rip, music :,(

The End of Music
By GLENN BRANCA

We seem to be on the edge of a paradigm shift. Orchestras are struggling to stay alive, rock has been relegated to the underground, jazz has stopped evolving and become a dead art, the music industry itself has been subsumed by corporate culture and composers are at their wit’s end trying to find something that’s hip but still appeals to an audience mired in a 19th-century sensibility.
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For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music. In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop. Is it that people just don’t want to hear anything new? Or is it that composers and musicians have simply swallowed the pomo line that nothing else new can be done, which ironically is really just the “old, old story.”

Certainly music itself is not dead. We’ll continue to hear something approximating it blaring in shopping malls, fast food stops, clothing stores and wherever else it will mesmerize the consumer into excitedly pulling out their credit card or debit card or whatever might be coming.

There’s no question that in music, like politics, the bigger the audience gets the more the “message” has to be watered down. Muzak’s been around for a long time now but maybe people just can’t tell the difference anymore. Maybe even the composers and songwriters can’t tell the difference either. Especially when it’s paying for a beach house in Malibu and a condo in New York.

Of course, we could all just listen to all of our old albums, CD’s and mp3’s. In fact, nowadays that’s where the industry makes most of its money. We could also just watch old movies and old TV shows. There are a lot of them now. Why bother making any new ones? Why bother doing anything new at all? Why bother having any change or progress at all as long as we’ve got “growth”? I’m just wondering if this is in fact the new paradigm. I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/the-end-of-music

I heard people talking about this in the coffee shop this morning. It's true.

deep

i will always remember where i was when i learned music died

Pour one out.

bye bye miss american pie

i'm gonna need to think abt this over the holiday weekend and get back to u guys

the title of this article puts me off

douche

I'd be all "YEAH, BUT BROKE KIDS IN THE UNDERGROUND WILL ALWAYS DIY PUNK RAH RAH TODD P" but considering this years crop of 19-year-olds are churning out shit like "Reading Rainbow" and "Neon Indian," I'm pretty much ready to side with dude.

there are too many "the end of" analyses going round the music biz these days

RIP Glenn Branca's taste.

it's like just chill out and put on a record

twitter kild music rip

this year's Destroy All Music festival was a success!

One night only, doors at 6 p.m., music starts 7 p.m.
It ends when all music is destroyed.
Admission is $10. Cheap!

can't believe "CD’s" and "mp3’s" with the apostrophe is NY Times style wtf

lol i think only one guy itt reviewed 1000 records this year

Glenn Branca and Bill Drummond : 17 Grumpy Old Men : The Musical

First Judd Apatow and now this!

boilerplate old-man cultural myopia

http://beingamomisgreat.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/warner-image-mptvnet-grumpy-old-men-1993.png

gah o branca

hey guys i was gonna go to the record store this afternoon maybe browse around a bit oh hey is there some cool new stuff i should check out?.....oh........wait...i forgot.

if u go to the record store the old thing u find is the smell of rotting music

Glenn Branca was the drummer in Gay Dad

its a new paradigm

I guess he really didn't like The Eternal.

6 .
samdon
n.j.
November 24th, 2009
4:31 pm
New ? Lady GaGa , now there is something new. Mozart would have loved her. Bach maybe not , Wagner yes.
Recommend Recommended by 17 Readers

Glenn Branca was the drummer in Gay Dad

Win.

For the ILX whippersnappers:

Why do people who hate music write about music?

well its kind of irrelevant now

c/d thinkpieces which start with the sentence 'We seem to be on the edge of a paradigm shift.'

ummmm what do you think

dude needs to cue up the new toby keith on youtube tbh

First Judd Apatow and now this!

roflz

Whiney why you hate Neon Indian?

"For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music."

hi glenn love your work (or at least the stuff you were doing 20+ years ago) but do us all a favor and listen to more new music. cuz its hard to believe that someone could write this sentence and actually mean it unless they were living in a hole in the ground for the last 50 years.

asking whiney why he hates is like asking the sun why it shines.

