Why The Next Decade Or So Of Music Will Be Great.

I don't mean great in the sense that it'll be universally adored and usher in new-found prosperity to musicians, however. Quite the opposite, musicians will be doing it tough and crap will sell more than quality until its dying breath. No, I mean the next decade or so of music will be artistically great. The kind that makes no money.

This is a big call and is somewhat counter-intuitive. As any pretentious music fan will tell you, serious, imaginative music has been somewhat lacking lately. Yes, the internet and the relative smallness of the world these days has made it possible for there to be a much wider variety of music available to even the most casual listener, and yes, there is a lot of good music out out there if you know where to look and listen but let's be fair, when's the last time you saw one of them on a magazine cover? When's the last time you saw a completely new movement sprout from a relatively small number of underground bands?

Yeah, I know it sounds like I've got my nineties hard-on in full force again, but these things don't follow decades. I mean, consider the nineties. Grunge may be considered the nineties soundtrack but Kurt Cobain died in 1994, at least a year after grunge had run its course. I'm not being facetious there, think about it. Core, Dirt, In Utero and Siamese Dream are four of the most completely different records released within the space of 2 years, yet all are considered "grunge" despite none of them really reflecting the sludgy, punky roots of the genre. The remaining 5 years of the nineties spawned brit-pop, trip-hop, nascent electronica and the good kind of alternative metal. The nineties weren't unified by one sound as they were unified by one theme: challenging, discontented music that was, informed or not, overtly against the materialism and shallowness of the generation previous.

What does that have to do with the music of the next decade? Well, if you haven't guessed it by now, there's something wrong with you. Decade dominated by vapid, image-driven pop-stars and a large but mostly sporadic and underground alternative scene, while greedy older money-pushers drive the world into economic uncertainty? Man, that sounds really, really familiar, doesn't it? Almost sounds like something we're going through RIGHT. FUCKING. NOW. The timing may be off, but this all goes in cycles. Children reject their parent's lessons and adopt a philosophy almost diametrically opposed to it. And it just so happens that this generation is about as vapid and shallow as it gets.

Yeah, tenuous I know, but seriously, society follows this pattern pretty much since the dawn of recorded music. The time scale may be contracting, but as information gets more readily available, these phases will get shorter and shorter. Stay tuned.