Its not only that pop has no clear center - as the majors have discovered and not recovered from - its that there is no central or even set of alternatives. The micronichification of music, combined with the relatively indiscriminate cafeteria of tastes my students have, mean that we largely live in a post-genre world. The beauty of this, especially when combined with e-commerce - is that almost anything goes and pretty much all integrative assemblages and playful syntheses of genres gone by are imaginable (a mild, leftish, case is Manu Chao, no?).
The horror of it is that, since pretty much anything goes, everyone can find multiple, frequently sonically and culturally incommensurable, microniches where they can hang but to which they have only short term strong allegiances. I know some young folks deeply deeply deeeeeply committed to underground indie-metal (that I can't stomach [that I can't ear?!]) and they are super tightly micronetworked across the mid-west - but there are about, say, 30 of them, total, in all of Michigan and, of course, they're all spread out.
By comparison, being into Television or Joy Division or The Replacements or The Feelies or The Fall or The Minutemen or The Dream Syndicate or The Dicks or Gun Club or even The Windbreakers or Bad Brains or Public Enemy or The Beat Nigs or... man, that tied you to an identity, dubious white and male it might have been but - despite its sonic and all sorts of other incoherences - it all pretty much meant the same thing... you listend to college radion and had seen and loved Diva.
All that's gone and for good reason but, as you note, perhaps quite unfortunate consequences.
-A
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:54 PM, joel schalit <jschalit at gmail.com> wrote:
> If only kids were interested in pop music, like boomers and 80s-90s
> youth were. I worked in the music business for fifteen years, both as
> an artist and eventually as a label manager. The decline in youth
> interest in music in general was clearly discernible starting in the
> late 1990s.
>
> To be fiercely into music, such as became the case during the
> indie/punk period that began in the US during the 1980s, is now a
> generational hallmark, rather something indigenous to contemporary
> youth culture. Music is enjoyed more as part of larger cultural and
> technological ensembles than on its own.
>
> So, you get the song with the video game, etc, or the album is
> complementary to your phone or ipod, not the center of it, like the
> pictures or the movies you add to it too. or the actual hardware
> itself, which is its own fetish object, like albums once were, albeit
> more expensive.
>
> Joel
>
>