Bring on the new revolution already!

Alrighty gang, I turned 39 recently, an age I used to think of as ancient, but now I think, "That's not so old..." So you can view this as "old-crotchety, up on his soap box again" if you want, but I think there are some nuggets here... Oh, and just so ya know, this starts off feeling ranty, but gets a bit of substance there at the end, so it's like a Snickers bar of a post, with a luscious outside and crunchy inside, or something... Bon appetit!

It seems like every quarter, the record industry is moaning about declining sales and piracy (and sorry RIAA, but I think you've pissed off quite a few of your customers with this "sue everything in sight" tactic, including myself). In almost every story I read in the papers or magazines, some industry exec talks about how the release schedule so far has been a little soft, and the big releases are coming later this year.

Maybe I'm getting old and set in my ways, but quite frankly I don't see a lot of music to get excited about right now. There doesn't seem to be anything new or revolutionary on the scene, in any genre. Country sales are outpacing rock, and rap is slowing quite a bit. Country is basically safe pop music sung with southern accents, and the "true" country music is long gone, leaving us with this urban cowboy, all-hat-no-cattle pap that settles for throwing out tired and trite patriotic and family cliches. Rock music is just recycling the same old guitar licks and vocal tricks. Every band is a variation of some band. "Yeah, man, they're Coldplay meets U2 meets Radiohead." And rap has sold out to materialism -- whoever has the most hos, bling, expensive champagne (because Cristal is sooo yesterday), and biggest rims on their pimped-out Escalade wins. We don't need to rap about what's happening in the projects or on the streets because people don't want to hear about problems -- they want to hear about how rich you are... It's all one big pissing match now...

Do I sound like a cranky old bastard? Good. I think pop music in general is in a major rut, and I think that's why sales are suffering. And yes, I do think it's been in a rut for the past several years. Nothing new under the sun right now... ...which is why I'm eagerly waiting on the next big bang of music. It's coming... Let me explain why.

I've been trying to wrap up my damned thesis (I'm like the 5th year senior of the grad student world), and I've come across some interesting stuff...

My favorite book in my research has been Rock Eras by Jim Curtis, and I plan to spend time re-reading it more in-depth later on, because there's a lot of good stuff in there... Rock Eras was published in 1987, so it doesn't cover the later stuff, but it has some interesting ideas.

Curtis writes that each rock era seemed to be fostered by some political scandal/mistrust/horror, where the people's trust in their government has been horribly misplaced. The rock era kicks off not long after, and is followed by five years of intense innovation. After the five-year innovation period, there's a significant death, followed by five years of less-inspired music that just follows the playbook (Curtis calls it assimilation). Curtis starts the first rock era in 1954, following the McCarthy HUAC hearings, when we've got Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis among others, and these guys tore it up. Then in 1959, of course, we've got Buddy Holly's death, combined with Elvis getting tamed by the U.S. Army, Little Richard turning to the ministry, and Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13-year-old cousin (uh, ick!), causing a nice little scandal on his British tour. And then we spend 5 years waiting for the next boom, with the teen idols, Fabian, Bobby Rydell, and Annette Funnicello. That's not to say that 59-64 didn't have some redeeming qualities -- that's when Motown starting getting its groove on, and Phil Spector was doing some interesting production work, but the popular impact wasn't nearly so broad...

Then, Kennedy's assassination happens, the Beatles hit the U.S., and we're off and running on the next boom. Highway 61 Revisited, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper, boom!
Dylan, the Stones, the Who, Hendrix, the Byrds. Then death: Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Altamont, Beatles break up.

Curtis has a rock era for 74-84 too, and I think that these rock eras keep happening later on, but that we see less of a bang each time. I think the overall impacts are getting smaller. Yeah, I think there was a grunge era, with the innovative period capping with Cobain's death. I don't know enough about it to really comment, but there may have been a certain type of rap era, ending with the deaths of Biggie and Tupac.

But here's what I know for certain: we've got the political crap going down -- Iraq, Israel, Katrina and some pretty shady stuff happening. We're building to something here... Not sure what it's going to be, but we're building to some defining political moment. Here's the other thing, another book I read, (but I'm blanking on the name right now, sorry) noted that declines in record sales always seemed to happen immediately before the booms. We saw record sales slow right before the 1954 and 1964 booms, and we're seeing it now. Times are ripe!

Maybe with such a diversified field of micro-audiences, a major boom isn't possible any longer... The internet, ipods, cell phones and other delivery systems allow everyone to stick their head into these little musical subsystems without having to be aware of the others. Maybe this decentralization of delivery has made a new boom impossible, and we'll all just be stuck listening to whatever genre the musical anthropologists tell is the current cool one -- "I'm listening to Micro-Grime-Step -- it's Malaysian hip-hop performed by homeless kids in London" -- and we'll keep the next boom from happening? I don't know... Perhaps I'm not listening to the right stuff right now, but I'm really ready for the next musical revolution...