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Originally Posted by Janszoon
What traditional path are you talking about? There were plenty of musical revolutionaries prior to the late 50s. I mean, even if you ignore most of the thousands of years of musical history leading up to that point and just focus on, say, the 20s through the mid 50s, you're still talking about a time period when everyone from Charlie Parker to Alban Berg to Little Richard to Harry Partch were out there blazing trails that were arguably a lot more revolutionary than some of the classic rock you're naming in his thread.
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If you thoroughly read all my comments, you would see that i already talked about this.
Yes, the original beginnings of rock'n'roll go back to the Fifties. after all, it wasn't the Beatles or the Rolling Stones who started rock music: Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and Buddy Holly all came before them. But in the Fifties, rock'n'roll was just a new type of popular music, teenage-oriented dance ditties that were catchy, groovy, and certainly innovative(some of the beatles early music does fall in this category), but not as innovative and revolutionary as the music of the 60s. Nobody could predict Sgt Pepper back in 1956 or 1958. The rock n roll of the fifties wasnt far removed from R&B or the blues.
Yes youre right, its those jazz and blues musicians along with the pioneers of the sixties and the musicians XVIIIth century who were the real revolutionaries.
To answer this question, one has to ponder upon the tricky question of what is a musical revolution and what are normally its reasons and its consequences. A musical revolution represents an essential turning point that brings in a completely different musical style: not just a new instrument or a new time signature or a new approach to singing, but a certain change in musical conscience. Roughly speaking, there have been three important musical revolutions over the course of the last few centuries - the Classical Revolution of the XVIIIth century, the Jazz Revolution of the early 1900's, and the Rock Revolution of the 1960's. The first one established a new type of music - music for the sake of art, music that had to be listened to as a self-estimated value, not devoted entirely to church or festival or other applied necessities. The second one was a crucial point in toppling the old, bearded values of Classical: music was rejuvenating, throwing off the shackles of the European style and going back into the masses. And the third one was very important in that it was a blistering, successful attempt at reconciliating everything: old values with new ones, 'elite' with 'working class', and protest audiences with conservatives. Come to think of it, what is rock music? Out of all the known genres, it is probably the hardest to define. If one takes Dylan's 'Mr Tambourine Man', the Clash's debut album, and Yes' Close To The Edge, all of which are normally considered to be 'rock', one can see that such enormous gaps that exist between the three can hardly be found in any other type of music.
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Originally Posted by Pedestrian
Good music is not hard to come by unless you're expecting it to be spoonfed to you. All you need is the right resource to help you find it, and you're on this website, so... problem?
Ultimately, I think hindsight is 20/20, and we can't make any accurate claims about the quality of this decade until we're out of it. I bet in 10 more years, the 00s will look pretty good in comparison to what's being produced.
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Im not saying there isnt good music. Im saying that there hasnt been any revolutionaries in music since the 60s and somewhat the 70s with prog rock. But music doesnt have to be revolutionary to be good.