Quote:
Originally Posted by Skaligojurah
In all fairness, if you examine the melodies that made jazz, and classical than compare them to the melodies that make rock, hip-hop, and pop... You'll realize there isn't much evolution going on in music.
As technology grows there's so much potential in growth of a musicians capabilities. This was a very VERY strong ideal in the 1800s, and early 1900s. However, somewhere down the line people started realizing the more advanced technology got, the easier music was to create.
Therefore, instead of using technology to evolve, and expand the knowledge base before. It was brought in focus to destroy all previous knowledge, and try to build anew. Which basically actually means technology sent music back in time, because it forced music to continually attempt to recreate itself from it's primitives.
Once what is becoming popular finally pulls itself out of those primatives, it's already gotten what most people consider stale, and thrown out to be completely rehashed again.
Then again, this is a phenomena that effects generally the mainstream. I mean, in the definition of time, Taylor Swift is concurrent with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum just on completely different planes. So it's not like music in general is devolving, just that mainstream music can never grow because it's been caught in this loop since the 1950s, and it loses a little with every reset.
It's only a shame that the best and only way for most new music to stand out is by trying to build on a pretty much completely buried knowledge base of music lost under ridiculously large piles or rubble.
It's just damn massively disappointing that mainstream music is so incapable of maintaining an evolving constantly progressing knowledge base of music rather than simply throwing everything away, and trying to recreate it.
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If you examine the melodies that made Jazz and classical and compare them to Rock and Hip Hop, of course they'll be similar. That's because they evolved from the same thing. Western Music will always be Western Music, there will always be common elements which remain palatable for the Western audience.
There is a lot of sonic exploration going on consistently. But "evolution" musically speaking is a very fleeting concept. For example, the compositions of John Cage were considered ground breaking. His compositions influenced everybody from his own students and fellow art music composers to rock and metal bands. Yet, John Cage isn't a popular artist. He is remembered among music aficionados but not the general public. His overall contribution to music is invisible to most people.
Pop is the most visible genre in our musical spectrum. Yet, it is the slowest moving. This causes many people to think that "music nowadays sucks" and that it's going nowhere, but the answer is there are things going on behind the scenes with people you and me have never heard of that will have lasting impacts on future generations.