h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is music dying a slow death?

Definately not. Whether you like modern music or not is a totally different question.

Ok, so the chart stuff is crap. But music itself, Id say was at its strongest...

How many music festivals, how many venues with live bands, how many different underground music scenes are there today?

So many people making music are there? Whether you like the music they make or not, they're making it. I have friends in ska, hip-hop and metal bands, who DJ and MC for hip-hop and drum n bass, others who produce music using software and samples on computers...

So the mass-produced product overshadows all the people making real music, and a lot of people never discover what great music is out there. But there will always be people who do, for a lot of people I know music is their life.

From my viewpoint music is most definately not dying.

'To finish, a recommendation for an Icelandic rock band called Sigur Ros.'

Just saw their video for 'Untitled #1' on MTV2, and I have to say it scared the living daylights out of me. It's not gory or nasty, just contextually chilling, if that's not too pretentious a way of putting it. Not sure about the song, though.

Interpol are from New York.

There is plenty of ace music out there, you just have to be prepeared to look for it. Record companies are taking fewer and fewer chances with the music they are prepared to put out because they want to appeal to as many people as possible. Therefore they end up promoting bland and dull music.

It's impossible to say what is great music without letting it stand the test of time anyway. Saying that music today doesn't stand up to music from the 60s and 70s just isn't a viable proposition. Give it ten years and you might be able to make a reasoned judgement, but sitting with your fingers in your ears singing 'I Saw Her Standing There' and looking down at everything going on today because it's just 'noise' and 'they don't make 'em like they used to' is a pretty negative way of going about things.

There has always been crap in the charts. Fact. It's just that when we think about the sixties and seventies we only think about the good stuff. Sadly, for every 'Leader Of The Pack' and 'Ever Fallen In Love.....' there were ten inspiration-free copies and joyless dirges, just as there are now.

I suppose pub music is making a come back, though the music scene where I live lacks the vibrancy of the the 60's and 80's (the 70's were a black spot in terms of local music- though I did see Deep Purple, Slade, Gentle Giant, Nazereth, George Melly, Lena Loveitch, Roberta Flack, and Acker Bilk all perform locally.)

Having said all this, the singles charts do seem to be dying. But isn't a CD with mostly empty space utterly pointless anyway?

Last night I heard a documetary about Robert Johnson and apparently back in his day record companies wouldnt let radio play their songs as they thought that airplay would mean the death of music through a decline in sheet music sales.

Its just the same old story and people to thick to understand the cycles of life...

I wouldn't say it's dying, music will always be a universal language, granted some of it sucks!

I would say that music is stagnating, music genres are being recycled over and over, look at mainstream music now, at the minute there's an abundance of Indie/Rock bands coming out of the wood work, but it's been done before. Pop music was always dire because it's so manufactured so groups and singers like Britney Spears etc don't really count.

I don't care for any new band on the scene right now, The Killers, Keane, The Libertines, Scissor Sisters in my opinion are dire, talentless musicians all doing the same thing without realising and thinking they're something special. You can top bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains (The whole grunge REVOLUTION), Ani DiFranco, Dave Matthews, Jeff Buckley (Acoustic and solo greats). It's banmds and musicians with real talent who shaped the music industry and it got knocked straight back down because of the media and musicians thinking they're Gods gift.

I hate most modern music, which is why it's a blessing to see bands like the Foo Fighters still going strong throughout the ages.

My preference of music was from the 80's and 90's, and forgive my musical "Nazi"ness but i'll stay there thank you, there's more talent in it.

So, music is not dying, it's stagnating, just going round and round and staying how it is, we need a musical revolution and none of these modern day bands are capable of that much. Music isn't dying a slow death, BUT it might as well be.

Not true at all mate.

Let me re-iterate, the music in the charts, in the mainstream scenes, yeah it stagnates. Cos record company execs wanna go with a safe bet...

But new genres are being created all the time, take drum n bass, a sub genre of dance music, in the 10-15 years since it first started out as 'Jungle' it has gone in so many different directions. I dont expect this to mean anything to many of you but there is now "Liquid" which is chill-out/ambient/trip-hoppy drum n bass, "Techstep" using hard edged synth sounds, "Jump-up" with rolling bouncy basslines,"Old-skool", "jungle" and a whole host of sub-sub-genres. On top of that you have the commercial releases, the live drum n bass bands (most of you must have heard of Roni Size and Reprazent) and all the people sampling the tunes for use in other music.

I know this is drum n bass, and to a lot of you maybe you couldn't tell the difference between techstep and jumpup (although I bet you could guess the liquid tune). But just cos yuou arent involved in a scene doesnt mean it isnt happening.

Music is continually evolving. So you think that music from a decade, 2 decades even 22 decades ago is better, and todays music is boring or bland? Doesn't mean anything but the marketing methods of major labels.

Hell, I dont like most of the stuff I here, but I appreciate that someone has made an effort to make it...

Remember, good music is always there. Very occasionally you can find gold on the surface, a nice hefty nugget. But nine times out of ten you have to go diggin to find the gold a long way underneath the surface.

