The New Sound
I’ve often wondered when a new genre of music would come along that would shake the foundations of our society in the way that rock and roll did in the 1950s. Where is that new sound that parents and elders will demonize while the youth move to its rhythms. Who is my generation’s Elvis? I will laugh at you if you say Kurt Cobain. His was a varation, not a true invention.
I don’t know why it came to me today, but I realized how much of an idiot I have been asking myself that question. What is the new genre, the genre of the late 20th century, early 21st? What comes after rock and roll in the progression of popular music? Duh, you idiot, hiphop.
This generation’s Elvis Presley is a combination of Jay Z, 50 cent, and Eminem.
I’ve been slowly opening to the notion of hip hop since leaving college. There, the musician you were most likely to hear echoing across the loggia was Ani DeFranco. Grinnell was a fairly insular bubble when it came to music. Not a lot of new things penetrated its exterior shell, at least while I was there. It’s not neophobic by any means, but the students have more important things to focus on, and music that makes them think is just one thing too many asking for brain power. Through Grinnell, I mostly listened to what I loved in high school. The mp3 revolution brought me not new things, but old things in a new format.
Then in Wyoming, I had nothing but time to think. I joined Emusic when it was still buffet style, and I downloaded things that I would have never consider paying $15 for an album, just to try out and find something that hits my ear differently. I discovered all manner of music from around the world, but still I failed to appreciate hiphop.
It took a succession of three artists to open my ears to what was going on. Kanye West, Pigeon John, and MC Frontalot. My initial dislike of hiphop was that all I ever heard about was gangster rap. Misogynistic, violent stuff–certainly valid art, but not something with which I connected. Then I began to hear more suburban hiphop, even nerdcore. Music that comes from places not quite so urban. It took listening to those artists for me to go back and realize what I was missing by not listening to Jay Z and others.
I used to think techno was the future, the next rock and roll.
In my teens, when I discovered techno music thanks to a after dark radio program on the local alternative station, I thought that the electronic beats would be the sound of the future. Everything I heard on that radio program sounded cyberpunk. I remember one track in particular that actually sampled heavily from Blade Runner. I would lay on my bed after midnight on a Sunday night with the radio next to my ear and soak in that new sound. I read science fiction then–nothing so good as what I read now, but enough to have this vision of a future where computers were important. What could signify that more than a genre of music made on the computer?
I still listen to quite a bit of electronic music. I’m not a fan in the sense that I can actually label all the subgenres. I like tracks selectively. Some downbeat, some drum and bass, some industrial, a little bit of everything really. Artists like Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, and Fatboy Slim are what I turn to when I want to concentrate on something in an upbeat manner. I find it difficult to feel down with those kinds of beats dancing around my head.
But I’ve added no small amount of hiphop to the mix. I’m even more ignorant of the genre than I am of electronica. I don’t have the time I used to have to explore music and to really seek out new sounds anymore. These days, discoveries are purely accidental.
I used to think that old people’s tastes calcified as a process of growing older, and perhaps they do. Our brains do tend to become less plastic over time. But I’m not so sure that our tastes don’t stagnate more because we aren’t exposed to anything new, or at least weren’t, because we’re so busy working and raising families. And by the time our children bring new sounds in, all it does is remind us of how we’ve grown older, and so we instinctively reject the sound of youth.
Maybe my generation will be different. I’m sure everyone has said that about their generation since Socrates, but the internet changes things. Tools like Pandora and Last.fm apparently introduce new music to people quite well–albiet music that is algorthymically related to music they already like. It’s rare that anyone makes a leap from one from of music to something so completely different. Change in taste is a steady progression of bread crumbs through a back catalog of tracks.
Now that I work from home and can listen to loud music with no regard for the health of my ears or the tastes of cubicle mates, I really must configure last.fm again and start exploring music again–if not actively, then at least passively as I work. I’m afraid of my brain growing rigid. I’m afraid of turning becoming that cliche of the old man who shouts at teenagers to turn down that racket. It’s part of being afraid to grow old, and yet it’s something different. Afraid of stasis, afraid of stagnation. If I’m not moving forwards, I might as well be moving backwards.
