About two weeks ago I decided to buy a subscription to YouTube Prime, including YouTube music. Since then I’ve been having a ball listening to music (I’ve had to sell most of my record and CD collections). In particular, I spent a couple of evenings listening to the rock of my youth – The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Cream, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Love, Vanilla Fudge, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Buffalo Springfield, and a bunch of others as well (not so much the Rolling Stones or the Grateful Dead, not for me). Tune after tune, sometimes more than one tune by a given band or artist, but sometimes I wouldn’t even finish a tune. I’d go on to the next one. And the one after that.
Can’t say I relived those years, wouldn’t want to. But I remembered. And one thing I remembered is that we, me & my friends and whole lotta’ other people, we’d wait for the next record to drop (not a term we used back then). We were waiting for one more revelation. Is that too strong a word? Maybe, yes, maybe no. It depends.
But it was the Sixties. Counter-culture. Love, Sex, and Rock and Roll. Turn on, tune in, and drop out. I did the first, though only moderately so (pot, hash, kief, not so much acid, not for me). Definitely the second, definitely. The third, not so much. I stayed in college, finished my bachelors, then a masters, and finally a doctorate. I never bought into the coming Aquarian Age, but, yes, things were changing, on the move.
[And then Nixon was elected, followed by Ford, and Reagan. But this is a digression.]
I remember when the Beatles’ White Album came out. I rushed out to buy it. Listened to it right away. A wrote a review for the college newspaper. It was, after all, IMPORTANT.
Is there any music like that today? Oh there’s Taylor Swift and Billy Eilish, and I don’t know who else – who are the current hip-hop headliners? Does anyone anticipate any current music like we anticipated The Beatles or The Jefferson Airplane back in the old days? I don’t know, I’m asking. I don’t hang out with kids these days. Kids? Anyone under 30, under 25?
The only excitement I see is in the tech world, with AI. And there’s definitely such a thing as a computer culture, and rationalist culture is close-by. There’s certainly a Doomer division of tech culture. But I don’t sense that there’s a music to or with any of it. Is it only the tech that’s driving things?
And then, alongside, we’ve got Trumpism and the MAGA right. Whatever else that is, it’s also about rolling back influence of the 60s counter culture. I don’t see any musical revelation there either.
What’s happened to music? Whatever it is, it can’t be good. And we can’t go back, either. [Don’t want to.] How do we go forward.
Hell, where the heck IS forward?
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Addendum: I'm NOT looking for new music to listen to. I've
spent a lot of time on YouTube. Sometimes I'm looking for old stuff.
Sometimes I'm looking of music made by kids. And sometimes I'm just
looking. The question is not: Is there any good stuff, I mean really
good stuff, being made today. I simply assume there's lots of good
stuff, nor do I have to assume. I hear some of it.
What I'm
after is whether there's any music coming out whose audience looks
forward to it the way my and my cohorts looked forward to the new rock.
That's what I'm curious about. Note that I listened to a lot of jazz
back in the day, classical too, but I didn't anticipate any of it like I
anticipated rock.
