Is it a thing of the past for bands to rapidly evolve over time?

Was thinking about this when I heard "Can't Stand Losing You" by The Police in a grocery store and then "Wrapped Around Your Finger" in a bowling alley the next day. They'd changed so much from one point to the other but it had really only been a 5 year gap. They're hardly the only ones to do this - XTC did everything from White Music to Skylarking in 8 years, Devo went from Q: Are We Not Men? to Oh, No! It's Devo in 6 years, King Crimson made 7 records with 7 different lineups in 5 years, YMO's entire lifespan was about 6 years, Can went from Monster Movie to Landed in 6 years, Genesis were one of the planet's premier pop acts barely a half decade after The Lamb, etc. etc.

Obviously there are countless examples of these bands evolving extremely rapidly and putting out a half-dozen good and fairly different records in a 5-year span (not least of all The Beatles), but it seems like this trend stopped at some point. In the 90's you'd see it with electronic acts like Underworld, Orbital, Autechre, Aphex, Mouse on Mars, etc. who were all working fairly quickly and adapting to new technology as it came out. I also think some more "traditional" rock bands were swinging around wildly at the time (Ween, Boredoms, etc.) Now I admit I don't keep up with modern pop music so much but I can't think of many 21st Century examples of this. It seems like bands these days are basically spending their whole career trying to refine what they did on their debut album. Even artists who are known for changing a lot (Radiohead, Sufjan, Bjork) are taking 5+ years between albums, or roughly the same amount of time it took for Talking Heads to go from '77 to Speaking in Tongues. Are artists still evolving like this and I'm just missing it? Or has pop radio become so homogenized and static that they don't feel the need to do this anymore??

Hm, someone like Ben Monder will do everything from playing on Bowie's Blackstar to playing prog-metal fusion with Dan Weiss to solo chord-melody jazz standards and noisy jammed out takes on 70s AM gold staples (the last two on the same double album), within a five-year stretch. From your examples, it doesn't seem like you're only thinking of mainstream pop artists...

I definitely hear the refining aspect, artists finding and digging a niche, planning their career more and taking a long-term approach to working their sound and identity where they explore the nuances, in contrast to a past with more flash and urgency.
Artists taking more time between releases and the longer recording periods would be a symptom of that.

With that said, it also depends at the genres you're considering: you can expect more rapid developments when a sound is in its infancy, and it's only later you recognize the road that was traced.
And of course there were always artists playing the long game: artists who drift, artists who take a big loop, artists who balance between two sounds or influences... you could categorize.

There's an optical distortion when looking at the past. Exceptional careers stand out more because we lose sight of all the commonalities and dialogue between peers.

I think there are still plenty of recent artists that have done the same thing, for example Dawn Richard, These New Puritans and Rosalia have gone pretty far from where they started.

Also consider the time it takes to write/record/produce/master/press/release/promote a record. It is not instantaneous, then or now.

Obviously, I am not a globally famous rock star. But there have certainly been times when I wrote a song and was thoroughly bored with it by the time anyone else heard it, months later.

With that said, it also depends at the genres you're considering: you can expect more rapid developments when a sound is in its infancy, and it's only later you recognize the road that was traced

sure and maybe this is where I'm missing something, I don't really know what genres are 'new' these days because most of the recent movements I've been into are throwbacks at heart. Dawn Richard definitely fits though

one amusing thing is all these modern prog acts which often just shut their eyes and pretend it's still 1972. a lot of them have been at it for 20+ years now which is like 4x longer than their influences were actually making the stuff they're trying to emulate. none of them went through a shitty pop phase nor a half-hearted reunion. where's the modern Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, and Howe???

A lot of this is attributable to changes in the industry. There was a time (the early '70s, basically) when albums could be recorded, mixed, mastered, and manufactured on a much quicker turnaround than they are now. For example, just because it's on my mind, Miles Davis's On the Corner was mostly recorded in a couple of days in June 1972, then there was an overdub session in July, and it was in stores in October. Also, a lot of bands were expected — contractually obligated, in fact — to make an album a year. And some artists, like Prince, chafed against even that schedule, finding it too slow to cope with the rate and evolution of their output. Nowadays, contracts like that don't exist. Bands write and record on their own schedule, and the label takes what they can get.

