We tend to think of music as being characterized by the decade in which it was produced. The 60’s and 70’s saw the fall of the brass section and the rise of guitar music. The 80’s found Stadium Rock and Metal. The 90’s produced modern Rap, Pop-Punk, Grunge, and further exploration into technology’s place in music production. The 00’s were responsible for Indie Rock, New Wave, and generally a cultural shift in favor of the studio over the live performance (i.e. looping, experimental recording techniques, instruments which are constructed rather than played). Though this is the case and every decade produces either a new technique or an iteration on an old one, the culture that a decade makes is heavily dependent on the generation from which it came.
For example, The Greatest Generation produced culture which became more and more candy coated until the 50’s produced The Crew Cuts which was nearly a parody of the foundation on which that music was built: Glenn Miller, Count Bassie, and Benny Goodman. The innovation that these big band musicians contributed was complicated vocal harmony and breaking away from the mold of orchestral styling. By the time The Crew Cuts became popular, the style of the previous 20 years had been boiled down to it’s most basic, algorithmic form, emphasizing the innovation apart from its context in instrumentalist music.
Then, in the 60’s, the cultural mantle was handed over to the Baby Boomers. The Boomers were also responsible for the 70’s and 80’s, but the 60’s laid groundwork for some of the most culturally influential bands of the 20th Century: The Beatles, The Rolling stones, The Who. This is when the first of the Boomers were getting old enough to begin producing culture. Their lasting contribution to society was passion and raw honesty. Although the music out of the early 60’s still had influences rooted in the 50’s (for instance, early The Beatles with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”), it became clear very quickly that honesty and passion would be culturally valuable.
When the Vietnam War picked up and the draft was announced in 1969, the disgruntled generation turned their attention to musicians like Janice Joplin. The music that became important was stylistically more emotional because it expressed something that the generation felt. By the late 70’s, however, Vietnam was over and the culture the Boomers produced was no longer so heavily fueled by protest and feeling as though they had no voice. The generation valued passion, but the aggregate passion in the nation was disintegrating. This led to the 80’s when, just the same as the generation that preceded them, their cultural innovation was boiled down to it’s most basic, potent form parodying it’s own roots: ACDC.
The odd thing about the Baby Boomers is that they turned out to be one of the most nostalgic, self-congratulatory generations of all time. This put Generation X in the strange position of reliving the early 70’s in all of the subsequent media that the Boomers produced for the young Gen X. Having grown up in a fully unchanging media environment, Generation X took the mantle of culture production with a very sharp left turn called Grunge. This was not lasting and subsequent media does not have obvious roots in the unique musical elements of Grunge, but the major contribution of Gen X was more in the production and business of music than in the music itself. Their unique innovation being something to the effect of “screw your corporate bullshit, man.” The consequence of that mentality, however, was the birth of independent music production which has had a profound effect on the entire industry.
The musical innovation became prominent in the 00’s with the rise of Indie Rock, something that never could have existed without Grunge revolutionizing the way business was conducted. Indie Rock integrated the first rumblings of the theme we are now watching play out: the prioritizing of the recording (available everywhere online) over the live version (available near you almost never). That became the case because Indie Rock was the first iteration of music that put things in the studio version that could not be in the live version. For instance, “we put the mic in a coffee can and then hit the kick drum with a fish to make that sound. The track really needed it.” That sort of one-and-done mentality gave way to the idea of producing music entirely on software and just running a back track of the things you cannot do live.
This has slowly been happening since records were introduced to the public early in the 20th century, but it is true now more than ever in the sense that the primary version is the recording and the live version must be adjusted in order to sound similar to the recording. Auto-tune, for example, made its way into the musical lexicon in the 00’s; that is a production trick adjusted to be capable of performing live. Featured artists on tracks do not need to tour with the band if they can just be put in the backing track. For the first time in history, the studio recording is the canonical version of the song. This idea makes being a musician substantially easier.
Whether that is good or bad, I don’t know. But I do know that based on the generational production of culture, we are nearing the next generation to take up the mantle and make its mark on society. Every thirty years, there is a big swing in popular music and media. In the next few years, we’ll watch the next iteration of music explode into existence.
