You never see evolution. One day you wake up and have six fingers and a tail. It just happens that way.

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.

As long as there are people complaining about the contemporary mainstream musical climate, music will evolve. The reason why we see so much crap these days is that there is more music made today than ever before, thus more crap is made as well. And given due time, some of today's crap may be tomorrow's nostalgia. Just think about what the 20-somethings today go nostalgic over.

If anything, this is a confirmation of my point. This **** will become nostalgia until something like Led Zeppelin/Nirvana/System of a Down comes around and mysteriously breaks into the mainstream giving a little bit of hope before it crashes down again. Sad thing is - with the exception of Led Zeppelin - even the bands listed are very limited, poppy, and short of the true potential of excellence music can reach.

When one of them breaks out we'll experience a brief moment of sunshine before it's sent crashing down again, and this stuff crawls out leaving us twenty years from now saying "Could be worse, could have been Gaga and Katy Perry".

LOL. Wut? System of a Down is a "moment of sunshine"? :laughing:

I'd argue that for a band that was as huge as they were, they had a lot of the aspects that many other large acts lacked. Their songs were very intricate, and varied by mainstream standards especially due to a lot of the under the surface experimentation in rhythmic shape. System of a Down may not have been all the way down the path to where thing should have went, but they're a damn start.

http://risselada.com/pictures/ctcbanquet041.jpg

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.

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.

David Cameron will do something annoying, piss everyone off and we'll see a punk revival. History repeats itself. I hope.

The future of music is even less choice.

The whole thing will become owned by less companies as worldwide conglomerates eat each other up where one persons say so will dictate almost everything what's done.

Yes you can say the internet gives more exposure but there's less & less money in it meaning independents can't afford to function and bands have no time to develop their music. And with the amount of music around it becomes a much more disposable commodity and the whole thing just becomes a melee of bands desperate for your attention with the better ones finding it even harder to stand out.