual black talent, from the early days to around the 70’s or so. We need to give them their due.
Yep. Miles, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Dizzy Gillespie, Coltrane, Tony Williams… giants.
For my money, the best of them all is also the most overlooked–McCoy Tyner.
Ray Brown. Oscar Peterson. The Modern Jazz Quartet.
Right tail FTW.
I don’t know that a lot of that black Motown and disco music was “good” insofar as it was stupid and trite, but I do think a lot of the black artists of the era had genuine musical talent. George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic was degenerate negro music, but I gotta admit, they sure could jam.
Negroes can only make good music when under intense and constant cultural pressure by a strong white majority. Otherwise, they regress to Africa.
This is absolutely true. The black musical greats like Miles and Ella and Wynton Marsalis were great because they played music in white society using white instruments and white recording technology.
If their ancestors had never come here as slaves and they had been musicians in the Congo nobody would know who they were.
The cultural pressure is gone. The result? Rap.
I remember growing up in the 1980s and 1990s and rock, be it the Sunset Strip variety that became a self-parody or the heroin-fueled sludge from Seattle, ruled the roost. New bands popped up and became a part of your tape or CD collection. Cities had music scenes where musicians hoped to get the big break and get a record deal while playing dive bars and clubs. Now, it’s just shitty cover bands. Then rap became the predominant music, even for young whites. It’s just guttural, profane, rhythmic grunting over a looped drum beat without melody or substance. I I… Read more »
Upvoted for the Taylor Swift part, bland looking with little talent and a shitty human to boot. Satan has to be involved in there somewhere. And I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard one of her songs but she’s so ubiquitous in the culture and so degraded that Satan made her success possible.
Perhaps she had a midnight rendezvous, axe in hand, at a lonely crossroads several miles southeast of Itta Bena…
Cover bands. I would never pay to see one. It’s really just sophisticated karaoke.
I slightly disagree.
It’s possible for a cover band to be very talented, yet lack the creative spark to move to the next level with their own material.
I can think of one band in my area like this. Nationally, the band First 2 Eleven is an excellent example.
I find it a bit sad that these acts just can’t quite get to the next level.
Clearly you’ve never been in a bar with the Bangkok Beatles playing. They were pretty good on the early stuff. Or was it the beer? Been a while now.
Never could quite talk myself into paying money to see an Elvis impersonator though.
I’m guessing the Bangkok Beatles would be better than Thai beer…
From my perspective, a streaming service like Spotify is all I ever wanted from music. $10 a month for all the music I ever wanted to listen to, by anybody? What’s not to like? I used to have to spend that much on one LP or CD, and it often turned out I didn’t like 2/3 of the songs on it. If that’s tough on the record companies, that’s not my problem. But it turns out that the majority of what I listen to on spotify is 50 years old. Because…. “Rock” always had a limited life span, because it… Read more »
The streaming services are the only bastion of music industry that still exists. People do not even buy mp3’s off of Amazon any more.
MP3’s are why I don’t buy music off of the internet. When I was younger, the entire purpose of a good sound system was fidelity. MP3 ain’t it.
Next thing you know you had this Cobain who Xers pretend was talented to this very day.
A-HEM! Not all of us do. 😒
Totally agree about Spotify.
As a late Xer it would have saved me hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars growing up.
I enjoy the, “Discover Weekly,” playlist because the algo usually comes up with a couple good songs. Anything that doesn’t catch my ear in 30 seconds gets skipped, saving me immense time.
My wife and I are musicians who play in a popular cover band around town. The entire music community here is actually pretty right-leaning compared to what you might think, especially since the surrounding city is entirely shit lib. On the subject of young people and live music, you are 100% spot on. We are constantly arguing about what songs to play, or what type of music we need to cover to get people out. The truth is, most of the people who come out are older. They are the only ones who want to hear live music. Your best… Read more »
I hate to say this, but this is one of those topics where our host, most of his readers, and even I show our ages. Basically, we sound like our parents did when we were young. Thus, it has always been… Like a lot of music enthusiasts, I get bored. I refuse to listen to “classic rock” stations, because I don’t want to hear the same songs I’ve heard thousands of times before. Even stuff that I absolutely love, if I’ve heard it too many times, I am only receptive to on rare occasions. I never go to nostalgia shows… Read more »
Pro-tip. Get a subscription to Pandora. Put in a genre, then downvote every song you’ve heard a million times. You will find stuff you never thought of. I never realized how good Ted Nugent was until I created “Radar Love” station, and downvoted the popular stuff. “Strangle Hold” Now there’s a song!
