Dansk
Member
This is something that I originally noticed while studying philosophy, but I've just made a mental connection to a much greater phenomenon encompassing a much wider scope of disciplines. I'd like feedback on this.
I'll start off with what I noticed in philosophy, since that was the genesis of the idea for me. Essentially it goes like this:
Philosophy was invented, for lack of a better word, by the ancient Greeks, and raised to an artform by Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle in particular wrote about anything and everything; by modern definitions his writings covered disciplines from nuclear physics to ethics to aesthetics to evolutionary biology. His ethical theories, in my opinion, are by far the most complete and comprehensive of anything since written; each philosopher since his time has been merely subdividing his work and occasionally hybridizing it with other academic fields. This process increased dramatically in the 20th century with the corresponding increase in the number of universities, published professors and philosophy students.
What this has resulted in is fossilization of ideas. I've encountered dozens of works by PhD holders who have elaborately crafted dense and obtuse arguments using specialized language centered around tiny, meaningless issues for the simple fact that they're the first and only ones to hold that position. It's a by-product of a system that values originality and creativity as the highest virtues. Given a limited number of options, the already existing positions will be cannibalized and spread increasingly thin among the growing number of researchers, who become ever more tenacious in their ridiculous positions with the passage of time.
Just tonight I connected that trend with popular music.
Say what you will about what's been going on in the musical world for the last 50 years, but I think you'd have to be blind not to see that bands are becoming fossilized in the exact same way. When the Beatles hit big in the early 1960s, they were working with essentially a blank slate. The invention of stereo recording and 4, 8 and 16 track tape machines revolutionized the industry and multiplied a thousandfold what it was possible to do with sound. Later, 24 track tape and eventually surround sound and digital recording with its unlimited number of tracks continued that trend.
The musical world in the 1960s and 1970s was in a state of incredible fermentation of styles and sounds, and every year that passed set the bar higher and higher, producing incredible new things that no one had heard before. The changing social norms helped this along, giving rise to genres like punk that would have been unthinkable only 20 years earlier.
And then after the 1980s, everything ground to a halt. Simply put, everything that can be done, has been done. Commercially viable conglomerations of rap and metal, punk and reggae, electronica and soul, and all of the above and more, have been created. Artists are no longer free to roam in a wide open field of possibilities. There is so little that's new and unique left to create in the sonic universe that the differences have become increasingly small. Think of bands like Led Zeppelin or Elton John, who were equally at home with blues-rock, orchestral progressive rock, reggae, punk, disco, bluegrass, country, or anything else that was going on in the 1970s, and they had hits within all of those styles. And now think of any of the famous bands of the 21st century: The Killers, The White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Linkin Park, Coldplay, Nickelback etc.
What do they have in common? They found a singularly identifiable style and they fossilized in it. All of their songs sound virtually identical compared to the incredible variety that was going on in the 1970s. Nickelback in particular has managed to release the exact same song a half dozen times over the last decade and fool people into thinking it's something new.
They're afraid to take chances because if they leave their niche, that little piece of the musical universe uniquely identified as theirs, they might not find another. Where the Beatles could skip all over the place from stuff like I Wanna Hold Your Hand to A Day in the Life and be reasonably sure they were going to land in uncharted territory, The Killers can't suddenly drop the synths and become a ska band for fear they won't be able to outperform the pre-existing ska bands.
I'm not saying the bands are to blame, they're victims of a general societal trend towards specialization that's been going on for centuries now. The musicians of the 60s and 70s were just lucky enough to live through an era when technology and society was changing so rapidly that a universe of possibilities were open and risk-taking was rational behaviour.
Anyways, I'm going to bed now.
I'll start off with what I noticed in philosophy, since that was the genesis of the idea for me. Essentially it goes like this:
Philosophy was invented, for lack of a better word, by the ancient Greeks, and raised to an artform by Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle in particular wrote about anything and everything; by modern definitions his writings covered disciplines from nuclear physics to ethics to aesthetics to evolutionary biology. His ethical theories, in my opinion, are by far the most complete and comprehensive of anything since written; each philosopher since his time has been merely subdividing his work and occasionally hybridizing it with other academic fields. This process increased dramatically in the 20th century with the corresponding increase in the number of universities, published professors and philosophy students.
What this has resulted in is fossilization of ideas. I've encountered dozens of works by PhD holders who have elaborately crafted dense and obtuse arguments using specialized language centered around tiny, meaningless issues for the simple fact that they're the first and only ones to hold that position. It's a by-product of a system that values originality and creativity as the highest virtues. Given a limited number of options, the already existing positions will be cannibalized and spread increasingly thin among the growing number of researchers, who become ever more tenacious in their ridiculous positions with the passage of time.
Just tonight I connected that trend with popular music.
Say what you will about what's been going on in the musical world for the last 50 years, but I think you'd have to be blind not to see that bands are becoming fossilized in the exact same way. When the Beatles hit big in the early 1960s, they were working with essentially a blank slate. The invention of stereo recording and 4, 8 and 16 track tape machines revolutionized the industry and multiplied a thousandfold what it was possible to do with sound. Later, 24 track tape and eventually surround sound and digital recording with its unlimited number of tracks continued that trend.
The musical world in the 1960s and 1970s was in a state of incredible fermentation of styles and sounds, and every year that passed set the bar higher and higher, producing incredible new things that no one had heard before. The changing social norms helped this along, giving rise to genres like punk that would have been unthinkable only 20 years earlier.
And then after the 1980s, everything ground to a halt. Simply put, everything that can be done, has been done. Commercially viable conglomerations of rap and metal, punk and reggae, electronica and soul, and all of the above and more, have been created. Artists are no longer free to roam in a wide open field of possibilities. There is so little that's new and unique left to create in the sonic universe that the differences have become increasingly small. Think of bands like Led Zeppelin or Elton John, who were equally at home with blues-rock, orchestral progressive rock, reggae, punk, disco, bluegrass, country, or anything else that was going on in the 1970s, and they had hits within all of those styles. And now think of any of the famous bands of the 21st century: The Killers, The White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Linkin Park, Coldplay, Nickelback etc.
What do they have in common? They found a singularly identifiable style and they fossilized in it. All of their songs sound virtually identical compared to the incredible variety that was going on in the 1970s. Nickelback in particular has managed to release the exact same song a half dozen times over the last decade and fool people into thinking it's something new.
They're afraid to take chances because if they leave their niche, that little piece of the musical universe uniquely identified as theirs, they might not find another. Where the Beatles could skip all over the place from stuff like I Wanna Hold Your Hand to A Day in the Life and be reasonably sure they were going to land in uncharted territory, The Killers can't suddenly drop the synths and become a ska band for fear they won't be able to outperform the pre-existing ska bands.
I'm not saying the bands are to blame, they're victims of a general societal trend towards specialization that's been going on for centuries now. The musicians of the 60s and 70s were just lucky enough to live through an era when technology and society was changing so rapidly that a universe of possibilities were open and risk-taking was rational behaviour.
Anyways, I'm going to bed now.
I'll just stop typing now.
