Well, I think you’re dead wrong if you think media / distribution / promotion have nothing to do w/ music or how we get to hear it.wot wrote: Sun May 23, 2021 9:54 pm counterpoint: cool shit is going on all across the world even as we speak, human experience will continue to fuel human expression, every generation will celebrate their own Dionysian rituals next to dimed speakers while ingesting multiple substances.
Simon Reynolds, VJs, tech bubble solipsism blah blah blah those people never did jack shit for music anyways.
Of course my pessimism could be misplaced, but I see little evidence to the contrary. I don’t think we got over massive burnout that ended the decadence dance of the late 90’s / early noughties combined w/ tech decimating the economy surrounding music around the same time. The arts in general have suffered from this, but music more than most.
I’m purposefully avoiding “rock-iz-ded” cliches as predictions are for chumps but I am 100% confident when I say that rock culture has significantly wound down in the last twenty years while I’ve been obsessed with it– less of it, much less interesting, nothing evolving.
There was a while when I used to think that the live experience would somehow remain sacrosanct and would separate the wheat from the chaff, but even the few hardcore shows I’d attend pre-pandemic (perennially unfashionable scene, apolitical macho spaces where the premium was to make the audience kick off – experiences worth experiencing in person, in other words) had become infected by the same listless apathy that had driven me away from the more mainstream circuit.
Everything has a time, everything ends.