There is a lot of terrific music being made these days, and solid community experiences to go along with it. Drum and bass-influenced subgenres are going through the roof right now, and indie metal can be great. I went to see Kode 9 in London last fall, and the vibe was every bit as consistent and friendly as going to see Killdozer in 1989, when I was a senior in college. Only thing that was different, really, was the music.
Granted, it wasn't a rock event, but that's another reflection of the zeitgeist. it was still a great evening, and was just as political, in its own ways, as the heyday of post-hardcore bands like Fugazi.
Joel
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Alan Rudy<alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> THIS is interesting... it seems to me, after developing my musical taste in
> exactly that 1977-1987 era (and this is what I teach in my Pop Culture
> class), the problem - jargon aside - is the post-modern condition.
>
> 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
>>
>>
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-- joel schalit editor, Zeek author, Israel vs. Utopia skype:jschalit email: jschalit at gmail.com web: www.joelschalit.com