Music during the 1T

[Blazkovitz]

I predict that EDM and rap will die down as too mechanical, and melodious pop music will dominate the High. At the same time new genres will be born among the Adaptives, they will be underground during the 1T but will explode during the 2T.

Do you have in mind any artists that might give us clue what will the music of the new saeculum be like?

[Ghost]

I think it's way too early to tell.

Like what I said before, 2020 is very likely this 4T's equivalent of 1933 (they are both the worst of each of their respective 4T moments).

I'm pretty sure today's trap, emo rap, and EDM will die off by 2023.

[LPDec63]

I've been watching 1T movies during this lockdown and post-lockdown. Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies for example. They are hilarious without raunch or cynicism. There is zero 3rd turning edginess or irony to them. There is some mild foreshadowing of Consciousness Revolution issues bubbling up, the Women's movement in particular, but those issues are not in the forefront. Anyway, I had no idea how much I've been longing for comedy free from raunch and cynicism.

I also re-watched It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World again. It remains the funniest movie ever. Ethyl Merman steals the show even as playing a very negative stereotype of a Mother-in-law.

Also, I recommend a couple great 2nd Turning comedies - What's Up Doc with Barbara Streisand and Ryan O'Neil, and High Anxiety from Mel Brooks.

[nguyenivy]

Any hope for us trance & techno fans in the 1T & beyond?

[pbrower2a]

If you want to know what music of the coming 1T will be like, then just go to a Goodwill store and look at the once-precious LP's now available dirt-cheap. Guy Lombardo. Lawrence Welk. Bing Crosby. Doris Day. Patti Paige. That's what GI's were listening to after the Big Bands quit playing and people relied upon records. There was much "Hawaiian" and "Latin" music... and it was incredibly insipid. If it went a bit rustic it went to Gene Autry, the "Singing Cowboy". And don't forget all the empty Muzak-like arrangements often derided in the 1970's as "elevator music". This was not music to think by.

OK, the Silent went for whimsy and even early rock (think of Chuck Barry and Buddy Holly)... but just think of what it was like to hear the anesthetizing sound that GI's offered Boomers. It's hardly surprising that Boomers would go in every direction other than to that stuff.

Maybe this Crisis will have a different effect upon mass culture... Still, it used to be rather easy to get classical music, jazz, R&B, or folk on CD in retail stores, and it isn't now.

[Einzige]

If this 4T goes poorly enough, and I think it might - a defeat in a war with China, say - 1T music might continue the darker themes of the 3T in a popular form.

[David Horn]

(02-01-2021, 09:31 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: Any hope for us trance & techno fans in the 1T & beyond?

Sure.  It may change a lot, but it will still be based there. Then again, music always evolves.

[pbrower2a]

(02-01-2021, 09:31 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: Any hope for us trance & techno fans in the 1T & beyond?

Most people outgrow the pop music of their youth. For my generation (Boomers) when the pop music quite pretending to any high purpose (disco sucks!, and bubble-gum rock directed at teen X), many of us had to go adult. "Elevator music" was the wrong sort of 'adult' music. Also available were R&B, country (the previous two assuming that one was in a certain culture), or something less specific to any ethnicity -- folk, jazz, classical, or for a short time, "new age".

Here's the problem for any pop music: much of it is really awful. There have been exceptions, like Big Band, and it gets revivals. I could make the case that the compositions of Haydn and Mozart had much the same sort of appeal in their time, and the waltz and ragtime crazes.  Is ragtime part of classical music? It is close. Joplin rags have some attractive counterpoint. Good music has a tendency to survive, often appearing in new expressions. Aaron Copland adopted the folk song "Simple Gifts" into his theme-and-variations ballet score Appalachian Spring (1944), which CBS News often used as lead music for news programs. But this folk tune is remarkably similar to that of a work for brass ensemble by Giovanni Gabriel ( Canzon per sonare no. 2) much older than the folk song which dates from 1848.

The Canzona (published in 1615, written no earlier than 1612)





the folk song which is obviously much newer than the Renaissance-era canzona:





and a masterful set of orchestral variations  expressing supreme optimism in America as the last Crisis was winding down (1944) in supreme triumph: 





I would not be surprised if there is a synthesized version of these.  

