"Play me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s."

[Jaron] Lanier maintains, for example, that musical development has essentially stalled. He has a challenge: "[P]lay me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s." Lanier claims that listeners can't distinguish between recent musical eras because music is "retro, retro, retro." I would like to see that debate play out in the columns on Pitchfork.

from http://www.slate.com/id/2239466/pagenum/all

The author's lack of forum knowledge aside, thought this was an interesting proposition.

insert boring discussion about techno here

it's not that interesting because it would be remarkably easy

i read that--dude probably doesnt know much about music

i think he's basing his argument almost entirely on Cher's 'Believe'

My pet labrador died in 06 but and he's still more qualified to write about music than Jaron Lanier, or as i like to call him Laron Janier.

i'd like to see this guy and robert hilburn get into an argument.. ok maybe not

I should have clarified... I think the idea that casual music fans (i.e. not people who post on ILM, etc.) think that this idea is true is interesting. Do they? I mean my mom probably does, but she probably thought that about the 90s also.

I think most casual music fans think of music in terms of "good" or "bad"...at a stretch it might extend to something like "funky" or , dare i say it "jazzy"

dudes got a point though, even if it's at the top of his head :0

music has been married to the machine for the last decade and the honeymoon is over. like whos the most innovative producer out there at the mo and you could easily equate them to a late 90's equivalent.

technology in the music field plateaued around the turn of the millenium and like operating systems they just keep getting tweaked. so music that couldn't neccesarily be made because the technology didnt exist is harder to find now that everyone is using the same tweaked warez and plug ins.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/87/Jaron_lanier.JPG/704px-Jaron_lanier.JPG

"i read that--dude probably doesnt know much about music"

As a musician, Lanier has been active in the world of new classical music since the late 1970s. He is a pianist and a specialist in many unusual musical instruments, especially the wind and string instruments of Asia. He maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played rare instruments in the world. Lanier has performed with artists as diverse as Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, Vernon Reid, Terry Riley, Duncan Sheik, Pauline Oliveros, and Stanley Jordan. Recording projects include his acoustic techno duet with Sean Lennon and an album of duets with flautist Robert Dick.

He also writes chamber and orchestral music. Current commissions include an opera that will premier in Busan, South Korea. Recent commissions include “Earthquake!” a ballet that premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in April 2006; “Little Shimmers” for the TroMetrik ensemble, which premiered at ODC in San Francisco in April 2006; “Daredevil” for the ArrayMusic chamber ensemble, which premiered in Toronto in 2006; A concert-length sequence of works for orchestra and virtual worlds (including "Canons for Wroclaw," "Khaenoncerto," "The Egg," and others) celebrating the 1000th birthday of the city of Wroclaw, Poland, premiered in 2000; A triple concerto, "The Navigator Tree," commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Composers Forum, premiered in 2000; and "Mirror/Storm," a symphony commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, which premiered in 1998. Continental Harmony was a PBS special that documented the development and premiere of “The Navigator Tree”[16] won a CINE Golden Eagle Award.[17] His album Instruments of Change was released on POINT Music/Philips/PolyGram Records in 1994.

Lanier's work with Asian instruments can be heard extensively on the soundtrack of Three Seasons (1999), which was the first film ever to win both the Audience and Grand Jury awards at the Sundance Film Festival. He and Mario Grigorov are currently scoring a new film called The Third Wave, which premiered at Sundance in 2007. He is working with Terry Riley on a collaborative opera to be titled Bastard, the First.

Lanier has also pioneered the use of Virtual Reality in musical stage performance with his band Chromatophoria, which has toured around the world as a headline act in venues such as the Montreux Jazz Festival. He plays virtual instruments and uses real instruments to guide events in virtual worlds.

That still doesn't mean he knows what is going on in the underground music market.

There's been nothing as startling as punk or rave/jungle in the last ten years. I like dubstep a lot, but it's not that huge a shift really.

I would say that the techno-dubstep cross over thing is coming to mind as something specific to today.

What, sounding like mid-nineties IDM?

If you played some drum n bass to a late 80s electronic music fan I think they'd be astounded; if you played some dubstep to a late 90s electronic music fan I don't think they would be particularly. Stuff has obviously advanced, but not to so great an extent.

I just don't see how the lack of either super exclusive production methods or "new" genres means that music is retro. If you had played me some classic Just Blaze / Kanye style productions in 1995 I would have lost my shit, you can't get much more retro then flipping an Al Green sample but anything can be forward looking if you do it right because it opens up new possibilities. As for being identifiable as "of a certain period".. I don't even know what to say to that other than this guy, however talented, must just not listen to a lot of contemporary music. Then again I wouldn't expect anyone who publicly admits to being in an "acoustic techno duet" with Sean Lennon to have a fucking clue about exciting music in the 21st century. Just thinking about this makes me want to shit in this guys mouth.

