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It's not just you getting old: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201 http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-2...

irrational 9y ago
"Look through a current fashion or architecture magazine or listen to 10 random new pop songs; if you didn’t already know they were all things from the 2010s, I guarantee you couldn’t tell me with certainty they weren’t from the 2000s or 1990s or 1980s or even earlier." The other day I was in the car with my 17 year old and a song came on the radio from the late 90s and she thought it was a new song. I didn't laugh because I've noticed the sameness to pop music myself and if I hadn't lived through it I probably couldn't tell either.
- ashark 9y ago
  We seem to have stabilized at "electronic (=cheap to make) hip-hop influenced auto-tune pop" as the basic standard for top-40s music. [EDIT] I gather someone may have thought I was taking a swipe at electronic music? I wasn't, but its enduring appeal for the commercial side of the industry is probably related to costs.
  - dpark 9y ago
    In what way is electronic music meaningfully cheaper to make? You still need to book a studio unless you're going pure instrumental, and that's where the cost is. I guess you get to cut out a dependency on studio musicians, but I don't think studio musicians actually get paid that much.
    - ashark 9y ago
      Cheaper to stage live (you can spend the money on theatrics instead, if you like), fewer takes. Composition blends into final recording, without an intermediate step. [EDIT] You can basically have most or all of your non-vocal tracks ready before stepping into the studio. Maybe even some of the backing vocals, if you sample. [EDIT EDIT] see also: the state of movie soundtracks, which have in the last couple decades skewed towards rhythm-over-melody electronically-composed (and possibly finalized that way!) works, largely for reasons of cost and (related to cost) predictability.
      - dpark 9y ago
        Fair enough. I could see how those could factor into the total recording costs quite a bit.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- ConceptJunkie 9y ago
  I've considered that this is true as well, but since I am extremely unfamiliar with pop music since the early 90s, I assumed that could also be the case as well. On the other hand, if you were to play me an unfamiliar song from about 1965 to about 1980, I can, with pretty good accuracy, narrow down its release to within a year or two just by its sound. It's a game I like to play with the SiriusXM radio channel. There's no doubt that pop music has become a lot more homogenized in the past couple decades, and the technological advances that drastically alter the sound of music are becoming fewer and fewer. Has there really been anything other than (the scourge of) Autotune that's really affected the sound of music in the past 20 years? The only other thing I can think of is digital sampling, which hit like a tidal wave around 1983-4. However, I must vehemently disagree that you wouldn't immediately recognize something from the 80s. The sounds and styles of music in the 80s were much more distinct. Even my kids, who were born in the 90s, can immediately recognize song from the 80s by their sound.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    The loudness war. Digital equipment also increased the amount of material with very high production values.
ryandrake 9y ago
Good article. I think they hit on something there not mentioned (maybe I missed it) in this thread so far: "One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed." It seems to me (in fashion, culture, technology, art, etc.) that we consumers are the victims of a giant hill-climbing problem, and our current batch of corporations, in their relentless effort to optimize everything, have us stuck at some local maxima that they can't A/B test their way out of. This year's jeans are a variation of last year's. This year's smartphones a minor iteration from last year's. It's too risky financially to make a wave, or move us into the next generation. Those shareholders want their risk-free YoY growth after all.
- euyyn 9y ago
  It's like how homogeneity is explained by rapid expansion, both in cosmology, anthropology, and linguistics. Maybe globalization led to a rapid expansion of what was then fashionable, and that led to its freezing.

irrational 9y ago

"Look through a current fashion or architecture magazine or listen to 10 random new pop songs; if you didn’t already know they were all things from the 2010s, I guarantee you couldn’t tell me with certainty they weren’t from the 2000s or 1990s or 1980s or even earlier." The other day I was in the car with my 17 year old and a song came on the radio from the late 90s and she thought it was a new song. I didn't laugh because I've noticed the sameness to pop music myself and if I hadn't lived through it I probably couldn't tell either.

ashark 9y ago
We seem to have stabilized at "electronic (=cheap to make) hip-hop influenced auto-tune pop" as the basic standard for top-40s music. [EDIT] I gather someone may have thought I was taking a swipe at electronic music? I wasn't, but its enduring appeal for the commercial side of the industry is probably related to costs.
- dpark 9y ago
  In what way is electronic music meaningfully cheaper to make? You still need to book a studio unless you're going pure instrumental, and that's where the cost is. I guess you get to cut out a dependency on studio musicians, but I don't think studio musicians actually get paid that much.
  - ashark 9y ago
    Cheaper to stage live (you can spend the money on theatrics instead, if you like), fewer takes. Composition blends into final recording, without an intermediate step. [EDIT] You can basically have most or all of your non-vocal tracks ready before stepping into the studio. Maybe even some of the backing vocals, if you sample. [EDIT EDIT] see also: the state of movie soundtracks, which have in the last couple decades skewed towards rhythm-over-melody electronically-composed (and possibly finalized that way!) works, largely for reasons of cost and (related to cost) predictability.
    - dpark 9y ago
      Fair enough. I could see how those could factor into the total recording costs quite a bit.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
ConceptJunkie 9y ago
I've considered that this is true as well, but since I am extremely unfamiliar with pop music since the early 90s, I assumed that could also be the case as well. On the other hand, if you were to play me an unfamiliar song from about 1965 to about 1980, I can, with pretty good accuracy, narrow down its release to within a year or two just by its sound. It's a game I like to play with the SiriusXM radio channel. There's no doubt that pop music has become a lot more homogenized in the past couple decades, and the technological advances that drastically alter the sound of music are becoming fewer and fewer. Has there really been anything other than (the scourge of) Autotune that's really affected the sound of music in the past 20 years? The only other thing I can think of is digital sampling, which hit like a tidal wave around 1983-4. However, I must vehemently disagree that you wouldn't immediately recognize something from the 80s. The sounds and styles of music in the 80s were much more distinct. Even my kids, who were born in the 90s, can immediately recognize song from the 80s by their sound.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  The loudness war. Digital equipment also increased the amount of material with very high production values.

ryandrake 9y ago

Good article. I think they hit on something there not mentioned (maybe I missed it) in this thread so far: "One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed." It seems to me (in fashion, culture, technology, art, etc.) that we consumers are the victims of a giant hill-climbing problem, and our current batch of corporations, in their relentless effort to optimize everything, have us stuck at some local maxima that they can't A/B test their way out of. This year's jeans are a variation of last year's. This year's smartphones a minor iteration from last year's. It's too risky financially to make a wave, or move us into the next generation. Those shareholders want their risk-free YoY growth after all.

euyyn 9y ago
It's like how homogeneity is explained by rapid expansion, both in cosmology, anthropology, and linguistics. Maybe globalization led to a rapid expansion of what was then fashionable, and that led to its freezing.