Can there be truly new music?

Nothing new I hear these days would have been out of place 20 years ago.

Those God-given talents entertainers have? God went and took them away.



And the title's been edited so my post doesn't make sense anymore. Oh well!

I think by those standards even hip hop isn't groundbreaking, just another evolutionary branch like the others you mention.

Perhaps the real change was in the 'invention' of popular music and the related industry, charts etc. It's just been spinning out variants on a theme since then.

Old thread title was pure Stefansson.

New music doesn’t exi-

youtube.com/watch?v=6KASn2C_rMY

I mean you’re right that they’re just building on what’s come before but I’ve been listening to heavy music for 20 years and have never heard anything like this.

I’m sure there are other artists doing it in other genres too. I’m not a fan myself but things like Scarlxrd sounds pretty new to me too

You're thinking Stefansen's last Opus aren't you.

My ears told me they'd never heard anything like it before, but they also told me it wasn't music.

I think what MysteryLamb is trying to say is that all 'new' music is derivative in some way.

I hear plenty of shit that would definitely not sound in place 20 years ago.

There's a lot that wouldn't sound of of place, to be fair, but you could go to any decade of modern music and say the same.

Things are much the same as they've ever been. New music has always evolved rather than suddenly appeared out of nowhere and that's how it's always been.

A lot of the hip hop that's being made today is VERY different from the RUN DMC days. Different enough to be new types all together in my humble opinion.

But how much of it is truly groundbreaking? For all the technological and stylistic developments popular music (in the broadest sense of the term) still largely conforms to compositional elements (time signatures, song structures) familiar for centuries. Breakthroughs tend to be at a stylistic level.

Sound has physical attributes that define music: certain combinations of notes are consonant, others dissonant, this doesn't really change. People have written entirely dissonant or atonal music, but often hew to traditional arrangements, structures and musicianship. Even most musos' favourite yak-fronted avant-garde polyrhythmic electronic emo-rap djent bands stick, to a greater or lesser extent, to the hallmarks that make something recognisable as popular music.

I may be missing the point of the thread if it's meant to be more about genres etc.

I feel like I've been hearing/reading this discussion since the 80s. "Nothing is innovative/new music isn't as good as the old, etc".

If people still find contemporary stuff to enjoy, does it even matter if it's "groundbreaking"?

Didn't we just have Eurovision?

Generally I quite admire dancing but for some reason I find the Fortnite emotes universally obnoxious

Now that we have reached perfection with Bim Bam Toi, there's not really anywhere else to go.

I think it's probably foolish to try and evaluate current music, because we're too close to it. Stuff that seemed really significant when I was a teen, turned out to really not be. Bands that seemed like they'd make an impact turned out to be one album wonders. 

My pet theory is that when you're young you're really 'close up' to music, so it seems like everything is dramatically different, and deeply important and meaningful, and your parents are really uncool because they say it all sounds and looks the same, when it's clearly totally different! Plus everything seems new, because you haven't seen it before.

But when you get older and get less closely invested in the minutiae and trends, your taste broadens and you get more of a high level view of music. The little differences between bands in a genre become less visible because you're now comparing them to all genres and all decades. But this isn't considered as valid, because the music industry is largely targeted at teens.

Tech used to make big sudden leaps, but these days all the smart people who might work for a decade to create some big technological leap are making their smartphone apps, which results in many tiny iterative improvements rather than big leaps.
I feel like music has gone the same. Anyone can make music now. Anyone can mix and remix and create their own thing and put it on Bandcamp or whatever. This means the changes are much more gradual and less clearly mapable.

If you think of musical genres as like a tree, that keeps branching off, in the early days you had one genre branching into two, or two branching into 4, which was much easier to take note of. These days you have 100 genres each splitting into 2-3 subgenres, and we're nearer the leaves of the tree, which makes the changes much less noticeable.
Unless you're highly focused on that particular genre on a very micro level.

It seems to me that the main 'evolution' of the past few years has been Collaboration and cross-pollination between genres.
Check the charts and some days everything in the top 10 has at least 2 artists on it. BTS with Coldplay. Ariana Grande with Coldplay. Ariana Grande with Cardi B, Cardi B with... everyone ever, etc..

TLDR: there are no genres anymore and with Bim Bam Toi they are no longer needed.