Quote:
Originally Posted by Conan
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.
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There's nothing in here I really disagree with. You have to understand, though, when I say look at the melodies, I say look at the decreasing amount of depth, and intricacy in them. Music evolves, and devolves, in many different places, and in many different ways.
However, mainstream music tends to sort of go by this whole cycle of focus. Where as attributes of the less poppier genres jump up, and sort of saturate pop. Then it takes flight, but ends up leaving a lot of the listeners behind who don't want to keep up with it, and it comes crumbling down to the ground again.
Music as a concept doesn't suck, and behind the scenes there's wonderful musicians all around the world who are having little impacts in their own ways. But mainstream music seems to be stuck in this constant loop of destroying itself before it can commit to a direction, then immediately jumping to a new one, or completely starting over in a direction it already went before.