Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism, in another book called “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, argued that in the history of recorded music, every 20 - 30 years or so there were new genres of music that wouldn’t be recognizable as music to the previous generation. But around the early 2000s this process stopped, and musical categories hardened due to capitalist logic. Record companies just wanted to churn out the same things that they already knew how to market, rather than invest in artists who were cutting edge. He called it “the slow cancellation of the future”.
Granted I think Fisher is kind of overrated as a practical theorist, all those CCRU research people went crazy, and Fisher is a particularly sad example. His vampire castle book is okay, and that generation was like preoccupied with marketing manipulation (a perspective that arguably was being marketed to them/us).
But through that perspective this meme is interesting, because the reason younger generations can connect about musical tastes, is because popular music has stopped being subversive. Chances are the band the younger boy is listening to has a sound that was copped from an older group, which is why the young man recognizes it as good. But to the older generations, music was still subversive, the young rejected the older, already explored categories of music, which were themselves subversive in their own time.
That seems like nonsense, given how genres slimed together by the late 90s. Everybody was stealing from everybody else and the best we could do was throw around labels like “alternative.” ClearChannel made every genre pull toward country while country became R&B for hwhite people. Meanwhile the electronica scene had discovered computers - a development that took longer than you’d think - and a bunch of dorks styling themselves as DJ [noun] had MP3s all over piracy services. This is right before Youtube, SoundCloud, and MySpace let truly independent artists reach arbitrarily large audiences.
If we really want to start an argument - there’s people who say anything generated literally is not music. Kids these days are growing up with the ability to drop a diss track on their friend for a faux pas that happened five minutes ago. Formulaic, yes, but immediately distinct from everyone listening to the same ten conventionally-attractive pop artists.
Actually he wrote a lot about 90s music in this theory, his main example of a subversive musical genre from the 90s was Jungle/D&B.
I mean I don’t think its complete nonsense, this is definitely something that has always happened regarding the capitalization of popular music, Gramsci wrote about some of the tendencies, in his analysis of italian theatre and how monopolized capital exploited artists and small venues, back in the 1920s. I think the pressures certainly exist, especially because of the examples you mention, like clear channel, but also live nation and ticketmaster. Those pressures to homogenize and commodify music are objectively the result of monopolization of the music industry. Culture and economy are intrinsically bound up in one another.
But also I feel that he sort of over stated his point, like his analysis is sort of warped by chronic depression and like fiercely hating the Arctic Monkeys.
Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism, in another book called “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, argued that in the history of recorded music, every 20 - 30 years or so there were new genres of music that wouldn’t be recognizable as music to the previous generation. But around the early 2000s this process stopped, and musical categories hardened due to capitalist logic. Record companies just wanted to churn out the same things that they already knew how to market, rather than invest in artists who were cutting edge. He called it “the slow cancellation of the future”.
Granted I think Fisher is kind of overrated as a practical theorist, all those CCRU research people went crazy, and Fisher is a particularly sad example. His vampire castle book is okay, and that generation was like preoccupied with marketing manipulation (a perspective that arguably was being marketed to them/us).
But through that perspective this meme is interesting, because the reason younger generations can connect about musical tastes, is because popular music has stopped being subversive. Chances are the band the younger boy is listening to has a sound that was copped from an older group, which is why the young man recognizes it as good. But to the older generations, music was still subversive, the young rejected the older, already explored categories of music, which were themselves subversive in their own time.
That seems like nonsense, given how genres slimed together by the late 90s. Everybody was stealing from everybody else and the best we could do was throw around labels like “alternative.” ClearChannel made every genre pull toward country while country became R&B for hwhite people. Meanwhile the electronica scene had discovered computers - a development that took longer than you’d think - and a bunch of dorks styling themselves as DJ [noun] had MP3s all over piracy services. This is right before Youtube, SoundCloud, and MySpace let truly independent artists reach arbitrarily large audiences.
If we really want to start an argument - there’s people who say anything generated literally is not music. Kids these days are growing up with the ability to drop a diss track on their friend for a faux pas that happened five minutes ago. Formulaic, yes, but immediately distinct from everyone listening to the same ten conventionally-attractive pop artists.
Actually he wrote a lot about 90s music in this theory, his main example of a subversive musical genre from the 90s was Jungle/D&B.
I mean I don’t think its complete nonsense, this is definitely something that has always happened regarding the capitalization of popular music, Gramsci wrote about some of the tendencies, in his analysis of italian theatre and how monopolized capital exploited artists and small venues, back in the 1920s. I think the pressures certainly exist, especially because of the examples you mention, like clear channel, but also live nation and ticketmaster. Those pressures to homogenize and commodify music are objectively the result of monopolization of the music industry. Culture and economy are intrinsically bound up in one another.
But also I feel that he sort of over stated his point, like his analysis is sort of warped by chronic depression and like fiercely hating the Arctic Monkeys.