Why Music Is Dying
bloombergview.com
bloombergview.com
My own two cents:
Music is dying because it's become bland. I love music, but only when it has... energy. I don't know how else to put it. It's got to call up intense emotion, intense imagery. It's got to have something to say.
It's also got to be compositionally interesting. Too much of today's music relies on heavy bass and catchy hooks to cover up the fact that it's kind of predictable and boring.
I look for new music often but little of it makes the cut. Of the music I buy, little of it stays in my playlist for that long. I just don't hear much energy in it.
To me it mirrors a broader and IMHO a little disheartening cultural trend: the death of counterculture. In the past 50-60 years in America various subcultures / countercultures were the dominant source for new, interesting art and expression. We had the beats, the hippies and various fellow travelers, punks, goths, ravers, and now... I'm not sure. I don't think it's just that I'm old. Even when those things were in their underground heyday, people outside still heard of them. I think if there were anything I'd have heard something about it but I don't see much. Hipsterism is all about being too cool to care about anything and that seems to be about it. The only other thing I see is this obnoxious neckbeardy Internet culture of cheezy snarky badly-drawn cartoons and memes, sort of like a cross between hipsterism and the comic book guy from the Simpsons... it's like hipsters but they don't get laid. Boooooring.
Obviously that's not strictly true, and wouldn't apply to other styles of music, but I think the sentiment is true. Some of it was counterculture as you mentioned; some wasn't necessarily "counterculture", but was more experimental, striving to go further down the same path. But however you term it, it seems to me that a lot of music has grown stagnate out of repeating known formulas instead of exploring.
Considering jazz again, there's a lot of "new" music categorized as, say, "neo bop". Would Diz and Bird have been doing "neo bop"? I doubt it. They were trying new things. I don't suspect they were particularly attached to bop music per se, but they wanted to push the boundaries -- take swing music and see what new things they could do with it. To me, most "neo" anything sounds about as bland as you'd expect; rehashing old ideas without the creative energy that made those old ideas work in the first place.
I sometimes find new music that I really like, but I mostly listen to the same music I was listening to ten years ago. And a lot of that was old even then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCawU6BE8P8
So yeah, loud bass sounds cool. Some interesting stuff was done with it fifteen or twenty years ago: hip hop, drum and bass, etc. Dubstep was one of those things that should have been a little micro-trend but somehow got super-popular because bass, man! It must have some kind of psychological effect or something, but once you get past that it's really boring.
Bass is kind of like spice. It can be used to make food more interesting, but it can also be used to cover up food that tastes like crap by overpowering it with hot sauce.
I agree-- nobody's trying. Nobody's really pushing the envelope. I think it mirrors what we're seeing in other areas: lots of lame apps instead of tackling hard problems, etc. We're in this weird gilded age depression-ish thing where there's lots of money sloshing around chasing not much in particular.