Is Music Dead? Pt.3: Know Your Music or Die!

February 6, 2012 by Edward Hotspur

This installment of IMD was originally posted by Edward Hotspur on his blog at http://edwardhotspur.wordpress.com.

I used to know all the bands when I was growing up in the 1970s. It was easier, I admit, because there were a few bands on the radio, and mostly just one genre at a time. Those songs and bands remind me of specific times, events, moments. In the 1980s, it was harder to know them all, because of MTV. MTV brought many different genres into the public eye in a short amount of time, and hundreds of artists and bands, not all of them good. It also started the trend towards singles instead of albums. Hair metal dominated a good portion of the 1980s, but so did alternative music. It was manageable.

In the 1990s, I started losing touch with music. There was grunge for a while, but then what? It was hard for magazines and reviewers to even come up with a label for the type of music coming out. The mid 1990s had a lot of good singles that I still listen to today, but whole albums? Forget it. And the bands coming out were just rip-offs of rip-offs, trying to sound like a certain thing instead of just playing. Because of this, genres got through many layers of crappy tier bands before moving on.

Through the early 2000s, it was even harder to keep track of bands, thanks to the internet. Bands could release songs without labels on many different sites and music was being traded constantly over file sharing sites. I lost track of a great deal of music, scratching my head at the playlists when I hadn’t heard of any of the bands. In the early to mid 2000s, I rediscovered prog, and it didn’t help my musical coolness when I was listening to bands like Yes, Jethro Tull, King Crimson and Gentle Giant.

I finally got through it when I realized that not knowing the bands around you, losing track of music, is a sign of aging. That’s right. When you look around and don’t recognize all the bands you hear, it means you’ve basically decided that what you heard is the be-all and end-all of music, and there’s no point in continuing on because all the other bands are just pale imitations of what you like. In reality, giving up on music is like giving up on life. Once you stop somewhere, you stop altogether. I reconnected with all kinds of new music, and discovered something: a lot of it is awful. But I realized that a lot of the music from the 1970s is awful too – we just listened to it because there was no real alternative to AM or FM stations. For every ‘My Humps’ that we cringe at now, there’s an equivalent ‘Wango Tango’.

I discovered something else: a lot of music from this century is incredible. And if you think about it, how could it not be? We all have access to millions of songs from thousands of bands, and some of it has to be great by process of elimination if nothing else. I learned about music from now, and it’s okay. Music is okay. I think I’m going to live!

Do you have strong opinions about the past, present, or future of music? Send your music essay of at least 1000 words to somebody@somebodyswebpage.com with "Is Music Dead?" in the subject line.