... but back to the not-so-specific. 3T fads and crazes have little staying power. There is much creativity in a 3T because of more complete freedom from pressures to conform to old standards of behavior and content. Human behavior not in a 3T explain why those standards of behavior and content exist. Nobody says "Burn the fads!"... more likely, it is that during a 4T, fads and crazes that don't have the support of Crisis-era leadership tend to die. Will it be different this time? Maybe. We have a war against the worst enemy that America has ever faced, and we have extermination of that enemy as an objective. COVID-19 has no chance, as did the German or Japanese governments during the last Crisis or the Confederacy had during the previous Crisis to surrender to stop the killing. Donald Trump has not been effective in promoting the sort of regimentation necessary for defeating COVID-19; if anything the people most likely to defy him (or at least act independently of him) have been most effective in fighting the Great Menace. 

The good stuff of course survives. So do virtues that get a society through the Crisis. Ugly compromises necessary for getting through the Crisis (slavery in the American Revolution, plutocracy in the Civil War, and Jim Crow practice in the Second World War) might have to be set aside for solutions in later times.  

[Mickey123]

(02-03-2021, 04:02 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: We have a war against the worst enemy that America has ever faced, and we have extermination of that enemy as an objective. COVID-19 has no chance, as did the German or Japanese governments during the last Crisis or the Confederacy had during the previous Crisis to surrender to stop the killing. Donald Trump has not been effective in promoting the sort of regimentation necessary for defeating COVID-19; if anything the people most likely to defy him (or at least act independently of him) have been most effective in fighting the Great Menace. 

The Spanish Flu was far more deadly than covid-19, and it killed young people, while covid-19 primarily kills old people who were at the end of their life anyway.

Covid-19 will not be remembered as the focus of this crisis.  Whatever is to come in the next decade will be much worse.

[Warren Dew]

Is there even music during a first turning?

Ah yes, "insipid". That's my prediction too.

[pbrower2a]

(02-03-2021, 08:48 PM)Mickey123 Wrote:

(02-03-2021, 04:02 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: We have a war against the worst enemy that America has ever faced, and we have extermination of that enemy as an objective. COVID-19 has no chance, as did the German or Japanese governments during the last Crisis or the Confederacy had during the previous Crisis to surrender to stop the killing. Donald Trump has not been effective in promoting the sort of regimentation necessary for defeating COVID-19; if anything the people most likely to defy him (or at least act independently of him) have been most effective in fighting the Great Menace. 

The Spanish Flu was far more deadly than covid-19, and it killed young people, while covid-19 primarily kills old people who were at the end of their life anyway.

Covid-19 will not be remembered as the focus of this crisis.  Whatever is to come in the next decade will be much worse.

I did write this after the Capitol Putsch. A million American deaths from a respiratory infection that we recently thought just did not happen in the advanced industrial world will reshape perceptions of the very nature of life. There will be cultural effects.   The best music that I can imagine to fit this Crisis would be a requiem mass with a decided;y macabre edge. No, not the defiant resistance to death in Mozart's requiem, the reassurance in that of Faure, or the sheer terror in Verdi's Requiem.

[galaxy]

Replying to the first post...I think you've got your timings a little off. Rap is today's "new great dominating genre," its rise driven by Adaptives, just like rock in the 1940s and 1950s. It will remain dominant for decades. Trust me, if you spend any time around Homelanders you'll know - rap is by far the largest genre for the majority of them, regardless of race, class, or any other divisions. The rap dominance extends up to late Millennials too, maybe up to around 1998 or so. I'm not a fan of most rap, which makes me distinctly the odd one out among people my age.

(At one time I would have progressed from that sentence about how I'm not a fan into a lengthy complaint about how music was forever declining and how the world is perpetually going to hell in a handbasket and I should prepare for a life of relentless slow and steady worsening of everything. I'm glad T4T led me away from that way of thinking.)

(Though to be fair, for me, a person who has never experienced any turning other than late-3 and 4, expecting a life of relentless decline is a pretty reasonable conclusion to come to, even if it's not correct).


To add to the above, EDM is perhaps analogous to the big-band music of the late 1930s and early 1940s - as big-band was the transition between the jazz era and the rock era, EDM is the transition between the rock era and the rap era.

[David Horn]

(02-04-2022, 08:35 PM)galaxy Wrote: To add to the above, EDM is perhaps analogous to the big-band music of the late 1930s and early 1940s - as big-band was the transition between the jazz era and the rock era, EDM is the transition between the rock era and the rap era.