Kind of wonder what this guy would make of the Hudson Mohawke album.

Not saying that it isn't one long dayglo migraine, but it doesn't sound like 99 at all.

Have been waiting for somebody to mention Crabcore tbh

If you played some crabcore to a late 00s electronic music fan I think they'd be astounded.

If you're looking at electronics in any genre as the answer to this question you're getting it wrong, seeing as it's been possible to make pretty much any sound for at least 10yrs. That doesn't mean there aren't answers to it.

it's been possible to make pretty much any sound for at least 10yrs

That wouldn't in itself negate the suggestion put forward in the thread title though, I don't think

...which I guess you said but yeah I don't see why something electronic would be the 'wrong' answer

I'd like to posit that the essential difference between 90s and 00s music is one of stylistic attitude. Maybe this is an age thing (I turned 20 in 2000) but I felt that the 90s was very much about people being into a "thing", be it grunge, britpop, triphop, drum'n'bass etc whereas by 2001 crossover culture was really kicking in.

Things like the 2ManyDJs album, ostensibly faddy as it might have been, changed a lot of people's views on genre boundaries. It became not only acceptable, but very cool, to be into Iggy Pop AND ALSO Jay-Z.

By the the middle of the decade you got a lot of indie bands fusing their guitar sound with electro (albeit the safest, whitest dance music available), but this did slowly turn the general hivemind of rock fans onto accepting "synthetic" music. By the end of the decade, it's become more or less prerequisite that your indie band has some sort of affinity with techno/electro/hiphop/dubstep etc.

I think it's an age thing. It was cool to like both Oasis and Goldie in 1994 as well, I'm not sure this is as much a thing as it's cracked up to be. If anything I think the examples you're giving are a return to a 90s mentality.

If you played some drum n bass to a late 80s electronic music fan I think they'd be astounded; if you played some dubstep to a late 90s electronic music fan I don't think they would be particularly. Stuff has obviously advanced, but not to so great an extent.

― Communi-Bear Silo State (chap), Friday, January 8, 2010 2:19 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

i am that late 90s music fan /obligatory

There was definitely a huge amount of indie/crusty/techno/hip hop/d'n'b crossover acts thru-out the 90s, if there's any differences at all I wd say that the mash-up is less self-conscious now, but at the same time the palette of references feels narrower - internet kids making music influenced by internet music or something. Most of the D'n'B-loving teens I know today seem to know or care knack all about the 90s roots, even.

I think he's probably got a point in that the pace of change in European and North American pop has slowed in the last decade or so, and a knock-on effect is that incremental changes get magnified (see a lot of discourse about, say, The Dream, or post-dubstep stuff). That said I can't really imagine how something like A Milli would have gone over 10 years prior to its release.

Also he's specifically talking about the influence of the internet on musical development and he's being very reductive in that sense. For one thing I think it's only the case with Western pop music - arguably the internet has had the affect of accelerating development in, say, Latin America or Africa.

The more interesting question is what music from the late 1990s would sound hopelessly dated today.

The only thing I can really come up with is the Neptunes and frankly even that wouldn't be TOO naff.

The pace of fashion and style

max martin stuff sounds pretty dated now (not nec in a bad way) - at the time those big crunching britney productions did sound pretty whoa on the radio

i think the mistake everyone's making is to confine "innovation" to just the realm of technology and the possibilities it provides - so sure, much of what's happened in the 00s could have been done with equipment that existed in the 90s, but doesn't innovation go beyond that?

eg - erykah badu's new amerykah pt 1 - i'm sure that patchwork of samples and radio static and odd instrumentation could have been done in the 90s, maybe even before that, but it was still mindblowing in 2008 and i'd totally class that as a musical advancement - it's how she did it, the subjects she did it with, the lyrics she sung over it.

or yeah, this from upthread otm:

I just don't see how the lack of either super exclusive production methods or "new" genres means that music is retro. If you had played me some classic Just Blaze / Kanye style productions in 1995 I would have lost my shit, you can't get much more retro then flipping an Al Green sample but anything can be forward looking if you do it right because it opens up new possibilities.

Tracer - big beat? This ostensibly pop, but actually almost monotonously tracky stuff would sound weird today I think. Fatboy Slim sounded hyperactive at the time, now not so much.

xpost

Yeah, technology doesn't solely equal innovation or orchestral music would've stood still for decades at a time.