Also consider the time it takes to write/record/produce/master/press/release/promote a record. It is not instantaneous, then or now.

Obviously, I am not a globally famous rock star. But there have certainly been times when I wrote a song and was thoroughly bored with it by the time anyone else heard it, months later.

― the floor is guava (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, October 5, 2022 7:27 AM

this is very otm. it didn't occur to me until i started to record my own music just how many flippin times you have to play/listen to the same song just in the recording process. imagine how sick the performer is of it when it's time for live shows and promotions. no wonder people take years off between albums these days.

A counter-example is Taylor Swift, who went from radio Country to radio Pop to indie singer songwriter.

Big Thief have changed/evolved pretty quickly.

Maybe an obvious point, but those earlier bands you mentioned were nurtured by a system that no longer exists. Bands could afford to fail a few times before hitting on something good (or lucrative). And their failures probably cost more than the average annual budget for any label operating today

I think some bands got sick of the whole "transition album", like "cool, let's release ten songs that we will never play live, none of which are the favorite of any audience member, whose purpose is just to prepare people for what we're going to sound like NEXT album. that seems like a good use of time".

also, maybe the critics who demanded growth and evolution on each new album are easier to drown out these days

It's more on the order of 10 years, but Cate Le Bon and Thee Ohsees come to mind as artists who've continuously mutated their sound to general acclaim.

Critic bands, notably!

also, maybe the critics who demanded growth and evolution on each new album are easier to drown out these days

― “uhh”—like, this is an insane oatmeal raisin cookie “uhh” (President Keyes), Wednesday, October 5, 2022 11:04 AM bookmarkflaglink

there was a friend of mine (who used to post here as Oystein I believe) who used to say demands of constant growth/evolution/change of sound was really a consumerist demand, much how you expect every year's iPhone or Madden game to have 'new' features, even if they ultimately don't improve the experience at all.

he's not wrong. I get tired of yelling at people who criticize a band for mostly staying in their lane "that's just their SOUND, why the fuck does everybody have to make a damn Pet Sounds?"

like does anybody care that Anvil never made a 2 cd, 85 minute heavy metal opera about the life of the philosopher Seneca

more often than not I wish bands would stick to what they are truly good at, but this only shows that not all bands are built the same. There are bands with a great core sound that end up diluting it when they attempt to branch out, but then there are also the bands mentioned ITT who thrive and evolve as they experiment. I agree that the reason we don't see this as much now is because the music industry is less willing to bankroll it. OTOH, home studio recording has become much more affordable and higher quality in the last 20 years, and bands that have been willing to go that direction are often more productive. Deerhoof and of Montreal are a couple that come to mind that have really benefitted from this.

some bands want to stretch. others have a wheelhouse they're comfy in. live and let live i say.

my 'evolution' complaints stem more from bands who haven't evolved in the songwriting department, less so than the style. like if you are still ripping off the same ten songs every album rather than finding a voice of your own, then phoo to you

maybe a lot of it has to do with technology changing so rapidly back then - records like Freedom of Choice, Ghost in the Machine, Technodelic etc. would not have really been possible in 1978. ditto with a lot of electronic stuff. is there any analogue to that now? anything you'd hear nowadays that would make you think "this couldn't have come out in 2017"? or does it take a few years to realize it?

imagine if Linkin Park formed when only the Fairlight Computer was available to them

It seems like bands these days are basically spending their whole career trying to refine what they did on their debut album

name names

21st century counterexample: arctic monkeys

Anal Stabwound hasn't matched the firepower of their debut

like does anybody care that Anvil never made a 2 cd, 85 minute heavy metal opera about the life of the philosopher Seneca

― stank viola (Neanderthal)

Well, now I do.