Been there, done that. It works even better with a paid subscription.
Time for you to discover classical music!
Way back in the way back, when I worked in the music business during one of the last great Los Angeles music scenes (the Paisley Underground), I was a Commercial Music major in college. It was the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff, focusing mostly on studio recording and live sound reinforcement. We learned and practiced using various mics, recording techniques, control room equipment, etc. It was a great program that produced some well-known recording engineers and producers. Real working-man stuff. One of the required courses was “History and Appreciation of Music”. It was basically learning about classical music, starting with baroque… Read more »
Took two music literature/appreciation courses as an undergrad, in part because they were supposed to be blow-off classes. At the time I had very little interest in classical. I can now honestly say those were two of the top-most classes I took in my college days, and that’s going all the way through doctoral work. Learned so much about classical music, and most important, I learned to love classical music. That will stick with me and provide solace for as long as I live.
I beg to differ in that I think there has been a genuine and steep I quality in the arts. The argument that old people always complain leads to the fallacy that things have not really gotten worse. Which they have
Disagree. Pop music has never been worse and it’s not even close. I tuned out when I was 24 years old, hardly a candidate for the old folks’ home.
Nice to see a mention of The Phish From Vermont, who are still doing very in terms of ticket sales and are continually putting out new material to co-mingle with the old, some of better quality than others. Billy Strings, who recently sat in with Phish in his home state of Michigan in Grand Rapids, is the real freaking deal. Great guitar picker, singer and songwriter who has over the course of his career performed a staggering 500+ covers that can be enjoyed on a playlist on the streaming service nugs.net. He kept it going during the pandemic and has… Read more »
Once upon a time, young people adopted a music genre as a statement of who they were or aspired to be. It was an identifier, much like hair or clothing style, face piercings, or cultural jargon. It was how a person coming-of-age set themselves apart and created a public persona. Others could tell a lot about a stranger once they became acquainted with their music preference. And it worked because music resonates with an internal dimension of each person’s unique soul. It was authentic. It was a visceral bonding experience. We are worse off without it.
Respectfully, I have to disagree. Before the world wars, and especially before World War II, most young people either didn’t have the time or the inclination to aggressively show that they belonged to some subculture, at least in the way they have since the 50’s. After WWII, and with the Baby Boom, the advertising world had a bonanza with promoting different youth subcultures. And with teenagers not having to work as much as before, and with their allowances from dad, they soaked that advertising up. Rock and all other forms of popular music are all a part of this, no… Read more »
Youth culture is a product of industrialization, mass market, and mass media. It emerged in the 1940’s and largely ended around 2010 for a variety of reasons. Youth culture is actually quite anomalous in the context of history.
Like everything in post-America it is reliant upon the lowest common denominatorization of the magical people’s culture. It is also bent on pushing their so-called music everywhere. Just as the ads, show hosts, airport jobs are all geared toward worship of that one demographic, their music is pumped out of every soundhole in the imperium: airplanes; airports; rideshares; restaurants; cinemas; parking lots; supermarkets; bodegas; hardware stores; lobbies; retail counters (rental car, national park …); bathrooms; … … It is a pleasure and a relief to hear silence. I now own earplugs that I wear everywhere I go, and aside from… Read more »
The sound of Nature is golden. Silence is silver. I rarely put the headphones on unless I pushing the lawnmower or riding the tractor.
The root problem is the people aren’t interesting
A guy who was born in the back of a chevy and had a crazy drunken dad and left home at 16 on a rail car for the big city with a floozy on his side had something interesting to sing about.
What is someone like Nick Fuentes going to sing about? Computers? Coding a website?
I am in Florida now and I said as a joke but now I mean it, the wildlife and weather are more interesting than the people
Not a bad point. Also, there are a lot of people who once dreamed of owning a radio station, I was one of them (thank God I didn’t go in that direction). The internet provides the perfect vehicle for these budding entertainers/entrepreneurs to do just that. But the rights fees are so obscene, someone in his basement loses money on the proposition. Then you have people with YouTube channels and podcasters that keep getting hit with copyright violations hurting their ability to monetize. Greed and inability to evolve to a more realistic model is another cause of them shooting themselves… Read more »
“One of the unexpected consequences of the technological revolution is the death of the popular music industry.”
