Coppola wrote:Jubz wrote:that there's nothing going on here, and the music is duller than fucking dishwater.
Music doesn't have to be constantly coming up with brand new sounds the whole time to be good music.
I'm agreed with this point. But shouldn't the most hyped tunes in a scene be more than just 'good' music? Shouldn't they be innovating, pushing the boundaries, breaking forth into new territory? At the point they no longer are, well that's the point anything stops being relevant. If it really is blowing the minds of the younger kids then more power to them, I'm not about to tell them to check their history cos that's just going to contribute to the irrelevance of what's going on. But I do think we're just products of circumstances where the changes that set new mutations apart, that give them identity, are becoming smaller and smaller, and that rather than just admitting it we're keeping up the illusion that something's really going on.
It could all be a matter of context, but I'm not convinced. The post-dubstep "bass" music scene in absorbing influences has also gentrified them, leaving them bland and tasteless, like a muzak version of something that originally was more vital. Why listen to one person's tepid garage influenced track, when you can listen to garage? The same with funky, none of the post-dubstep lot have been able to use it's influence to create anything anywhere near as primal or vital as the originals. There is often too much reverence for the source scene as well - compare the techno influences on post-dubstep, with the distorted and twisted sounds that gave Grime it's identity. The difference is between knowing too much on the one hand, and not knowing (or caring) as much on the other.
Finally Donga made a point I also wanted to make. That the hype machine itself cheapens the situation by encouraging people not to consume on merit, but on hype; an abstract concept.