I should buy a Cameo from Lips and ask him if he's willing to do this, that will probably be the thing that finally gets his drummer to quit.

xpost I was about to say, where is this

I respect where Arctic Monkeys have landed, but they are definitely a band where I found myself wishing they didn't completely abandon the harder rocking tracks from their debut

I'll admit to completely losing interest in The Coup after they went from being purely hip-hop to adding indie rock in with the hip hop, not because the latter was bad but because it was fairly removed from the qualities that endeared me to them to begin with and I was sad I wouldn't get any more albums of that previous sound.

(which is a far cry from claiming "Immortal sold out after their first album because they expanded their sound", but I still feel weird admitting I'm not into the Coup anymore given the reason)

name names

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Wednesday, October 5, 2022 12:32 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

thinking about like, LCD Soundsystem & most of the DFA acts (how are they still doing homages to Remain in Light 14 years later??) and a lot of modern prog

not saying there aren't a lot of counterexamples but it seems nowadays bands know exactly what they want to do from the get go

I can't really tell one Beach House album from another.

Bad Religion is a good example of a band standing firmly in its wheelhouse with good results for years, and when they've fallen off in recent years (or on albums like Generator), it's not been deviance from the formula (or failure to expand their sound), it's that their songwriting wasn't up to par without that formula. it's not that I care that I've heard this chord progression before, it's the melody you're singing over it is boring or dumb.

Some artists evolve rapidly, others refine over time. Same as it ever was. I don't really see a trend over time.

I'm intrigued by the idea that the music industry's changes over time have influenced how artists do (or don't) develop. But such arguments don't prove the hypothesis that artists aren't evolving as rapidly these days. It's really just a restatement of the initial hypothesis that takes its conclusions as a given.

If theory, artists working at their own pace rather than to industry schedules should produce just as much innovation as refinement.

Not sure if it counts as rapid, but Kanye's run from The College Dropout (2004) to Yeezus (2013) shows a pretty massive shift in his scope & sound. Re: the technology, I don't know how possible/palatable autotune as a vocal style across a whole album would have been before 808s in 2008. It barely was then.

same as it ever was
same...as it ever was.
same. as it ever was.

This subject makes me think a bit of the great stagnation theory put forward by an economist I shall not name due to his liberterian background... We are spending more money and person-hours on science but getting fewer innovations, presumably due to all the easy innovations getting discovered already; and we are not seeing big gains in productivity any more, either because we are mostly a service/information economy rather than manufacturing, or because we stopped cutting the work week, so part of the work week is spent just slacking off on personal pursuits (internetting, chatting)

It might have been easier in 60s to innovate in pop music and experiment with new tech - multitracks, synths, feedback, hired orchestras and session musicians. Since the 60s technical innovations have been much less frequent I think. Drum machines and sampling were another inflection point with a burst of creativity and two amazing new genres (rap and techno), and then not much new until laptop recording, which seemed to trigger a creative stall - protoolsy productions sounding a bit samey, and a big regression to 2000s era indie singer-songwriters recording their bedroom songs.

The 50s-60s also had new musical, literary and artistic concepts that hadn't yet been tried in pop/folk - suites, unrhymed lyrics, unconventional structures, bizarre subject matter, etc. The artists and audiences were taking psychoactive drugs and there was unprecedented opennness.

So it makes sense to me that innovation itself is less highly valued now. You read about some artist that supposedly is doing something new and it's basically something you've heard before. The map of all possible genres was getting exhaustively explored long ago and all that remains now are inauthentic sounding cross-pollenizations like country-metal or ambient-goth-reggae.

I do think there's some increased selection now on successful musicians needing to have business/self-promotion and tech savvy, rather than in the past there was selection bias for years of musical training. You are using a laptop at age 14 to record or sample things, and network/market yourself and research music you love, instead of in the past you had piano lessons, were in a church choir, and formed a garage band.

Casting my mind to film, I have a vague sense there's less genre-hopping among established directors, something that was very common in the past for maybe half of the top tier directors.