I'm not a fan of hip-hop in any of its forms, though individual pieces can be captivating.  On the other hand, I do like EDM in its prime function: dance music.  Even a person lacking all rhythm can move in time to a metronome, and EDM delivers on that every time.  I'm less convinced it's a bridge than a byway: just another path along the way.

[Eric the Green]

(02-04-2022, 08:35 PM)galaxy Wrote: Replying to the first post...I think you've got your timings a little off. Rap is today's "new great dominating genre," its rise driven by Adaptives, just like rock in the 1940s and 1950s. It will remain dominant for decades. Trust me, if you spend any time around Homelanders you'll know - rap is by far the largest genre for the majority of them, regardless of race, class, or any other divisions. The rap dominance extends up to late Millennials too, maybe up to around 1998 or so. I'm not a fan of most rap, which makes me distinctly the odd one out among people my age.

(At one time I would have progressed from that sentence about how I'm not a fan into a lengthy complaint about how music was forever declining and how the world is perpetually going to hell in a handbasket and I should prepare for a life of relentless slow and steady worsening of everything. I'm glad T4T led me away from that way of thinking.)

(Though to be fair, for me, a person who has never experienced any turning other than late-3 and 4, expecting a life of relentless decline is a pretty reasonable conclusion to come to, even if it's not correct).


To add to the above, EDM is perhaps analogous to the big-band music of the late 1930s and early 1940s - as big-band was the transition between the jazz era and the rock era, EDM is the transition between the rock era and the rap era.

I hope not. That to me is a pessimistic outlook. Also, rap already has been around as long as EDM, and their roots both probably also are just as deep. So EDM is not a transition to rap, and still is prominent in pop. Rap thankfully does not dominate all of pop, but it dominates too much. It mostly is not music at all, but poetry slam. It can be brilliant as such, and like David said, some rap pieces can captivate. But overall its style is too aggressively ugly and angry and lacking in musical aspects. EDM comes out of electronic music generally, which we now call ambient or techno ambient, styles which still are ongoing too but on the fringe of what is popular. Assuming music catches on with Gen Z again, electronic will surpass rap. Usually artist generations prefer a mellower and gentler fare than what rap is, and as artists they have better taste and creativity.

Rap is fine for civics, since civics are supposed to be dominated by words and intellect as well as by the social interests that rap exhibits. Still, the record of civics in show business in the GI/Greatest Generation was great overall, as was that of the Lost, so civics and nomads like Lost and GenX need not always fall to the level of what rap is-- along with the other GenX-preferred pop styles that are usually just as bad--- such as glam rock, heavy metal, grunge and superficial and over-sexed pop... rap is also a GenX preferred style, aggressive and cynical like the others, but has hung around into the next generation..... unfortunately.... but the kinder and gentler GenX artists in genres like singer-songwriter also have extended into Millennials culture, and will continue as well..... and beyond the USA is always generally better....

[Anteros]

Honestly, it's really hard to say with the increasing amount of genres and subgenres cropping up. I think anything that's catchy or edgy (or both) will always remain popular but people's overall tastes in music have become increasingly broad since it's so easy to listen to anything nowadays. It's also so much easier to make music in general and distribute it without the need of major labels so there's this constant barrage of new things to listen to if you're looking for a specific sound.

Trap is the prevailing pop genre right now but I don't think anyone is really listening to this genre as exclusively as boomers who always waxes on and on about the same classic rock hits from the 60s and 70s. Neither was it the case with EDM, kpop, or whatever else that gained popularity over the past decade. By the 1T, people probably won't have as much of a collective taste in music. There's just no reason to with all of the options you have.

I think a couple sites that illustrate this well is Everynoise and for electronic/EDM specifically, Ishkur's Electronic Music Guide which apparently someone already made a thread of. Everynoise is basically an automated list of all of the genres that have cropped up throughout the year into a sort of "tag cloud" format that you can listen to at your leisure. Ishkur's Guide tries to catalogue every genre and subgenre of electronic music by year with an impressive list of examples for each (and a bit of snark in the descriptions). They're both very interesting ways of observing the evolving music trends.