Here’s an alternative hypothesis: the industry is dying because their product sucks, cf. Taylor Swift. Much of the new stuff sounds like it was generated by AI, which might actually be true. Similar to what’s happened with movies (see today’s Green Door post), bad content kills interest.
The most popular acts have also moved to the biggest venues. Now they are playing football stadiums with 60,000 seats. It is generally a really crappy experience watching a live band in a football stadium.
Yes. Mrs W and I went to see Kenny Chesney at a football stadium recently and he sounded like he was playing in a dumpster. Added to the fact that the stadium itself is a large dumpster, it made for a very disappointing, expensive evening. Never again.
Went to a stadium show once – the bands were playing in a different zip code. Never again.
Saw Chesney last year in an arena and he sounded very good.
This has been going on since the 70s. In Buffalo they had several ‘Superfests’ a year at (then) Rich Stadium. For instance in ’77 the show was headlined by Yes, and also feature d Bob Seeger, J Geils and Donovan. Tickets were $8.50, and you could bring in your own coolers.
We’re really dating ourselves in here. But I don’t care in the least.
Lots of people noticing and contemplating the same phenomenon lately: https://brianniemeier.com/2024/10/how-rock-and-roll-lost-its-groove/
Interesting take. Speaking of length, Stevie Nicks said that the original version of “Sarah” is twenty seven minutes long. She also went on to add that it’s in a vault and that she’s not sure if it will ever be released, even after she’s gone. Too bad, that I’d love to hear.
Hmm. I think the released “Sarah” is plenty long. That said, what a weird and wonderful chick she was. Yeah, boomer nostalgia, but 1975… I was fifteen: The struggle for my eternal devotion came down to: Nicks, Valerie Bertinelli, or Dorothy Hamill. The emergence of the transistor radio in the 1960s caused a revolution in the formation of young minds. Pop music became ubiquitous, a “soundtrack” of our youth. Listening to that stuff now reactivates memories, both large and trivial. For instance, Ringo Starr’s hit “It Don’t Come Easy” reminds me of the day my little league team won the… Read more »
I’m a few years behind you in age, so I get your “soundtrack”. I had two objects of desire Olivia Newton John and Erin Gray, who played Colonel Wilma Deering on Buck Rogers. She’s the only reason I watched the show. Ok, Princess Ardalla was pretty hot as well.
Eric Clapton’s long version of Layla. Some songs are the soundtrack of your life
That timeline corresponds with the last stages of pre-horrible STDs that either burdened people (e.g., herpes) or killed them (AIDS). The era represented the last carefree time in recent memory for many.
My older brother (with whom I have not spoken in over 20 years) had/has literally thousands of LPs (his and our late father’s, rock/classical). Presumably worth a fair amount of money. Hubby and I still own a handful of cassettes and have some CDs. One of the many reasons we recently bought a pre-2020 vehicle was because it still came with both a CD player and an auxiliary jack (for my ancient MP3 player).
Our 2013 Honda Odyssey has both but the newer ones have neither. When I replaced my 2001 Nissan a few years ago I wanted a car with a CD player and found a 2016 Honda CRV that had one but no auxiliary jack. My daughters’ Hondas have only the Bluetooth connection.
Some of the best music comes from 60’s garage bands. These guys did this for fun and had small, local followings. Unfortunately, the Vietnam draft caused a lot of these bands to dissolve.
There are a few good modern songs, but most are commercial and boring. Rap music is torture, and a lot of Country Western is just silly. I can’t listen to Kenny Rogers while driving, I start nodding off and falling asleep.They should market his music for insomniacs.
People ask me if my horses are smart. I tell them “How smart can they be? They like Kenny Rogers.”
I have to respectfully disagree with the last paragraph. I believe music from the 1960-90s period will live forever, because no one makes anything like it anymore. Much like classical fans still listen to Bach/Mozart/Beethoven. What choice do they have? I also wonder if much of the creativity of the golden era was a result of LSD. Musicians just seemed to be in a different creative realm. Now, much of popular music sounds like it was created by a corporate committee. Computers give the ability to create complex combinations of chords, but the humans programming them can’t think of anything… Read more »
Bach/Mozart/Beethoven is the barest minimum of classical music. There are hundreds of other composers who are within shouting distance of the Big Three, and they produced tens of thousands of works. We don’t lack for choice; we’re spoiled for it.