I think certain scenes and contexts can create more of a pressure-cooker environment where bands and artists feel more of a "change or die" imperative - but, crucially, within a certain self-contained "narrative" as to the broader developmental context in which such change is manifesting.

Thinking of a band like Simple Minds where for the first six or so albums you can basically plot what additional and somewhat-adjacent new music the band was reacting to with each successive release. Whatever internal restlessness contributed to that, it's also clearly a product of the environment. There's an anxiety of influence on amphetamines dynamic at play that in turn is part-premised on a more-or-less unified theory of UK rock of the late seventies and early eighties. I'm calling out a rock example here perhaps because rock is typically less likely to be perceived as a space within music about which a coherent single conversation (or a handful of them) may be held (compared to say dance music or rap, though in both those cases the idea of a single conversation in truth has always been just as problematic or flattening).

In essence, the confines of genre can themselves be the most efficient drivers of change. And where there is greater consensus as to what sounds good "right now", there is greater pressure on artists to both align with that and to direct whatever innovative impulses or capacities they have towards innovating within those genre confines in a manner more likely to rebound upon their peers, so that innovative impulses cross-vest.

Leaving aside whether innovation is more or less possible at certain times or under certain conditions, what is unavoidable in the absence of some extinction-level-event for popular music is the ever-greater accumulation of "long tails", until basically the idea of popular music as pursuing a handful of narrative lines becomes impossible to maintain - basically it's all just long tails looping around each other. In those circumstances, artists and bands are primarily competing against their own legacies, because what other artist (x) does has a much weaker relationship to how my own music is perceived when all possible variations of a sound have a supportive niche at all moments.

Even in those circumstances we can see echoes of a more urgent competitive dynamic, but it becomes diluted and hence slower at a whole-of-culture level (however slowly or quickly any individual artist may switch up their sound): for example, think of the long slow march of eighties synth presets across the field of pop-rock across the 2000s, a process of adoption that was much slower than in its original incarnation.

I was trying to think of a list of counterexamples. I thought of Jenny Hval, Broadcast, Sault, Nicolas Jaar, Shabaka Hutchings, Nick Cave... It's not so hard to come up with contemporary prolific and diverse artists. What I find harder is to speak with confidence of an artist making great strides with each album. It feels relative, or at least you need retrospective, you need to specify what's rapid evolution and evolution to what. I'm suddenly unsure of the initial distinction between refinement and innovation. Are Low and Julia Holter evolving sonically, or are they exploring nuance in their own sonic world ? That's tomato-tomato.

I don't think you can beat Wire, from "Live at the Roxy" in 1977 to "154" in 1979! Put it another way, from "Field Day From the Sundays", 28 seconds, recorded September 1977, to "Crazy About Love", 15 minutes 27 seconds, recorded September 1979.

most of the DFA acts (how are they still doing homages to Remain in Light 14 years later??)

fwiw the only sort-of-current DFA acts that I can name top of my head are Amy Douglas, Juan Maclean and Parrot, all of whom have made wildly different records at various times in their multi-decade careers (tbf I’d love to hear a Weymouth-played version of the Never Saw It Coming programmed bassline)

Yeah for what it's worth, I saw Juan MacLean perform in August and it was all ambient sound meditation stuff.

Lambchop a great counterexample. Julia Holter too maybe?

curious how much of this has to do with the "restrictions breed creativity" adage

like in the early 70s you only had so many guitar & organ sounds to work with so you had to do your best to make them sound as cool as possible. then along came synthesizers and drum machines & expensive computers with 16 kb of RAM which required you to really simplify and focus yourself. after that came sampling and drum loops which also changed the way people wrote songs. all this really influenced the sound of the moment, like I'm sure most of us can identify which era something is from solely from which it sounds like but idk if that really applies to anything from, I dunno, 2010 on. everything is so wide open, you can do whatever you want, you can make stuff sound like anything, and it's all pretty cheap. in most cases just a software plugin. I wonder if that's left a lot of artists just not knowing what to do.

time doesn't exist

"It's all pretty cheap" but there's also a cheap feeling about much of it for me, an ersatz aura.