[pbrower2a]

(02-04-2022, 08:35 PM)galaxy Wrote: Replying to the first post...I think you've got your timings a little off. Rap is today's "new great dominating genre," its rise driven by Adaptives, just like rock in the 1940s and 1950s. It will remain dominant for decades. Trust me, if you spend any time around Homelanders you'll know - rap is by far the largest genre for the majority of them, regardless of race, class, or any other divisions. The rap dominance extends up to late Millennials too, maybe up to around 1998 or so. I'm not a fan of most rap, which makes me distinctly the odd one out among people my age.

Rap is cr@p, which should not surprise one when a Boomer says it. 

All fads fade. I am predicting that people will end up with more time on their hands, and people will want music of deeper substance such as more musical lines or more philosophical lyrics. There's a damned-good reason for Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize in literature and the diction of the computer "Watson" being modeled after Bob Dylan's song lyrics. 

Classical music largely disappeared from the marketplace because people have been obliged to work two jobs to make ends meet. That is likely to come to an end as people can satisfy their material needs more easily with fewer hours of work. We could of course have another economic meltdown that forces down costs of real estate (the real cause of the rise of the cost of living for the last 40 years) and the disappearance of bullsh!t jobs. We need more people doing genuine, productive work and not doing pretend-work that supports a parasitic elite of well-paid bureaucrats. 

Quote:(At one time I would have progressed from that sentence about how I'm not a fan into a lengthy complaint about how music was forever declining and how the world is perpetually going to hell in a handbasket and I should prepare for a life of relentless slow and steady worsening of everything. I'm glad T4T led me away from that way of thinking.)

Cut the normal workweek from 40 to 32 or even 28 hours a week, and we are going to have much more leisure time to fill. If people are working more hours it is in second jobs just to meet rent because moderately-priced housing isn't being built. Yes, I know that it is far easier to make a profit in dealings with people flush with cash, and it is easier to build and sell one $480K house in a poor part of Michigan than it is to build and sell four houses that cost $120K. I recognize that the clientele is different and that foreclosures are far more common at the low end than at the high end. On the other hand, in the last 1T the emphasis was on housing near the low end for ownership. 

We have gone from "you get what you pay for" to "you pay -- really pay, and consider yourself lucky for what you get". That reflects a society that has pushed monopoly and cartels because such maximize profit and thus elite gain as the ideal. That is very 3T. Rodeo Drive practically needs Watts to keep things truly exclusive.  

Quote:(Though to be fair, for me, a person who has never experienced any turning other than late-3 and 4, expecting a life of relentless decline is a pretty reasonable conclusion to come to, even if it's not correct).

Nearly half of a car tire is headed backward with respect to the car, and nearly half is headed forward. The part heading backward is the part causing the car to go forward. Two turnings is half the cycle. 

At my age I have seen a small part of the last completed 1T, and a whole 2T and 3T. Most likely I have seen most of the 4T. Of course I have known people who lived through a completed 1T, like my parents (born in the early 1930's) and the latter half of a 3T. My paternal grandparents (born in the early 1910's) lived through the latter half of the previous 3T (Roaring 'Twenties) -- but I asked my grandfather what the Roaring Twenties were like. In his time the Roaring Twenties meant that the rum-runners were using US 12 (now supplanted by Interstate 94), US 112 (Detroit to Elkhart, diverted later and renumbered US 12), US 20 (still connecting Chicago, South Bend, and Toledo), and US 6 (not quite reaching either Chicago or new York City, but the most direct route for all but about thirty miles all in all). US 6 and US 20 are of course largely supplanted by the Interstates. His parents must have told him that cities like Chicago and Detroit were modern-day equivalents of Sodom and Gomorrah.  My paternal grandfather (1883-1966) obviously got to know the Gay Nineties , and my maternal grandmother (1891-1973) got to know most of them -- sort of them... because one missed out on a lot if one lived in a rural area.  

As a Boomer I got my idea of the Roaring Twenties to a great extent from The Untouchables. 

Relentless decline is predictable for a thoroughly-corrupt, inequitable society under incompetent leadership wither mad, despotic, or dictatorial leaders. When such is so, practically nothing can go right.  This isn't the last 200 years of the Roman Empire. It could be that the cyclical nature of American history prevents any destructive trend from dominating everything else.   

Quote:To add to the above, EDM is perhaps analogous to the big-band music of the late 1930s and early 1940s - as big-band was the transition between the jazz era and the rock era, EDM is the transition between the rock era and the rap era.

We shall see. Maybe tastes will be for music that more soothes and numbs than that causes people to think.