Zman,
Reread your article, replace covid with economic collapse, fixed it for you. Stop blaming covid, covid was hype, fear and the flu. Economy started to blow up late 2018, repo crisis late 2019, and on demand virus in 2020. Economy still sucks and nobody even thinks about covid anymore.
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/
And for music or enterntainment in general, people are sick of rich, mediocre hacks lecturing them on how to live life, who to vote for, and the god damn message they’ve been sending in their media since 2016.
He’s talking about the cultural impact of music. I’m not sure why everything has to be tied back to economics.
ha are you serious? Wait wait wait, how many comments here will rant about jews in t minus 5 4 3 2 1
If you don’t understand why everything comes back to economics, i don’t think you’ve been paying attention.
Music is a discretionary purchase, if the economy gets bad, what do you think gets cut first? This ain’t rocket science people
Tell us. Who gets cut first? I’m genuinely curious.
i dunno, you better make sure you don’t have any jews hiding under your bed first 😉
Took your advice and was fixing to be a Minyan so got to them just in time. Thanks!
Goethe wrote something that surprised me at that moment but I was able to see the truth of it ever afterward. “All genius is provincial”. And although I don’t suppose he was thinking particularly of music it turns out to be very true, for example, of the great music of the 19th century, when both the compositions themselves and the perfomers were unique to their province and language, and easily idenfied. Edith Piaf would be an obviously French voice if she sang in German. With high tech came homogenization of language and culture. Accents disappeared. Genius could not percolate without… Read more »
I assume Goethe was referring specifically to artistic genius.
I’m 67 y/o. I saw most of the big mid 70s – mid 80s rock acts. The only act i’ve been excited about in decades is Billy Strings. One of the best live bands i’ve ever seen. Their recorded stuff is OK – pretty good, but live they are extremely good. As good as any band i’ve ever seen.They’re classified as bluegrass but appeal to a wide range of musical tastes and ages. If you ever get a chance, go see them!!
Billy is awesome. I posted about him an hour or so ago before I saw your post. I’ll add that he is a sincere guy who survived a very rough upbringing and who is very honest about his internal struggles with his sudden fame.
When I was a kid in the Fifties and Sixties, almost every song that came across the (ubiquitous) transistor was novel, and often extraordinary. Now we get two choices: (c)rap, or waify politicized women warbling about how rotten men are. Who buys it? The same demographic that dominates the (ruined) culture: teenage girls. The Fifties through Seventies WAS a golden age of music, and yes the music WAS that good, and tremendously diverse. The (c)rap that rules now has not changed in forty years; it’s just the same rhythm and song recycled over and over again. Like the waify feminist… Read more »
Not only novel, but a lot of them were just plain fun. (If you wanna be happy the rest of your life, you better get yourself an ugly wife … And then you also have the old local American Bandstand TV shows that are no longer in existence. Ours was called Dance Party and it featured local high school garage bands like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq9ZlcFR0hg
Never heard of The Section before but I looked them up and they are a subset of The Wrecking Crew, LA studio musicians who played on hundreds, perhaps thousands of hits.
Yep that sounds right. The Wrecking Crew, I think, preceded The Section.
Great topic. So many thoughts. When I could download MP3s for free, I went crazy sticking it to the Man. He had been sticking it to me for so many years, with one good song on an album of crap. I haven’t paid for a recording since Kazaa. I’ve been to countless concerts, but none since Covid. Part of it is the old acts are all fading away. Part of it is the missus and I are old and tired. Most of the concerts we went to before the Cooties were full of gray hairs anywise. As far as what’s… Read more »
I found a website last night that, for 10 bucks a month, generates a 3 minute song in whatever genre, with whatever lyrics, that you own a commercial license to.
People are already using this technology to create hour long mixes on YouTube. (Egyptian metal, bubblegum rock, folk calypso, etc.) There’s also at least one guy creating a fake pop-star account with the technology.
LLMs might just make the musician themselves obsolete.