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Exactly and even within a 'scene' there are divisions, metal is a good example of this. To the uninitiated Slipknot are indistiguishable from Bolt Thrower but they are entirely different things (nu-metal and Grind/war respectively).

That's something I missed, I'll back down to your knowledge of dance, Drum 'n' bass and stuff. I do like those genres of music but I'm not as fanatic about it as some people, I'll leave those genres to the experts. I'm just a grungster who cherishes the older tunes in a bid to keep the spirit alive.

Grunge is NOT dead dammit! Just Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, deal with it, just let them die, it's what Cobain wanted. He didn't blow his brains out so that the Nirvana smiley face could become a clothing label. he'll be eternally spinning in his grave because of that. But this is a different topic, anyone want to continue that discussion, drop me a line.

Ahh, but I have quite a good knowledge of metal sub-genres too, I was into metal before I got into dance... And Im a grunge fan too! Theres still good grunge bands out there as you say...

What Im trying to say is good music will never die, and new music will always evolve. With the home PC, easily accessible instrument and the internet for communities of like minded musicians, more people are working on music then ever... I fall back to my first point;


Music is not dying, it is at its strongest.

>it's what Cobain wanted. He didn't blow his brains out<

Certainly not according to the Police reports he didn't.

>The Killers, Keane, The Libertines, Scissor Sisters in my opinion are dire<

Yeah, but dude, you like Sebadoh or whatever the they're called.

And I'm not sure that harping on about sub-divisions in particular genres is healthy. Whether or not I can tell the difference between Slip Knot (who I've seen live) and Bolt Thrower is largely irrelevant - if people don't like very loud rock music they still aren't going to 'get' them.

How are you defining music? This surprised me about recent BBC downloads:
"Forget Coldplay and James Blunt. Forget even Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, in the version performed at Live8 by Sir Paul McCartney and U2, has become the fastest online-selling song ever. Beethoven has routed the lot of them."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1532890,00.html

Macca & U2 were 75p (ish) for 3 minutes (ish). Beethoven was several hours for free. I think that might be relevant...

"I hate most modern music, which is why it's a blessing to see bands like the Foo Fighters still going strong throughout the ages."

Am I the only one who sees humor in that statement?

Maybe I'm just old.

- JD (I actually like Foo Fighters - some of it, but it's still funny)

Plus it was the whole of the symphonies. If the BBC offered the whole of the Beatles' back catalogue for free, I think there'd be some interest

hi all,

i hate to pull out the old "rephrasing the question" trick, but it seems that most people posting here are really discussing the question of whether a) music on the british charts is as good as it used to be and/or b) whether rock music in general is as good as it used to be. both questions to me are much narrower ones then rather music in general is "dying a slow death." (side point: both rock music and the concept of charts are well under 100 years old, so in the general context of life, the universe and everything, we wouldn't be able to witness anything but a quick rise and fall even if either category (rock or "chart music" were actually dying.)

at any rate, my personal answer to the much larger, more general question, i.e. the original one that kicked off this discussion, has to be a resounding NO. and i can't imagine any time in the future, near or distant, when music will die. what we see are small shifts and adjustments. i've certainly wondered about the future of this or that _genre_ at that time (and sorry, but personally i think drum n bass died about 5 years ago, but that's just me and i've admittedly been following it less in that time than i used to in the "glory days" of jungle), but that's not the same thing as wondering whether music itself is dying. you might as well ask whether the human race is dying - which you can very well do, it's just that music will die at about the same rate, i think. or something like that.

as has been already noted, if you cast your eyes further afield, past the narrow regions that encompass rock (yes, rock!) and music that gets on the british charts (i didn't hear any discussion about what's popular in france, perhaps for good reason), than you can find all sorts of examples of new music that is very much alive and even growing in places. for example in the field of electronic and experimental music, you can look to the thriving improvisation scene in the states at least, which even bleeds into jazz, or the continued experiments of the academics both in the us and europe, or the noise artists to be found around the globe, or the ambient glitch music that predominates in europe, or even the dance music that's still alive and kicking everywhere. and then there's world music, and jazz, and new classical. hell, even in rock there's so much stuff. nobody even mentioned the "poppy" groups like stereolab, modest mouse, the shins, and there's a lot more metal that i personally know nothing about. or all those american jam bands: not my cup of tea, but so what? the list goes on and on.

my point is that EVEN if the only type of music you like is the rock music/ chart music of the 50s through 90s, you still have to realize how much new music is constantly being created, all around the globe, and even how many existing traditions are still being carried on, reworked, improved upon, or fused with other traditions and/or new styles. there is no way to see this as the death of music, at any speed.

sorry to go on so long; the question posed was so fascinating to me that i couldn't help but write all this.

let me know what you all think.
h&s

let me know what you all think.
h&s>>>>>

music death , i'm talking about music as we knew it , that type is dying .

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Define 'music as we knew it'.

Stuff we liked, by bands we liked. When we were young enough to dance to it.