Yeah it's not a technology/sonics issue really.

One other factor here is that people are, by and large, taking the same drugs as they were 10 or 15 years ago. There's not been anything that's had the same impact on music as LSD, speed or ecstacy.

ketamine and mnml!

The more interesting question is what music from the late 1990s would sound hopelessly dated today.

this isn't that interesting! most stuff from ten years before sounds dated, almost by definition. it's virtually a cliche to say that the least fashionable sound now is the most fashionable of ten years prior. if something's of its time, it's bound to sound dated later on.

I'd settle for the re-availability of LSD tbh :-(

ketamine was already common currency in the late 90s. common enough that madonna was recording k-anthems on the ray of light album in 1997

cf. indicative chemical brothers title 'lost in the k-hole' (1997)

history mayne if "most stuff" from January 2000 sounds dated, surely you could provide an example or two?

Big beat's a good try but it already sound dated by 1999.

first time i heard of ket = my best friend taking it at dnb squat parties when we were sixteen.

and the nme dance page (?) calling it 'donkey e'.

anyway i guess what i'm saying is 'ketamine and mnml' is no more valid than 'ketamine and dubstep' or whatever it was s reynolds was speculating about.

history mayne if "most stuff" from January 2000 sounds dated

ok, from memory (which is hazy), i guess, uh, dr dre, eminem, destiny's child, primal scream's 'exterminator', and uk garage.

xpost

william orbit productions

Hah, 'Insomnia' by Faithless has just come on the radio, that sounds proper dated.

soz i only just woke up. what are we trying to do. think of stuff from '00 that doesn't sound dated or think of stuff from '10 that would sound mindblowing to someone from '00? or both

We're trying to answer the original thread question.

common enough that madonna was recording k-anthems on the ray of light album in 1997

^is this a real thing though? I don't feel like it was acceptable in electronic music circles other than psytrance or squat techno etc until a fair bit into the 00s

The original question is sort of inane tho for some of the reasons already noted.

Narratives aren't reflections of a visible truth, they're a fiction based on more or less objective references but constructed in a way that reflects the narrators prejudices/ideology/brain.

a bit like CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE!!!1ONE!!!

srsly tho we have to reluctantly accept that there is an objective world out there, and flawed as we are that it's possible to make sense of it.

As I say, technological innovations can make "new" sounds possible but any notion of progress has to tackle the idea that music made now is in some indefinable way more complex or innovative or y'know progressive than music made 20 years. and that bubble won't stand two second's scrutiny.

we have to reluctantly accept that there is an objective world out there, and flawed as we are that it's possible to make sense of it

I am quite happy to acknowledge something that we could call progress in fields of scientific enquiry. it's treating aesthetics as science that I think is the big mistake.

well if you look at the narrative of the 70s as told at the time it was kind of blah blah leftovers of the 60s -> bloated rock dinosaurs -> prog excess -> O WAU PUNK ROCK WILL SAVE US ALL

but then with the benefit of hindsight you can go back and notice all these other things that happened outside that narrative and go ooh krautrock wow funk omg disco and these crazy choons they play at the warehouse which weren't even on the radar or were but were dismissed or disregarded and it's a different story which makes a really rather vibrant 70s not a dinosaur prog boneyard

a similar thing will happen to the 00s in a few years

you can't tell the story of "music" but of particular scenes and genres and situations. so it doesn't really matter if warehouse disco "existed" in 1974 if you lived in croydon and hadn't heard it.

I know that Animal Collective were mentioned in jest, but yeah, experimental-ish indie does seem a lot different to what it was ten years ago (e.g. GY!BE, Tortoise etc). Seems to be a lot less scowly for one thing.

only proves my point

the things from '09 that would break the heads of listeners from '99 are hiding out in 'warehouses' in croydon that we don't even know exist coz we are old and borin'

Except it is easier to find this warehouse music than it has been at any point in history.

yep.

i think the likes of reynolds conceive that as the/a *problem*, based on the old saw that a bit of restriction and limitation does you good. *shrugs*, puts on 'john wesley harding'.

it's possible to make sense of the objective world, and it's necessary to make sense of the objective world if we're going to get by, and sometimes the narratives fall apart under consideration and sometimes they keep working. The idea that popular culture contains an innate Objective Force of Innovation, which must make itself manifest in each generation or that generation has failed, isn't true but it's appealing.

ugh many xposts

the things from '09 that would break the heads of listeners from '99 are hiding out in 'warehouses' in croydon that we don't even know exist coz we are old and borin'

maybe it's not! the whole idea that 'each decade contains a movement that will BREAK THE HEADS of the listeners of the previous decade' is so suspect!

why?

what was the music of 1919 that broke the heads of listeners in 1929?

