> Personally, I think it's clear that music has declined in the West over the last couple decades. If you listen to
>popular music today, it seems evident that the basic genres have fossilized. Rock, rap, dance, country, and
>pop music genres are not developing today at the same rapid rate they were a generation ago. Mostly they're
>updated with improved production techniques and technology and are remixed and hybridized. But, we
>haven't seen the rise of whole new genres to the same extent we used to. Sgt. Peppers would have been a
>little shocking to a guy fighting in Korea. But the latest album from The National or Phoenix would not be very
>revelatory to a slacker from the 1990's. He'd probably be like, what, *that's* supposed to be from the year
>2010??
I think you can make a case for artistic declines within genres, and to the extent that 'the West's' music is composed of genres, possibly even in 'the West's' music as a whole. But I wouldn't agree that there's been a decline in the last couple of decades. It may be that you're looking in the wrong places, if the National or Phoenix are your exemplars. You say we haven't seen the rise of whole new genres - but surely electronica (in a broad sense) was the historical music of the 1990s, and genuinely new. Maybe it had relatively little direct influence in the US, but it's all over American pop now.
One problem with comparing 'the music of today' with the music of the past is that we're probably not personally aware of much of the stuff that will be canonised as the music of the 2000s. Canonical bands like the Velvet Underground or Joy Division are much more widely known in retrospect than they were at the time. And there's been plenty of novel, interesting stuff happening over the last few years - to take a few diverse genres: cassette psych, ghettotech, hauntology, post-dubstep/wonky, the various regional hip-hop mutations (eg Baltimore, Houston, San Francisco).
As for participation - there's certainly something to the idea that most people have had a consumer's orientation to music 'in the age of mechanical reproduction'. But now we're in the age of electronic reproduction, it's also easier to make, record and distribute your own music than ever before. It's pretty interesting really - not a return to pre-music-industry requirement that the audience be present while the sound was generated, which tended to be fairly conservative with forms, but a post-music-industry situation which encourages novelty and genre-proliferation. But at the same time, a mainstream music industry that seems duller than ever (with some exceptions). Maybe what you're picking up on is the stagnation of form in radio pop and 'indie'.
Mike Beggs