I should qualify the question by pointing out that I don't believe that genres necessarily die, and I fully recognize the potential for the revivial of popular forms. That said, I'll continue.
People don't really listen to barbershop or ragtime anymore. Sure, musicologists and collectors buy it and a small industry exists that perpetuates these genres as curiosities, novelties, and cultural archives, but they don't resonate with people on the street. They're largely socially and aesthetically irrelevat- which isn't a question of quality so much as content. Many of those who have large collections of dixieland and swing are generationally linked to the music. Of course on ILM there are collectors and fans, but that's not indicative of larger cultural acceptance.
I contend that when the baby-boomers die, much of what is considered canonical in rock music will experience the same gradual decline and eventually die on radio, reissued for collectors and audophiles but otherwise culturally irrelevant. So-called "classic rock", with everything the loaded term implies, will be as dated sounding to the casual music fan as the New Orleans jazz heard in Woody Allen films. The life of sixties and seventies rock is artificially extended by nostalgia seeking baby-boomers and the children of the 70s, much in the same way most classical forms are maintained through public funding by an elite that aligns itself the "arts" to lend legitimacy to itself.
It seems to me that cultural relevance is overrated by collectors and fans of earlier genres. Punk and post-punk fans exemplify this. To this day, we have to hear about the ideology of punk, the "moment," the world historical zeitgeist of the enterprise, but the moment doesn't actually exist anymore. The meaning of early punk is confined to the 70s, both its aesthetic and its content, regardless of the wave after wave of revivals. The mythology of the moment has been protracted and retarded by punk fans. The hardcore fans of the genre in its infancy sound as tired and old as babyboomers with the "British invasion".
I suspect that if it were left to its own devices, without a culture industry to keep reminding us of its existence, 70s rock (and everything contained within it) would just die- its not so immediately necessary as one would like to think. The demand would simply collapse and most people would regard it as an antiquarian throwback. Only hardcore fans and collectors would even care about or acknowledge it. I'm not saying that fans lack agency, but I do think a lot of that agency is orientated towards options readily available.
I suspect that music, like any art form, lacks staying power in a ever-shifting cosmopolitan culture, which isn't to say that it can't be revived or made relavent again.
I guess my questions is, should anyone actually care?
― James Slone (Freon Trotsky), Tuesday, 2 December 2003 14:53 (twenty-one years ago)
The world is probably as cosmopolitan as its ever likely to be as a whole. It might not be cosmopolitan in the sense of the Weirmar republic or something, but it's certainly urbanized, culturally sophisticated, and international in character. Culture in the US, might not be particularly intellectual, but it certainly has a progressively more cosmopolitan and international character, unless I'm missing something.
But jesus christ, that isn't even the point of my question.
― James Slone (Freon Trotsky), Tuesday, 2 December 2003 23:58 (twenty-one years ago)