While I cannot vouch for certain that todayʼs record industry has been completely deprived of people of vision, it is somewhat telling that I intuitively view it as having become completely depersonalized — more of a well-oiled algorithmic system in which individual opinion, taste, and strategy no longer matter at all. How many talent scouts or industry bosses do we even know by name, and how many of them have been known to willingly take risks and experiment? The very size of the labels — with the majority of commercial brands now united as The Big Three — implies that individual responsibility has been reduced to negligible proportions. Marketology is now dominated by rapidly advancing statistic algorithms; very soon, big data-based machine learning will be generating optimal strategies that will be followed to the letter since they are strictly-scientifically aimed at maximizing profits at the expense of population majority. "Risk taking" is no longer an option — not because the major labels can no longer afford risks (they most certainly can), but because they no longer believe in taking risks — which may both have to do with "The Mind Has Its Limits" (see below) and also with the perceived uselessness of this strategy: why entrust something to the clearly fallible hunches of the individual mind when you have perfectly viable recipes generated by rigorous analyses of tons of data?
Naturally, in this situation it would probably make more sense than anytime before to put oneʼs trust in the small communities — little indie labels whose purpose has always been stated as putting art before money (at least big money). Even those of us who have not lived through that time, or, like me, spent it behind the Iron Curtain where the situation was altogether drastically different, can easily read up on the emergence of a sharp line between the major commercial labels and the small independent enterprises that began to take shape around the New Wave era and became particularly flashing in the Eighties — back when the "masses" were happy enough listening to Bon Jovi and Asia and Kim Wilde, whereas the "culturally refined" people (mostly college students, of course) could find solace in the indie underground and college rock radio and Sonic Youth and whoever was still interested in keeping music socially and artistically relevant, progressive, and at least vaguely "dangerous". Even after the much-mythologized event of how "Nirvana sold the underground out", the distinction between mainstream and indie persisted well into the Nineties and the early 2000s: I remember distinctly and perfectly well how each of my "modern music sucks!" invocations on the early Internet was immediately repudiated by a dozen remarks of the "nah, youʼre just not listening to the good stuff! you have to be on the active lookout for the good stuff!" variety. And to a large extent, it was true — I could complain about the Backstreet Boys or Mary J. Blige, and people would counterattack this with MP3 gifts of the Flaming Lips or Wilco, and it made me shut up for a while. [...]
The first signs of this alarming nivelation of the difference between market-approved and market-resistant, the way it seemed to me, appeared around the late 2000s — about the same time that I once again resurrected my reviewing schedule — with the nostalgic Eighties boom. I thought there was nothing inherently wrong with this: after all, the new emerging musicmakers were precisely the Eighties generation, and they must have been inspired and energized by the sounds of their childhood much like Paul McCartney had drawn inspiration from the British music hall ditties of his childhood. It was a bit alarming that much, if not most, of that nostalgia somehow ended up centering on the popular sounds of the decade — all of a sudden, synth-pop and electro-pop were being dusted off as if we suddenly had this consensus that the Eightiesʼ greatest musical achievement was getting people to do stupid futuristic dancing. (Rude hint: it wasnʼt). But then again, said I, British music hall circa 1950 wasnʼt exactly the epitome of musical progress, either: we all grow up with what we hear on the radio (well, used to grow up), so if you happen to be subconsciously motivated by mullets, fishnet gloves, and Casios rather than hard-to-generalize underground attributes, you only have regular human nature to blame for that.
The problem is not that the nostalgic Eighties boom happened, and not even that it somehow refuses to end (even if itʼs long past its bedtime, and I am not yet seeing distinct signs of Nineties nostalgia replacing it). The problem is that the popular, critical, "institutional" acceptance for Eightiesʼ mainstream has somehow mutated into the same kind of acceptance for many other, if not all, forms of popular music that had earlier been deemed "uncool". Appreciation — among the young, allegedly ought-to-be-rebellious music lovers — has risen for everybody from Bing Crosby to the Carpenters to Barry White, though, interestingly enough, this sudden affection for middle-of-the-road artists has largely evaded arena-rockers: Hall & Oates may be easily granted immigration visas into the consciences of todayʼs youth, but Foghat and Black Oak Arkansas are about as welcome there as a destitute Mexican in Trumpʼs America. This latter is also a part of the accompanying trend where quintessentially "rock" music loses its cool, partly because bands like Nickelback did so much to uphold the genreʼs reputation, but partly because "rock" is so often associated by millenials and Gen-Z-ers with their boomer (grand)parents and, therefore, has to be rebelled against according to natural law of generations.
Itʼs all fine and dandy, youʼll say, but where does corporate calculation actually enter into this? Well, arguably the worst consequence of modern generationsʼ (note that I am talking about the best representatives of these generations — smart, active, musically curious people) readiness to embrace the kind of music that their parents typically scorned is that indie and corporate music-makers have, to a large part, become indistinguishable from one another, to the point that the old opposition no longer has the same viability in 2019 as it had fifteen years ago. Because if you are young and smart and if you want to listen to music that will piss off your old and allegedly not-so-smart parents and if it is pretty much the same music that corporate culture was pushing upon the world thirty, fourty, fifty years ago... hey, happy times! [...]
"Selling out" is a classic term that we have always used, and continue to use for, say, the likes of Eric Clapton, or Aerosmith, or all those progressive rock bands in the 1980s. The difference is that, to the best of my knowledge, nobody ever describes the difference between Adele's 21 and 25 as "selling out". In fact, nobody ever describes anything any longer as "selling out"; the term has officially been retired, because it implies the existence of an invisible, but actual wall between two different musical camps, which is no longer there. Imagine, uh, letʼs say, Olivia Newton-John doing an album with, uh, The Clash circa 1978. Impossible, right? Now skip right ahead to 2015 and we find (former) indie darlings Flaming Lips doing an album with Miley Cyrus, literally one of the symbols of corporate commercialism. Nobody is batting an eye (well, actually, the album was so crappy that everybody had to bat an eye, but the very fact of such a collaboration hardly raised any outcries — because how dares anyone but the most elitist prick in the world say that a teen pop queen / sleazy shock diva is somehow "inferior" to one of the most inventive and daring art rock bands of the past three decades?). [...]
In propagating this absurdist historical revisionism, people are not simply mistaking black for white: they are unwittingly playing into the hands of the corporate industry that is manipulating their feelings and making them feel as if, by "rectifying" the history of art in this way, they are actually doing some important thing for The Cause. Thus, "rock" music, which used to be perceived as flying provocative and rebellious colors by default, is now increasingly viewed as a rudiment of conservative, sexist, racist forces — who knows, maybe this is the way it is today, but it definitely was not that way in the sixties or seventies. "Pop" music, on the contrary, is being promoted as the gold standard for empathy, tolerance, unification, even psychological depth — which, again, is perfectly fine for the music industry, which has always found it easier to deal with more predictable and malleable "pop" artists than the generally rowdier "rockers". It may be argued that the original rise of "poptimism" in the early 2000s was a natural process, a healthy counter-reaction to the over-the-top expansion of "alternative rock" in the previous decade. But in the end, the "poptimistic" approach played right into the hands of people who would be perfectly happy to have your brains turn to mush, to have your sense of history completely atrophied, and to have your perfectly natural and admirable drive to do good in this world reduced to not forgetting to buy tickets for the nearest Ed Sheeran concert (okay, low blow, but within a text this large, it is hard to finish each paragraph with a tasteful banger).
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Originally Posted by Poisoned Youth
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