Yeah the narrative states that that punk rock or disco would have been mindblowing for the previous generation and that's a seductive narrative but I'm not sure they would have been that hard for anyone brought up on late 60s soul or garage rock to get their heads round.

the bottleneck of 'simply too much out there to digest it all' has replaced the bottleneck of 'boring critics with rockist agendas'

it'll take 5 years to sift through the myspacesoundcloudwarehouse debris to figure it out

how is it not suspect? it assumes eternal progress.

I didn't mention Animal Collective in jest fwiw

what was the music of 1919 that broke the heads of listeners in 1929?

Er, Edgard Varèse amirite?

Oh no. shit delete me, I read that wrong.

your right 'progress' is a suspect notion

evolution isn't so simple, punctuated equilibrium as stated above

tailbacks and dead ends that only look like a straight arrow of progress when viewed from a distance with the perspective of time when people are trying to write a narrative to describe what happened

kind of like that s.reynolds piece everyone lost their shit over. people assuming that s.reynolds was saying 'this is the hip happening stuff i love now!' when really someone just asked him to write 'what happened in 00s indie rock' and he told them without drawing conclusions whether it was good or bad or he liked it or not

what was the music of 1919 that broke the heads of listeners in 1929?

― lords of hyrule (c sharp major), Friday, January 8, 2010 12:09 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

well, in another sphere, gerard manley hopkins i guess. this stuff happens.

how is it not suspect? it assumes eternal progress.

― lords of hyrule (c sharp major), Friday, January 8, 2010 12:11 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

still not seeing the problem...

When did the popular idea of decades as self-contained cultural eras first come about anyway? Can't have been much earlier than the 20s, maybe it doesn't even predate the 1950s.

"the 1890s" became a thing as early as the 1900s iirc.

1890s and fin de siecle?

in the uk you had a constitutional crisis that began in 1910; a war that ended (formally) in 1919; then the crash c. 1929, then something-or-other important in 1939. of course we also had 1914, 1945, 1956...

yeah they used to say 'the nineties' about the 1890s, didn't they.

'this stuff happens' is one thing; assuming eternal and inevitable progress is quite another. it's like... teleology with no end in sight.

see also queen victoria dying in 1901 and nicely underlining the previous decade/century

I'm sure ket has always been around but in the last 2/3 years anyone I know who takes drugs has done it and a good portion have it with them at every single party, coupled with another handful of friends who do it ALL THE TIME. It's definitely boomed in the last while...it just seems easier to get or something, and I guess shit mdma and es push people towards it too.

if that even makes sense.

xpost to self

assuming eternal and inevitable progress is quite another. it's like... teleology with no end in sight.

― lords of hyrule (c sharp major), Friday, January 8, 2010 12:20 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

people began to doubt the whig/darwinian/teleological version of history exactly when karen says, after queen victoria died (if not a little sooner) and obviously the sceptics had a point. but im not talking about etnernal progress, but about the historical epoch we're in, i.e.... the period since the middle ages, in which basically society and aesthetic forms have all more or less demonstrably exhibited signs of progress. it's not watertight (as i myself have said upthread) but as a rule of thumb it isn't terrible. and lefties basically have to buy into it imo.

lefties basically have to buy into it imo.

if you buy into a narrative of inevitable progress, why would you bother trying to make anything better?

what was the music of 1919 that broke the heads of listeners in 1929?

Jazz?

haha i only just realised i got that the wrong way round.

the period since the middle ages, in which basically society and aesthetic forms have all more or less demonstrably exhibited signs of progress.

This makes no sense to me... How do you measure "progress" in aesthetic forms? How is it "progress" instead of just "change"?

i guess in western music making more notes acceptable is progress. like what happened over the last 1000 odd years.

an idea emerges to upset the norm, later becomes and adds to what is considered the norm.

in aestheetics it's change in a particular direction. people can squabble over whether that always implies improvement, but there seem to be aesthetic traditions that demonstrate certain tendencies. it's a mistake to confuse the present with the apogee of progress, but to relate present to past, you need something more than "change". "development"?

pretty obviously ditto in society, it's not indeterminate "change" that has taken us from subsistence farming to... us even having this conversation in a pretty short period of history.