FYI the sun is a mass of incandescent gas whose light and heat are given off by the nuclear reactions of hydrogen, helium, etc.

yeah, but why

poor music, was just starting to enjoy her company

"I'd be all "YEAH, BUT BROKE KIDS IN THE UNDERGROUND WILL ALWAYS DIY PUNK RAH RAH TODD P" but considering this years crop of 19-year-olds are churning out shit like "Reading Rainbow" and "Neon Indian," I'm pretty much ready to side with dude."

yeah cuz every other year music was only kept alive by broke punk kids. that's very true.

rip, the sun ☼

most broke punk kids couldn't keep a hamster alive for longer than a week.

now this thread is bringing me down. First music, now a poor lil hamster?

rip, lil Sid Vicious
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1375/541401285_1770fa26dc.jpg

well of course they couldnt, they are too broek to buy hamster feed

u do NOT want to know what happened to lil nancy

FYI the sun is a mass of incandescent gas whose light and heat are given off by the nuclear reactions of hydrogen, helium, etc.

Also-- never pussy, always comes out.

hahahahahaaaaa

it's really too bad about music. i did enjoy it, in its time.

i'd give it a 6 or a 7

the difficult second millennium

xp You're in agreement with Pitchfork, then.

If music's dead, then what have I been listening to? This is the worst thing to happen to the NY Times' music coverage since Kelefa Sanneh left the paper.

there should be a fine for every musician who publishes an article like this

i propose we repurpose i love music as i love podcasts

glenn needs more ANTi in his life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nA5nuiE93s

i even enjoyed some glenn branca, in this one mp3 i downloaded one time. sad but true.

The End of Music
By GLENN BRANCA

We seem to be on the edge of a paradigm shift. Orchestras are struggling to stay alive, rock has been relegated to the underground, jazz has stopped evolving and become a dead art, the music industry itself has been subsumed by corporate culture and composers are at their wit’s end trying to find something that’s hip but still appeals to an audience mired in a 19th-century sensibility.
Related

For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music. In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop. Is it that people just don’t want to hear anything new? Or is it that composers and musicians have simply swallowed the pomo line that nothing else new can be done, which ironically is really just the “old, old story.”

Certainly music itself is not dead. We’ll continue to hear something approximating it blaring in shopping malls, fast food stops, clothing stores and wherever else it will mesmerize the consumer into excitedly pulling out their credit card or debit card or whatever might be coming.

There’s no question that in music, like politics, the bigger the audience gets the more the “message” has to be watered down. Muzak’s been around for a long time now but maybe people just can’t tell the difference anymore. Maybe even the composers and songwriters can’t tell the difference either. Especially when it’s paying for a beach house in Malibu and a condo in New York.

Of course, we could all just listen to all of our old albums, CD’s and mp3’s. In fact, nowadays that’s where the industry makes most of its money. We could also just watch old movies and old TV shows. There are a lot of them now. Why bother making any new ones? Why bother doing anything new at all? Why bother having any change or progress at all as long as we’ve got “growth”? I’m just wondering if this is in fact the new paradigm. I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music.

I am a sad old man.

Fixed.

hes just the paradigm messenger

Punchline here is surely: He is recording a new album, “The Ascension: The Sequel.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/thescore/Glenn-Branca.75.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/thescore/Glenn-Branca.75.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/thescore/Glenn-Branca.75.jpg

his portrait is pretty tremendous

branca-SORE-us

^^^winner

alternatively,

branca-SNORE-us

If the premise of this article is true (which it isn't), then surely Glenn Branca, as a musician, is partly at fault?

You had FIFTY YEARS to come up with some dope new shit, and all you managed was two guitars stuck together...

branca's more of a stylist than a musician

and by that I mean hair stylist

http://i46.tinypic.com/2w7oaiq.jpg

glen, that u

http://sexedmusic.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/phil-spector-head.jpg

naw dawg I'm over here

for some reason this reminds me of Ted Nugent's political writing

more like Glumm Branca

I saw Branca at PS1 this summer and he ruled so fuck yall

guess music died sometime after that

PS1= rock has been relegated to the underground

http://goldstars.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ps-i-love-you1.jpg

And that one thing is 'we want hen fap'.

I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/the-end-of-music

― ice cr?m, Wednesday, November 25, 2009 8:16 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

dunno if he's right or wrong in general about what's going on. not concerned with that. his predictive conclusion, however, is way off base. he's not describing "the end of music". he's describing the wresting of music from the hands of 20th century art and its return to the possession of music itself. he's describing, basically the end of the 20th century: futurism, the shock of the new, the need to constantly annihilate the past in order to create artistic novelty. and that has almost nothing to do with music-as-music.

