A friend suggested that music hasn't improved since guitars and tube amps but I think there's a pattern of contemporary music regressing into rock.
Rock music was a revolution but I think the appeal was partly the way guitars suited male voices (and the way males wanted guitars because females liked males who rock) but also because rock was part of the force that created the markets which drove the growth of the recorded music industries in the late 20th Century. I’m referring to the creation of products aimed at teenagers, who began to have increased leisure time and budget for various forms of entertainment.
It also helped that drums, which are a key part of rock, sounded amazing using magnetic tape when that became available outside of Germany after WWII.
Since rock I think there's a trend for it to become part of other genres, like folk going electric and Rick Rubin adding rock-style song structures to hiphop and then rock musicians like Aerosmith working with Run-DMC.
Then in more recent times you see rock-style electronica like The Prodigy and rock-style drum n' bass like Pendulum.
Anyway, this is a thesis I'd like to research and develop if I were to return to higher education.
Wonder if there is a parallel to be drawn with the influence of house music on rhythm and blues in recent years? It used to be that RnB would swing but this century it became more strictly quantised as it relied on DJs to mix it into sets comprising of a variety of machine-made musics.
Echoes of rock
Just been pondering the question “Did music stop innovating?” and thought I’d record my thoughts here:
