Paradigm Shift?

Otherwise, I feel I am unqualified to make any predictions. I'm not sure I've felt any of these RIGHT moments. Also I'm a musician and attempting to answer these questions becomes masochism.

So, what next: new technology, not necessarily for producing music but rather focusing on creating a new environment for experiencing music (obviously don't know what this is going to be, but it could be some mix between hardware and drug) *and* as a movement next to it *not against it*: music focussing more on a pastoral mindset, whether it's acoustic children's songs a la B&B or the electronic pastoral of Neotropic.

Now, I'm not saying that knob-twiddling hasn't had a fair deal of attention as well, but new phenomena like The Strokes, Life Without Buildings and the nu-acoustic movement strike me more as the latest volley in an ongoing dialectic between hi-fi and lo-fi than as a paradigm shift of the magnitude your post would suggest (especially as the current critical rehabilitation of R&B et. al - to the extent that it's filtered down to the NME, at least - has occurred simultaneously).

I think perhaps a genuinely feminine element will appear. Not the fag version of femininity, but a sort of opening up of the crushed woundedness that's inside girls, except for it would be available as a source of productivity to anybody.

Unless I don't know myself or anyone else, as a rule I don't think there's a "crushed woundedness" inside girls.

But the current shifts in production and distribution seem to make it easier for individuals to bang out whatever sounds they want and actually provide the results to a decent segment of the public. Couldn't this work in the same way that, say, weblogs do -- creating a system in which people are looking for a very distinct presentation of an idiosyncratic personality? Couldn't it mean that instead of loads of individuals using their PCs to replicate the same synthetic sounds as electronic artists, we'd have loads of individuals using their PCs to just record whatever it is about themselves that sounds completely different from anything else? I'm thinking of the sort of system you have with an artist like Kleenex Girl Wonder: people in bedrooms banging out songs that represent whatever it is music is to them. But not lo-fi: the other part of the trend I'm positing here is that it will be serious and non-kitschy and as honest as possible about all of this.

I'm not sure the next thing is going to be a getting-back-to-your- roots, honest to goodness "band" -- maybe it's just that there has been a slight backlash against this futuristic knob-twiddling auteurism, because the technology to allow you to twiddle said knobs is easier to get at than, say, 10 years ago. So, y'know, the market has been flooded with people using all these nice devices and user- friendly pieces of software.

Hopefully, or not, depending on your point of view, what's next is people doing all this knob-twiddling for the sake of it, and putting all this new knowledge to work in an effective and interesting way, so perhaps some fusion of these bands/"rock units" with electronics in a truly innovative and exciting way.

Or has that already happened?

Music is always, always, always the same. I'm not familiar with a great deal of international folk music but i recall a band playing in the opening scenes of Underground, that former Yugoslavian film that won Cannes sometime early 90's and being astonished at the rhythms of the brass band. All music is about pushing the technology. Supposedly 'real' instruments are science, acoustic science.

There is no unifying Scene right now. This is mostly, I think, due to what Momus covered years ago in 'Pop Stars? Nein Danke!'. Unifying cultural moments are not a reality anymore. Perhaps this is an overly contemporary view, much as the picture of the 60's one might have, usually in briatain a hyper-Carnaby Street thing, is also an illusion. A quite beattiful one, and therin lies my point - we're trying to examine a naturally fractured present against a barely remembered past, or even a past we never experiences. It's a mistake to look for a paradigm shift as they're so local.

Organic! Why are guitar bands more organic? The Strokes are quite as dependent on a curated old NYC idea as, i don't know, Deee-Lite were. Both being collectives that probably formed revolving round some scene or another. Having more of a weight of critical history behind ye (modern rockmusic, all) doesn't make your music more organic. The new Bjork album sounds terrifcally organic in that it's deeply emotional and sounds like being wrapped in trees.

A fresh production method is there. Wherever. Whatever's new to you. But whatever it is it shan't be an open post punk thing, as the technology of the guitar has been exploited as far as it can go, the recent buzzes being limited to a quite tiny audience, hip to the past. Creative Rock isnt's going to die as dignified a death as Creative Jazz which went out on miles and herbie hancock, unfortunately. I give it 20 years.

What's gonna be new is as much in the context of performance space / recreational pharmaceuticals / distribution methods ...

One thing I notice ... music has gone from a two step supply chain :

1) instrument makers / songwriters in the back ground

2) performers in the forground

to a three step one

1) instrument makers / sound designers

2) record makers

3) DJ / performers

Who would have predicted Rap? The figure and ground swapping places ... the singing takes the background, the talking that introduces the song and hypes the crowd takes the foreground.

MCs at junglist / 2-step nights are increasingly the stars more than the DJs.

Who will be the next stars? The people that hand out flyers? The drug dealers? Anyone who can get nearer the listener in the music supply chain ...

Microsoft have just realized that the next platform is the *user*. HailStorm is their attempt to own it.

The next musical wave will be the HailStorm wave.

Is everyone getting this? Can you become the *face* of music?

You realize, Keith, that the quality of Graham Smith's songs has nothing whatsoever to do with what I was saying?

Responding to other posts: I completely do not buy the assertion that music is always the same, or that the potential for large thematic shifts is exhausted. I presume that people have been making precisely that argument for years upon years, and that they've continually been proven wrong.

I also want to stress that my prediction wasn't positing a "return" to post-punk in terms of its sound -- I was speaking more of its feel, its agenda, its method of presentation. The best comparison I can make is to the post-rock scene and some of its German antecedents, and the ways in which its form of the former -- long, ambitious instrumental pieces, collaborative collections of musicians whose "personality" was submerged beneath the conceptual aspects of their music, etc. -- drew heavily upon the latter. Certainly if you don't like post-rock, you can argue that it was essentially imitative of that earlier progressive sound, but to most of its fans and to listeners in general, it did not seem like retro or nostalgia. My idea was that the "next" sizable movement will instead draw on the form and feel -- though not necessarily the sound, songwriting, or even instrumentation -- of poppier post-punk bands. I'm thinking specifically of things like Echo and the Bunnymen's Crocodiles: the recognizable, clearly defined sounds of people playing specific instruments; the strong, idiosyncratic personality of the vocal performance.

Also: I'm not positing this as a backlash to "knob-twiddling auteurism." I think that "backlash" has already existed, in the form of people like Will Oldham and Joe Pernice and the fact that the hipsters in my town, anyway, made a quick detour from post-rock to Bloodshot Records insurgent country. I saw that as the immediate turn in another direction.

And to return to my annoyance with Keith's post: I'm not arguing that any of the bands I'm mentioning in this regard are necessarily "good." In fact, if you think the Strokes or Life Without Buildings are awful, you're only proving my point -- why would so many people get a momentary thrill out of these "bad" bands if not for the fact that they represent a baby step in the direction of the next big thing to excite people? The Strokes, I think, will wind up nowhere, and "The Modern Age" will be the future's equivalent of "Where's Captain Kirk?" or the Jilted John track -- one of those old singles you search out and throw on and get a kick out of, but feel absolutely no need to hear anything else any of the people involved did with the rest of their lives.

Hmmm, another possibility: all-electronic bands that are still recognizable as people playing linearly and specifically creating each note? A lot of the early "research"-type Moogy stuff still had the feel of a performance, so I can certainly imagine putting microphones in front of four guys with keyboards and getting something very "organic" out of it. ("Organic" -- a useless word that I'm intentially misusing here, but hopefully you see what I mean.)

Tim: Did you mean hip-hop fans will turn increasingly to house and jungle? Coz house and hip-hop have always been fairly tight, as far as I know, and I think further movement will be largely in incorparitivity of hip-hop artists, not diversification of interests by fans.

Also, perhaps the fragmentation is an optical illusion because hip- hop IS the defining "thing" right now, except the influence, while pervasive, is kept at arm's length by those influenced (excepting R&B, as it is the other "black" form of music) -- and thus the center is invisible? Hmmm...

Individual pieces of music are generally less likely to belong wholly to one style of music, so a fan dedicated to one genre can still cover a fairly broad range of approaches. Compare and contrast to all dance/urban scenes about six years ago, where each scene sounded radically different and tended to be mutually exclusive.

Also: I think you're probably right about 'fragmentation' being an optical illusion. Certainly the US charts are more cohesive and coherent than they have been at possibly any time during the nineties. The best way to discredit a real and current paradigmatic shift is to deny its existence and insist on a new and different one. Hence all this talk of 'fragmentation'....??

However, they all suck, and they will not last.