As someone pointed out, you can only say something has "progressed" if you assume a teleological direction towards which it is progressing. And unlike with some societal changes (democratization, for example), there is no hegemonic authority in music that would dictate the telos of music while it's still "progressing". Therefore, the telos of music's "progression" can be only determined once that telos has already been "reached". You couldn't say, for example, that the garage rock of the 60s was "progressing" towards punk before punk had already happened. So "progression" in music is merely a retroactive narrative that fits a particular story of its history that some particular writer wants to tell.

(xxx-post)

Ten years previous to the current day is the wrong span of time to notice change. In 1999, 1989 didn't look too different- the indie rock and twee and techno and boy band didn't feel far off from the Touch & Go, C86, Acid House, New Kids on the Block. Heck, in 1979 you could probably bitch that London Calling was warmed-over MC5.

i like it when mayne brings the history!

we're barking up the wrong thing with this 'progress' and evolution notion. but we still want to see evidence of CHANGE from 99 to 09

we like to parcel up history into 10-year periods because we are 10-digited creatures. what other unit should we use? a generation? a 'cohort'? with people holding onto their kidulthood love of pop culture and need to understand the bleeding edge longer into their lives are generational divides meaningful any more? what else shall we use

So "progression" in music is merely a retroactive narrative that fits a particular story of its history that some particular writer wants to tell.

― Tuomas, Friday, January 8, 2010 12:40 PM (29 seconds ago) Bookmark

yes. the same is true of social change though.

unlike with some societal changes (democratization, for example), there is no hegemonic authority in music that would dictate the telos of music while it's still "progressing".

excuuuuuse me, but what hegemonic authority says that "democratization" (such as it is) is a social good or telos?

it's easy to play these games in both directions.

yes. the same is true of social change though.

No, in some more specific social changes there are authorities that can determine the telos of progression while it's still happening. for example...

excuuuuuse me, but what hegemonic authority says that "democratization" (such as it is) is a social good or telos?

The Western world. Most Western countries have agreed that democracy is the finest form of social organization, and since Western countries have had hegemony over other countries (though China might change that in the future), they have been able to determine that, 1) democracy is a telos for Third World countries, and 2) some of these countries are "progressing" towards this telos, even if they haven't reached it yet.

Music, though, (taken as a whole) doesn't have an outside force (or at least an outside force powerful enough) that would determine the telos of its progression while it's happening.

Play me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s

Lanier should be able to appreciate that tho pop was doing the same thing now as then conceptually, surely the differing context and method are significant.

e.g. to generalise, what changed with hip-hop between Jan '00 and now? It got slower than it ever had been before, in its most popular form (excluding acts like Black-Eyed Peas...tho playing 'Boom Boom Pow' to someone in Jan 00 who had only heard 'Joints And Jams' might be fun - "They're the biggest band in the world in your time?!!").

e.g. play someone 'Archangel' and they might think 'is this some weird new Goldie or Full Cycle shit? it's at the wrong speed!'

there's been a lot of goalpost-moving on those terms, tho they may be the same goalposts.

the western world isn't an "outside force". it's claiming that democracy is best -- though frankly most of the western world is pretty new to democracy! -- because it's how it got to the top. and it tries to export it (well up to a point, when it's expedient, etc.)

no-one has to agree with the west on this score, and plenty of leftists are sceptical about it. but if we're writing a history of the west, it is hard to avoid certain strong directional changes like democratization, basically something other than undirected chaos.

music is part of that same civilization, and in complex ways changes with it.

xpost

well, I think this would shock any listener in 1989. Or 1999

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

One thing this kind of question always makes me think is: if there was a style of music that seems quite exciting - mindblowing, even - to us now, experiencing it in the appropriate historical moment, might it seem less mindblowing to people in the past?

Like, if you did take a jungle record back to the early eighties, would people just think you were playing some funk record at the wrong speed? Would people in the late seventies think that Detroit techno was just Kraftwerk without the subtlety or restraint?

i.e. is it maybe the case that knowing the context, tracing the actual development of music in real time, creates more of a sense of wonderment and bewilderment than it diminishes?

This seems to be the sensible conclusion to me because the truth is people tend to be more blown away by developments the closer they are to them. My experience of following music generally when I was 13 was that most people not into jungle circa 1995 thought this was a fad, "oh sped up rhythms, I get it, put The Folk Implosion back on". It was people who were following the music, who were primed to see what it was doing, who were like "wow this is pretty amazing..."

I think this ability to spot innovation is always a combination of familiarity and unfamiliarity, having your prejudices confirmed as much as overturned. People from the past would have less of a way "in" and therefore I think would be more likely to just dismiss (or rather explain away) the unfamiliar futurism of the future-artifact.