“19” Paul Hardcastle?

What’s that have to do with Jazz?

Earlier this year, my teenage son bought me tickets to see the Melvins.  They toured with a Japanese band called, "Boris."

My son liked Boris.  They were okay, but the Melvins blew their doors off.

I don't know that it fell off the face of the earth, or anything. The worst I suppose you could say about it, is that it's no longer the dominant cultural force it once was among say...15 to 25 year olds. And for the purposes of this discussion, I'm assuming we're talking about "popular music primarily consisting of guitar, bass, drums and maybe some keys once in a while".

We discover and consume music differently now. If everybody about my age and older was really honest with themselves, outside of music nerds or people who were super deep into a particular "scene", most of us didn't really organically "discover" all that much on our own. Our tastes were influenced A LOT by a small group of gatekeepers - radio station program directors, music television executives, and people in charge of purchasing at chain retailers. That's a good 75% of us, if not more.

The world would look at lot different if you told a bunch of us in the 70s or 80s "Get this - for a few dollars a month, you can listen to whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, with no ads. Oh you want music videos? Live concert footage recorded by fans? You can have that too - whenever and wherever. You can even get it for free, if you don't mind 30 seconds of ads now and then. And you can even go exploring on your own, and find stuff no one else you know has ever heard of". What "normal" people organically "liked" would have looked A LOT different, and history would have played out a lot differently. It would have murdered the radio (70s) and music television (80s), and physical record sales (both decades) instantly. But it wasn't technically possible back then, so we never had it.

But now we do. And those things happened.

Interestingly, both of my kids along with all of their friends (and in the past year or so, my wife) discoverer all of their new music (even when it's occasionally old music, per the release date...) through TikTok. And then they'll create their own playlists containing these artists, in Spotify. I'm a little different, in that I discover new music primarily though Spotify and YouTube...and when I really like it, I buy the vinyl record.

People like to wax nostalgic and bemoan the loss of "good" radio stations and all that, but honestly - I can't imagine willingly going back to that (even in it's glory days), after having experienced the alternative. It would suck. The only reason that existed at all, was because that's all that technology was capable of at the time. And it made a lot of sense.

Is rock even dead now? My kids (one 21, the other 16) both listen to an incredible variety of new music - some of it rock. For as much as we complain that people are silo'd now, they listen to a FAR wider variety of music than I ever did at the same age. When I was in HS, you kind of belonged to a "tribe", musically speaking. It made up part of your identity. If you loved "this", you were obligated to hate "that". It even affected the way you dressed, or wore your hair. Nowadays? That's all kind of gone, for the most part. They're sort of liberated to like and appreciate most anything, without the social baggage. And they do.