stones67 wrote on Jun 27
th, 2008 at 9:12pm:
These things run in cycles.... kind of.
Arguably, Rock has been dead as a contempory art form since the early '80's or so, depending upon who you ask. It belongs to another age, like Ragtime, Dixieland, Mississipi Blues, Bigband, Bepop, Rhythm and Blues etc etc. Which is not to say that Rock itself is dead, just that it now belongs to a past age like the other above genres.
It has now been replaced by God knows what.... in fact I think the criteria for entertainment has now shifted and where once teenagers sat down with a 33rpm LP record and listened intently they may now be online fighting it out with Battlefield 2 or chatting with friends on Facebook. Music may still be in their lives but it will be on in the background while they do something else.
Plus the fact that the big money has kind of almost gone.... while the digital medium itself has been the greatest democratising element ever in the history of recorded music, the illegal downloads thing has killed off the ability for most people to actually make a career out of being a recording artist. And as for touring, that will soon be too unprofitable as well, twisting the knife even further..
Hard to see how another Rolling Stones will emerge out of all of that....
Very articulate and eloquent, but not necessarily true... The way that music gets passed on from one person to another nowadays was never possible when I was young. My daughter is 14 and , although I don't necessarily like everything that she listens to, there is an awful lot of her music that actually makes me smile, and some that I really like. There are plenty of groups out there that may not necessarily tour around the world, but they certainly have an enormous download-fanbase. My daughter listens to more music than I ever did at her age, and I listened to A LOT, and although it IS the constant background of her life through earphones superglued to her ear canals, she also goes to live gigs of local bands and to other more famous bands when mum finances it. You may argue about the quality of tinny mp3s as opposed to our old vinyls, but the fact is that I would have slipped several discs in my back had I ever attempted to take all my vinyls away over the weekend, whereas she just puts her ipod into her pocket, hey presto!!! Music was never as easily available and ubiquitous as it is now. Downloading is a global phenomenon, it crosses creeds and races and nationalities, and the way music spreads makes touring in our sense almost unnecessary, look at the massive succcess of fairly nice bands like the Arctic Monkeys, and they are bloody good live and also have a massive fanbase....Unfortunately there isn't anything new that will EVER be as good as the Rolling Stones, the question is : would they have become as big had their medium been more electronically based than touring-based??? Somehow I think so, and I believe they would have found a way of making it financially successful. If the music industry is going down the toilet, then I can only say that it was about time, and good riddance! The bastards have been ripping us and the bands off for years and years, and have only their own greed to blame.
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Which band are the New Rolling Stones ? (Read 4,447 times)