Not just musicians. In ten years you pay five bucks, say a few key words, like “Indiana Jones meets Tarzan”, “snakes and aliens”, “black magic, blonde heroine”. And fifteen minutes later your home screen slows a feature length AI created movie around your keywords
Ultimately, this might be a good thing. Performers will return to the relatively low status they enjoyed before mass media, and their product will be cheaper, and in some cases maybe better.
The likes of Taylor Swift should not be influential cultural icons, to say nothing of Diddy.
Thanks to AI there are already tons of modern movies that have trailers in a 50s style on YouTube.
That stuff has really started to crack me up. Better than the original sounds it’s based on!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FizOyEt7QWk
That was fun
Not just the musicians, but the record companies and recording studios as well. If the song you want can to hear can be synthesized for you from existing materials, most of the entire music industry becomes obsolete.
I guess it’s a mixed blessing. I’ll never forgive the industry for forcing hip hop on everyone, when almost no one wanted it. Now, even country music is incorporating it.
Being around young people because of my kids, I almost never hear them talk about going to a big concert. They will go to smaller events, music or otherwise. If they do go to a big concert, it’s an old act, like really old. They don’t have anyone from their generation that they seem to care much about.
But, again, smaller events are more popular than ever.
But, again, smaller events are more popular than ever. You beat me to it. There has been a nationwide proliferation of small venues, and these tend to feature rock or country with their implicit masculinity and whiteness. Excellent music is being produced as a result. This is a true green shoot. The tickets tend to be quite inexpensive and kids actually socialize in meat space. In the old Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, the same happened prior to the communist implosion. I won’t claim those two were related directly (they may have been), but dissent often first manifests in popular… Read more »
In my area, local music festivals have become very popular in the summer months. Most of the performers, while semi-professional (I.e., they have day jobs), are good, obviously enjoy themselves and bond easily with the audience. Off-site, the nearby bars will engage musicians as well, offering free admission to ticket holders for the main stage. It’s a lot of fun. Sure, my wife and I might drop $200 at one of these festivals, but it takes a whole afternoon of music, food and beverage to do so, as opposed to some large event with a big name act, where $200… Read more »
The crowd at the Hammerfall/Sabaton show I saw was aggressively White and aggressively masculine (I saw one black guy and one asian woman). I was one of the few oldsters (in my late 50s at the time). And everyone mingled, knew all the lyrics and sang along enthusiastically. I jumped around with the best of them, as much as possible given the crowd and tight space.
Smaller music venues sell tickets for shows for $20-$30, it’s more intimate, the acoustics are better, the booze is cheaper, it’s easier to get in and out of, etc. Yes the music is different, but ultimately you’re paying for an experience, even if you never heard of the band, if your friend likes them maybe you find something good you never would have thought of. And for $20, even if the band stinks, it’s a few hours out. The Black Keys got egg on their face earlier this year for canceling their tour due to low sales, while I like… Read more »
I could never imagine spending triple digits to be packed in like a sardine in uncomfortable chairs to see anyone ever. It’s not as if that’s the only way to hear the music. Obviously a lot of people see it differently. In my youth it was more like $15 and that was justifiable in a town where there wasn’t much else happening on Friday night.
Late on this, but it is not (mostly) technology. But Demographics. I did a post years ago, on my old site, and I looked at the number of young White men available to form bands, patronize clubs, and make a semi-living (not real one). That peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Which is precisely when you saw bands like X, the Blasters, the Ramones, the Bangles, the Clash, Devo, Wall of Voodoo, etc, form in places like London, New York, and Los Angeles. The formula was: “enough” critical mass to where bands can play in dive places and… Read more »
While’s the decline in music quality is a bad thing; the decline of the superstar is a good thing. Please, no more celebrities. Let that die with Boomer just like the dream of writing the Great American Novel has mercifully died.
Forgot: college should die with the Boomers too, I hope.
I gave away my LP’s years ago, the cassettes are worn out and I really don’t need the cd’s when I can go on YouTube and listen to just about anything plus see them perform for free. — I know of a local band of young guys that does quite well playing 50’s -60’s songs to the Boomers. My class reunion had them and it wasn’t all that bad but it was a long, long, really long way from actually being young and electrified by that music.
I’m baffled as to why Swift is so popular. She must’ve sold her soul to Satan.
