I grew up with WLIR/WDRE on the radio in the 70s/80s and early 90s, so I saw the transition from rock to rap/hip-hop and the advent of dubstep/EDM, as the DJs there actually had new releases in London and other influential music centers flown in as they were released. While as a white suburban kid whose peers only seemed to listen to classic rock and show tunes I didn’t feel a connection to rap/hip-hop, I did really enjoy the EDM imports, and still listen to their descendents today. While I know my taste for such music isn’t common, I do hope that in the future the current performers I like will set the stage for what comes next: Pendulum, DeadMau5, Prodigy, Infected Mushroom. Not holding my breath, though.
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Sea shanties
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So you’re telling me that liking punk is back to being obscure and not mainstream? Awesome. My street cred will rise again!
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The punk underground never went away…
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I think this is right on, but would ascribe the shift to a number of songs/artists from that moment, not just Dre. But since Dre is at the center of pretty much everything I would point to… yeah, sure. That’s the one.
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yeah, I think his point was it’s an “if I had to pick one song that symbolized the shift in taste” scenario. it’s kinda lazy history-wise but it’s actually a good technique storytelling-wise.
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Also, if you’re going to declare the death of a genre, it’s worthwhile talking about why it was primed for death. That answer runs all the way from the commoditization of rock culture to the corporate consolidation of “last mile” media (Clear Channel et al). Tbh, the rise of hip hop had very little to do with rock’s death, in my opinion. Rock was already well into its august years by the 80s and we were lucky to have a last gasp of the punk ethos break through into the 90s (largely because most of those bands actually experienced something close to the early culture of punk). Rock was bloated, fatigued and pretty much entirely out of ideas by the time Dre entered a studio.
I was honestly afraid for hip hop in the early 2000s for that very reason; gangsta had yielded to whatever the fuck you call the shit that was getting radio play at that time (Mase, No Limit, G Unit) and seemed to be completely devoid of anything worth saying. But then came The Roots, Mos Def, Dilated Peoples, the Atlanta crews and a bunch of others and really revived it and pushed it further than it had ever been before. I’ve heard far more music that I like in the past 20 years than during the golden era of hip hop.
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Which runs right on back to the beginning of rock culture… it is a commercial culture. All popular music culture that sells albums is commercial culture… I think we need to move past the mindset that there is some kind of purity to be had in the production of popular music in terms of being commercial. A commercially produced album can be just as artistically good as a work produced in a non-commercial environment. Not everyone who gets paid is a sell out, I’d argue.
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Yes, of course. What I was referring to was the effect that consolidation had on the breadth of artists people were exposed to and the idea that the “rock star” was an attitude or persona as opposed to the reality of being really hard-working musicians. Once you get a decade or so removed from innovation, especially coupled with the public excesses of many artists, it becomes an aspiration to fame as opposed to being the result of maniacally focused artists’ work ethic. At that point most music just becomes a pastiche of what came before.
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Well, then say that… But let’s not forget what Marx said about the commodity and the Edward Bernays freudian logic of modern capitalism since the 20th century (the building of desire and identity to shape particular kinds of people who identify by their patterns of consumption rather than as active citizens in a democratic society)…
“Innovation” itself is a commodity that obscures how music is actually made - which is not in a vacuum, with the only real valuable stuff being somehow novel… rather music is built on what came before out of necessity. This is why we have all this dumb ass lawsuits happening, because there is an expectation (and now legally with an overbearing set of copyright laws) of works of music being entirely novel, but at some point that is just difficult to NOT show your influences in one way or another…
It always was… As Eugene of Gogol Bordello said “Let rest originality / for sake of passing it around…”
Hell, hip hop was built by taking samples from other music and recontexualizing/remixing into something new… some samples are so well known, that they’re instantly recognizable…
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"after the advent of gangsta rap, acts like Motley Crue, Poison, and virtually every subsequent rock band seemed toothless in comparison. "
I can’t speak for every subsequent rock band but Motley Crue, and I guess Poison, sounded utterly lame on their own. Without gangsta rap. They were just forgettable rubbish. We were laughing about it just the other week, that they sold bajilions of records but none of us knew any of their forgettable weak ass music.
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I mean…they already were…
But the 80s also had hardcore and the early 90s had all sorts of great rock bands. So… 
the need to have a teleological narrative that just happens to conform to the narrative of the music industry is a powerful one, i guess…
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The Chronic really killed the careers of all the jazz-rap groups like A Tribe Called Quest and Pharcyde and really anyone who wasn’t gangsta rap like De La Soul had lost the battle. And as far as rappers go, Snoop’s style really made Chuck D and LL Cool J look old school overnight. Snoop killed the career of a lot of rappers
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The Buggles.
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“Jazz isn’t dead, it just smells funny.”
-Frank Zappa
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TOP 10 SELLING ALBUMS OF 2021 IN U.S. (PHYSICAL & DIGITAL SALES COMBINED)
- Adele, 30 (1.464 million)
- Taylor Swift, Red (Taylor’s Version) (621,000)
- Olivia Rodrigo, Sour (557,000)
- Taylor Swift, Evermore (529,000)
- Taylor Swift, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) (521,000)
- Billie Eilish, Happier Than Ever (430,000)
- Harry Styles, Fine Line (317,000)
- Taylor Swift, Folklore (304,000)
- Carrie Underwood, My Savior (293,000)
- Morgan Wallen, Dangerous: The Double Album (288,000)
Gangstas all. Who rules the world?
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Who’s this Taylor Swift? Some young upstart from the Tick Tocks or the You Tubes?
No Captain & Tennille?
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