Well - to add my $0.02 pesos...
This is a gonna be a long post - apologies in advance - I am wordy and long winded when trying to get ideas out...
1) First the personal background - in my opinion, one develops musical taste during our teens - therefore, given my age, I did develop a taste for post-punk/new wave/synth-pop/goth and other related styles
2) However, because I actually started listening to music as a child, I developed a taste for the 70s rock that older kids and family friends were listening to - and that included prog, which I soon preferred above anything else - apart from stuff in no. 1, of course
3) At the same time, my father being a serious classical fan with a classical LP collection that looked immense to my child eyes, well, help me develop a serious classical (including opera) addiction - So I also acquired my own immense collection - last I calculated >4000 classical CDs, plus the LPs...
4) Obviously lots of crossover - Kraftwerk went from prog related, to the post-punk side. I am never sure whether to classify "The Cars" as new wave or classic rock. I moved Bill Nelson to prog from post-punk, same as Dead Can Dance who is now more prog-related than goth... And it was weird to put the 80s King Crimson albums in the prog side of the shelf - they sounded like they belonged next to the Talking Heads, instead... And the last Bjork album is contemporary classical thru and thru... so on, so forth...
5) So because of my taste I have become in contact with all those musical communities, by gosh, lots weird stuff all around - ignorance and incorrect assumptions all around...
- Post-punk, punk, etc friends called on the "pretentiousness" of prog. Darn gosh! I guess pretentious triple albums are only OK when The Clash (Sandinista) does it! Or, classical pretensions are only OK for Elvis Costello and his ballet called "Il Sogno".... ugh
- One time a classical friend accused me of listening to "boy bands" when he found me listening to Joy Division... REALLY? Is that what you think top 40 pop sounds like? ugh
- To their credit, the prog community is actually a lot more open - but there still plenty that makes you go ugh... One poster commented that Steven Wilson's "Pariah" was gonna be a big radio hit and therefore a money grab... REALLY? poster really has no idea what top 40 radio sounds like these days (as a father of teens, believe me, I know and it doesn't sound like "Pariah" at all)... ugh
Or that poster in the Jean Michel Jarre thread putting in the same bag, when it comes to live performance, David Guetta and JMJ - REALLY? come on... it is fine not to like modern EM (which is mostly EDM) but when JMJ shows up live with 2 more musicians including a live drummer... pls.... ugh
So we all have prejudices and assumptions. But in my mind the trick is to be open, actually listen and learn about the style... Yes, punk is stylistically simple, and a thing cannot help to be what it is, BUT those artists did evolve - punk rapidly gave way to post-punk and as early as 1982, we got some great artistic statements - Japan's Tin Drum, for example or even Public Image Ltd, for chrissake! - that Bill Laswell produced album was a marvel.
I could go on, citing examples of both wonderful and bad prog, not to mention classical compositions that definitely are not sophisticated artistic statements... but I am meandering... I will stop now and try to get to my point...
Which is, that while punk *initially* had the anti-chops, anti-art stance, it was actually a very arty movement, and they evolved into lots of non-commercial, sophisticated forms... and that the current state of things has to do more with corporate consolidation and the evolution of the music business than any master plan that started in 76 with the Sex Pistols.
That consolidation coincides with the advent of the digital revolution - we got one more relatively organic movement in Grunge (which never clicked with me - you could say I dislike it by purely musical and taste reasons), but after that I do believe it is the state of the business that forced us into the current state of affairs...
We are in an era of corporate producers again (at least on the pop/top 40 side) pushing artists to record songs from corporate songwriters - only now is Doctor Luke and Max Martin instead of Phil Spector and Dozier/Holland... I mean, even songwriters like Tay-Tay are forced to add some Max Martin sheen on corporate orders....
Why? Because they (record companies) are now risk adverse - and the environment being so hostile that no music is really bought/sold these days... well, while I disapprove immensely of the music they put out, it makes sense given a goal of selling tons of records from a single release from a single artist... which was the traditional model until digital killed it...
Which killed everything - no genre has suffered more than classical... except for jazz maybe...
Well I am meandering and not sure if my post really contributes to the thread, but it is somehow related and well, wanted to get all that of my chest!
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