I grew up on rock music. It was the touchstone of my adolescence. In my earphones were Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Then eventually came Lennon and McCartney, the Stones, Traffic, Dylan. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan on a borrowed CD player lying in bed at age sixteen. I felt as though a world was opening that I hadn't yet even guessed existed.
I learned the guitar, and can still play at an open mic night kind of standard. I lived and died with the great men of forty years ago. Eventually, after a few books, I could almost tell you which Beatle was in London on which day, which may have been a bit obsessive. But there was something about living and breathing and laughing with the living (mostly) legends of forty years ago, who had made music you could still get a bar dancing with today. I'll always remember where I was the first time I heard Revolver. Or, for that matter, Highway 61 revisited. Beaches and open sky and the sound of music that could still tear at the soul after all that had happened, and probably through all that will happen. In some ways, the golden years will always be the sixties and seventies.
Begrudgingly, I began to concede that good music existed that had been made post 1980. Gradually my ears began to open. I heard sounds that had been outside my repertoire of acceptable until very recently. Radiohead had released Kid A about four years ago.
It may just be that hindsight is 20/20, but the fact is I was stuck, musically. I was in a bit of a rut. New bands were coming along that I could dance to, and increasingly what I wanted to do was dance, not sit around on a floor or on a couch passively and attentively listening. And some, like Radiohead, were more interesting than I could explain. Because of the strangeness of what they were doing. The alien element.
Then Daft Punk happened, and to be honest, a musical era ended and another began. I was hypnotized. How had they done this? These were sounds that I hadn't suspected could be made. On some strange level, Hip Hop, which I had come to accept after a bout of childish resistance in the 90s when it was the done thing, had presaged it. It felt in the same ballpark somehow. As though it were somehow tweaking things in the same way.
I knew nothing of Detroit or sampling or the early turntablists. I just knew I was hearing something I'd never really heard the like of before. It was in the back of a mobile camper on the way to my cousin's wedding, playing computer games and listening to Harder Better Faster Stronger that I left the rock scene. I would have denied it long after, but something had irrevocably changed.
What I since know, and couldn't yet appreciate, was that the reason they were new sounds to me was just that. They were new sounds. Period. Nobody had made sound like this before.
It was a combination of things. It was partly the sound of one continent hitting another. Of kids in Paris or Berlin or London putting their own stamp on some of the music they were hearing from across the Atlantic. It was partly that somebody figured out there was an art to scratching two records. It was partly new and exciting drugs that were changing how people partied. And it reached its apotheosis when personal computers became cheap, portable, powerful and ubiquitous.
Robert Moog invented the synthesizer in 1964. It was a giant, boxy thing with a keyboard. Only the richest rock bands, and at that only the best, were even able to use them. A few weeks ago Google had one that was immediately downloaded to your browser when you logged onto Google. You may have seen it. It was their doodle. That's how much more powerful modern computers have become.
With more of your computer's power, programs exist that allow you to take all music that's been made before this point and chop it into its constituent elements. You can mix tracks. You can invent completely new sounds by twiddling the dials on your computer's synthesizer programs. And any musician, at least in some circles, who's worth their salt will have a lot more than just one.
The bottom line is, and here's the tragedy, that a lot of music made before this point is simply bunk. The computer is capable of producing all of those sounds pretty damn accurately. They've been made. In essence, the computer is the ultimate instrument. Whatever sound you can imagine, with a little time and patience, can be made with it.
This is not to say in any way that the music that has been made, and continues to be made, with guitars and drums is inferior. It remains, in some cases, incredible music. The remark is merely that it is a lifestyle choice. A pleasant anachronism. One is into rock these days in a way similar to the way that classical music fans, jazz fans, or even hip hop fans, to some extent, are into their respective genres. It's a choice. They define themselves in these idioms. It is not the dominant force. It's not what the kids are listening to.
The boundaries of music are being pushed out by a different set of people. They're not in the limelight. It should be clear I'm not talking about the LMFAO's or the Skrillex's of this world, and the anonymous party rock that dominates mainstream culture right now. Pop is still pop, and it springs eternal. It's become crass and jagged lately, but that's a failing of society. Not of the fact that marketing people have figured out what sells now. And what that is is electronic music.
Electronic music doesn't even really do justice to what we're talking about here, to be honest. The different genres of music that have developed that owe none of their music to conventional instruments are too numerous to be listed here. House has evolved from Disco, Dubstep and Drum and Bass from Reggae and Ska in Britain. God knows where Ambient came from. Electro, Techno, Tech House, Electroswing, Deep House, all have followings of their own as subgenres even within just one of those broad terms of description. And to the ear that's looking for it, they have an infinite subtlety of distinction. It's like wine. Superficially all the same. But you look for the flavours, and they're there.
It still has its roots in older music, don't get me wrong. Indeed, the real art form is in making something new from something old. From taking the music of the past and making it continually relevant. Continually present. Electroswing is probably the best example. By self-consciously choosing to base itself around the sounds of the twenties and thirties, it has created a mood that is all that was great about Weimar Berlin, with the power of contemporary production values.
I will continue to listen to rock and roll. Every so often the mood will descend to throw on Honky Tonk Woman and get down and dirty, or sit down with Abbey Road or Animals. Just as I make concessions to all great music. But the cutting edge? The down and dirty? The countercultural force? (Though Rolling Stone's recent cover may spell the death of that.) That's with electronic music now. And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.
But hey, maybe like rock, swing, and jazz before it, maybe it's 'just a stupid fad.'
