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Dubious selections for Unsung albums...
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Dog 3000
Dog 3000
4611 posts

Re: Dubious selections for Unsung albums...
Feb 14, 2011, 21:19
Agreed!

I think the broader disconnect is "the artistry of music" vs. "fashion/culture trends of the day."

Which came first, the flares or the wah-wah pedal, you know?

Musicheads like us might say it's all about "the pedals", but to the general public it probably really is about width of pants collars, skirt lengths and hairdos.

Which is I think the major "problem" of our current musical age -- you can't tell me Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber or these other pop tarts have much "musical" going on. Gaga is just a frankenstein monster composed of leftover bits of Madonna, Bowie, Elton John, disco, etc. . . . if she didn't make compelling IMAGES, would anyone care? No they would not.

I just don't think music is "culturally important" these days, like it had been in the late 20th century. Nowadays the cultural mojo is on videoscreens and portable devices, not hifi's or radios -- hence "popular music" is reduced to the soundtrack of what happens on video screens (up to and including "rock band: the video game"), and not much more than that.

Serious musicheads are probably going to be a smaller and smaller % of the population going forward. The "mass audience" has tuned out, and is not going to return. Which is niether good nor bad -- people still write poetry and do oil paintings, and there will always be an audience that appreciates these forms, even if they don't have mass cultural impact like in past centuries.

What turns up in Unsung reviews might actually be a good barometer of what more-serious musicheads are thinking about over time, in support of or reaction to whatever larger cultural trends are going on. The types of records being reviewed has changed a lot since 2003 when I first discovered this site. In general, a lot more NEW stuff is being reviewed lately. I actually do take that as a sign of the "music scene" (as opposed to the "media scene" of Gaga, Bieber et al) has gotten "better" over the last decade (late 1990's to about 2008 seems to me like the worst period for music since recording technology was invented! Popular music today still sucks, but the underground is back.)

But even that is driven by computerscreen interactions -- how do so many people get to hear these "limited edition of 50 cassette" underground releases? Because they download them from blogs/slsk/rapidshare/etc., which is also where they find out that this music even exists in the first place.

Final thought -- clearly the most relevant music of the last half-century remains Kraftwerk's "Computer World" album -- it is all coming true today! It really is More Fun To Compute, and we are all victims of Computer Love nowadays. ;-)
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