^^^so OTM. novelty has never been an essential component of music, "progress" is an illusory concept, etc.

novelty is the only thing

This article is incommensurable with me giving a shit.

C'mon Glenn, how about you enter a period of revolutionary science where you intone this article real slow over a drum machine and some pedal notes.

i think there are ideas worth exploring on the subject of "the meaning of art in these hypermediated times" but all of the articles that try and tackle this subject are so uniformly bad.

most of the time when people say a genre or music is dead they are just saying that that form no longer has the vitality to continue to remake the world in its own evolving image. which i think feels sorta true about new music in 2k9 but i know that this has little to do with the actual musical quality of the albums themselves. it is not like everyone forgot how to string chords together and sing on top of them in a way that is compelling!

...which is not exactly what branca is looking for.

Branca's going senile, surely everyone knows music is ending in 2012 along with everything else, DUH.

this dude is 61 years old. this is a pretty harmless piece...he doesn't really even attempt to make any point. he's just kind of a sad old man

put him in an old folks home

It might put a small dent in album sales among the NPR demographic, for a few weeks anyway.

Does the NPR demographic know who Glenn Branca is?

Back when the rock paradigm ruled New York, it were all Danny Fields round here.

I know who Glenn Branca is because NPR did a special on him, and he was featured in a "wacky guitar mods" article in Guitar Player magazine next to Eddie Van Halen.

He's some obscure guitar great from the seventies, right?

Does the NPR demographic know who Glenn Branca is?

They might not, but they sure as hell read the NYT.

why the fuck do you dorks still care about articles like this

http://nybookworm.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/0000-0287-6fernet-branca-posters.jpg

ullahufukbar77
1 year ago

------

MUSIC

RIP

1996 - 2002

May ur soul live on 4ever in the hearts of the lucky few who were blessed 2 experience u in ur short, glorious life.

U were taken away 2 soon fr ur loved 1's by commercialism, sellout djs and the bastardization of elctrnc music. And, i guess, by the simple universal fact that things must always change. Even when they couldn't possibly get any better..

We mourn u everyday but u continue to inspire us from beyond the grave..

Love Always and Forever The True Ravers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1tAYmMjLdY

this GUY

music started in 1996?

for those that call themselves 'the true ravers' it did

http://i.imgur.com/xPP9G51.png

on the other hand maybe Rihanna on Spotify is the acme of music and you no longer need anything else, Sophie Heawood

am absolutely certain she's received the lbzc treatment before

oh god, and how

Sophie Heawood

That's the name of the person who wrote that laughable Kate Nash review last week.

― Just got offed, Friday, 10 August 2007 12:28 (5 years ago)

even this loon was getting stuck in

I had no use for it, but RIP anyway.

Fuck you Sophie. Gonna blast out some Monk and read whatever Marcello's latest rant is.

As a friend of Sophie's, let me say y'all might want to actually read the article.

I have read it and it is the kind of risible shit I can't take any more.

I envy you your living in the listening and delivery of music setup of 1989, then.

I Loved Music

well, she provokes a reaction, which is I suppose the whole point of music criticism*

*unless you're simply seeking to inform or persuade your audience to hear something

On one hand, I can definitely relate to the article. You need a turntable, a CD player, or something to couple with spotify. On the other hand, buy a soundcard and some decent headphones or speakers!

She's just saying what I've been babbling about forever.

Yeah, she admits that the death of music was personal. She's not calling spotify the end of music or anything.

Unless that's what you've been babbling

The death of music will only come when the zeitgeist album of the moment is made by a couple of 40something Frenchmen enlisting a couple of 60something producers with a lead-off single that could have come out in 1979.

take out the 'frenchmen' bit and sounds like a p sweet deal tbh

feel pretty cheated that a headline and standfirst did not in fact represent the totality of a writer's opinions

it's sad, it was an art of sound in time that expressed ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color.

There is nothing worse than reading some bored middle class fuck-o transposing their own smug apathy onto everything, because they don't get excited any more that's a failure of the world, not them.

True, but what does "middle class" have to with it?

it's a british thing afaiui

it's sad, it was an art of sound in time that expressed ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color.

― That booby's are HOTTT (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, June 26, 2013 8:13 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

geirbait imo