Last good concert I attended was Porcupine Tree at the MGM Fenway a few years (!) ago. Not too big or small, and even has a skybar that overlooks Yawkey Way.
They have all sold their soul to get into that business
I don’t know much about the music industry but, with the availability of recorded music, new music has to compete with already-produced music that listeners can access according to their own tastes. Insofar as concerts are concerned, aside from the “crowd experience,” why listen to several hours of songs when you can get the ones you like on Yourube or other platforms? I remember hearing Al Stewart (Year of the Cat, Time Passages) complaning about the lack of sales.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gPoiv0sZ4s4
Talk about….pop muzik!
Well we all know what happened to the radio star:
https://youtu.be/W8r-tXRLazs?si=4totjIF5p0IqbMnv
Reminds me of Robert Palmer, that’s not a bad thing.
Just bring up again the conversation I had with a local who remarked that her grandson got to go see Tool. WTF, like the same so-so act from when I was in high school? Yes, the young people’s dream act is a whose best song was released before decades before they were born. Just to expound upon your technology point. Even for “normal songs” in the modern era a close listen will reveal heavy mixing, i.e., the only way the music could possibly be played live is with a lightening quick guy working the mixing board. Industrial Karaoke is much… Read more »
I noticed a surprising number of teenage girls walking around in Nirvana shirts the last two years. I thought the reason was since they had no rock bands putting out music today they were going with one that was popular when their dads were teenagers.
Every time I see a young person wearing a Nirvana shirt, and yes it’s quite common, I wonder if they actually like the band’s music or just the aesthetic. No judgement either way, it’s just interesting how they seemed to land on that.
Which wasn’t even that good- punk and metal bands had far cooler aesthetics than Junkie McSweaterface’s terrible band. The Misfits come to mind.
There quite a few kids walking around in Led Zeppelin and Rush shirts. When they are complimented on their good taste, they say “Oh. I just like the shirt, never heard of the band.”
It’s a shame that the only crap available to them is hip hop rap trash.
I feel sorry for the young. They don’t have an aesthetic of their own. I see a teenaged kid wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt, and do the math, and realize this would be like me wearing an Al Jolson t-shirt in the seventies.
There was a blogger about 10-15 years ago who followed youth culture. He said that youth culture as a separate distinct sub-culture, died around 2010. I don’t remember the reasons he cited as to why. But this is the reason why they no longer have their own aesthetic. This is also likely the reason why Taylor Swift is so popular.
This guy?
http://akinokure.blogspot.com/
Yes. That guy.
I’ve read that the Ramones won the young-person-tee-shirt lottery, which is odd for a one-joke band, but they won for graphic design, not for music. Old hipsters love to ask the youngsters what their favorite Ramones song is, which is a bit cruel.
For as long as there have been Ramones, Misfits, and Nirvana shirts, they’ve signified not listening to those bands. Sonic Youth was the last to become that kind of nonmusical icon, years after everyone but musicians forgot them. The first generation of camwhores—the internet’s first great “influencers”—had a lot of Kim Gordon fangirls in it. And Burzum, favorite of teenagers who lightly cut themselves. The erasure of the Burzum shirt from the “hipster” wardrobe—result of a total corporate alliance against average metal nerds, backed by a campaign of antifa violence—is a better date for the Great Awokening™ than anything that… Read more »
Sailer likes to recount when he saw the Ramones and Talking Heads in the 70s before they got big. I don’t blame him. I bet those were exciting shows.
Goad likes to recount the fights he got into with anti-racist punks in Portland in the 90s for wearing an iron cross.
No. It is the new irony t-shirt without the first sense of irony. Upper middle class teen girl is dying to fill herself with angst. She loves Kurt Cobain and Nirvana as it is bottled angst that was real that she can accumulate. Same girl hates white men and calls them privileged. Girl doesn’t realize that Cobain, Staley, Cornell … … were young white men from working class Seattle filled with the angst of being dispossessed by environmentalists, off-shoring, civil rights regime and mourning the onset of the anti-white longhouse of post-modern post-America … Girl puts on her Nirvana t-shirt,… Read more »
My mother threw away my Blue Öyster Cult t-shirt. That still stings…
“Your mama threw away your best porno mag!”–(((Beastie Boys)))
Kids sporting rock t-shirts from the 60s through the 90s are a common sight on the campus where I work. I actually take this as a positive sign in this dismal age.