smoe.org mailing lists
ivan@stellysee.de
| From | "Donnie" <largro13@yahoo.com> |
| Subject | Re: Caution, May Induce Vomiting. |
| Date | Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:52:17 -0000 |
[Part 1 text/plain ISO-8859-1 (3.4 kilobytes)]
(View Text in a separate window)
I think the ten year gap the you refer to, since the mid-1990s is
very real. And I don't know if it will ever be totally fixed. Sure,
there will be great musicians/song-writers again; but I think it will
take a cultural change or a cultural realization for creativity to go
back to the levels that have been witnessed in the past.
Kids nowadays have a lot of other things fighting for their time.
And I don't know that they have an opportunity to have the
introspective moments that lead to writing great music, painting
great paintings, or writing great novels that previous generations
had. Video games take up a great deal of the their introspective
time. And then texting takes away a lot of what would have been
introspective time when I was growing up. In fact many modern young
people are way over-addicted to texting and spend way, way too much
time doing it. In fact, texting allows them to know the most minute
things about their friends that my generation got by just find
without knowing. With texting, Modern teens are more likely to know
the last time that a friend sneezed, washed their hair, or took a
shit, than they are to have time to pick up a guitar and write a
great song.
I also believe that 'sampling' and 'catering to the lowest common
denominator' have lowered the quality of music. Sure you can sample
someone else's great song from the past and have a huge hit. But can
you write something yourself that's great and will move people?
And then the things that pass for lyrics in modern pop music? I was
lifting weight yesterday. And a couple of young, college age guys
had arrived at the gym first and commandeered the stereo. They were
playing rap or whatever they call it now. And the lyrics: it seemed
like it was 80-percent the slang word for sexual intercourse and the
derogatory word for African-Americans! I worked out for an hour and
a half, and heard maybe 10 or 12 songs; and I don't know, but I would
have guessed the title of most of them to have been: "F**k N*gg*s".
And the bad thing is that these songs weren't being sung by the KKK
or some hate group; it was actually African-Americans singing things
that were derogatory to themselves. I don't 'get' that?
--- In audities@yahoogroups.com, synchro1 <synchro1@...> wrote:
>
> I'm a true-blue boomer (1953 vintage) and I can understand the
sentiment and agree with the observation the music we hear in our
impressionable adoloscence becomes a time-stamp we rarely escape.
>
> But, I think a strong argument may be made that the true zenith of
American musical accomplishment is the injection of African-American
influences into all realms of "popular" American music between 1920 -
1970.
>
> I consider the greatest contribution to the world from the US to be
American Jazz - the music came out of the African expatriate
experience and cross-cultural melding in the deep south. Blues,
honky-tonk, Gershwin, Stephen Foster, Copland, Presley, Fats Domino,
Miles, Perkins, Ella, Aretha, Sly, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Disco,
Philly Soul - it just goes on and on. Although I believe it has
suffered a horrible decline since the mid-90s and I find recent rap,
hip-hop, and urban idioms to be a pale shadow of what came before. I
am not sure if that is me being nostalgic and close-minded or a real
( and hopefully temporary) gap.
>
For assistance, please contact
the smoe.org administrators.