I wasn't going to write about this, but the "Michael Jackson is back in Pepsi ads" story just brought it all back to me. Ever since HoloPac at Coachella a while back, there's been a sudden wave of "Who should be the next holo-artist?" with Janis Joplin, Freddie Mercury, Biggie and Jimi Hendrix being on the list in a Rolling Stone reader's poll. This is all a part of my major problem with most of modern music, its that it's stuck in nostalgia.
Ever since the Seattle Grunge movement, music has been going in every direction except forward. While the wall between genre styles has broken down, there hasn't been a major move move forward in musical style since Nirvana. There have been better bands than Nirvana, but no one has been able to match the cultural and style shift that they had. You could say that N.W.A. and Tupac and Biggie had the exact same effect as Nirvana, for gangster rap and rap in general, as Nirvana; but the styles of those artists was diluted to studio gangsters faster than grunge became the steaming shit pile that was nu-metal.
My point is, music has been trapped for well over a decade by refusing to look at what is happening in the modern music world. Everyone is waiting for the next Beatles or Micheal Jackson or even the next version of any of the Big Four, even though all of them are still around. This popular stagnation will do more harm to the music industry and music itself than piracy ever will. So let's all stop wallowing in the past and love what we have now.
Ever since the Seattle Grunge movement, music has been going in every direction except forward. While the wall between genre styles has broken down, there hasn't been a major move move forward in musical style since Nirvana. There have been better bands than Nirvana, but no one has been able to match the cultural and style shift that they had. You could say that N.W.A. and Tupac and Biggie had the exact same effect as Nirvana, for gangster rap and rap in general, as Nirvana; but the styles of those artists was diluted to studio gangsters faster than grunge became the steaming shit pile that was nu-metal.
My point is, music has been trapped for well over a decade by refusing to look at what is happening in the modern music world. Everyone is waiting for the next Beatles or Micheal Jackson or even the next version of any of the Big Four, even though all of them are still around. This popular stagnation will do more harm to the music industry and music itself than piracy ever will. So let's all stop wallowing in the past and love what we have now.