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Originally Posted by emdub123  My questions along this line of thinking would be: Can the creative "giants" of our time reach as broad of an audience as the creative giants of the 1970s? At that time, it seems that the "machine" was able to market these artists successfully -- people knew who they were. Today, the "machine" is no longer capable of marketing the vast majority of artists. Therefore, if the creative giants fall outside of what the record companies are capable of hyping and marketing, who's gonna know about them? I think it's back to word-of-mouth.
I don't think we can say what has lasting cultural relevance without the benefit of hindsight (time and distance), can we? Did The Stooges' 1973 release have a greater or lesser impact than 10 Years Afters' 1973 release? How would the general consensus about this have changed over the last 34 years?
In 1993, who would have thought that Uncle Tupelo's Anodyne would have any lasting impact whatsoever? In 1996, who would have thought that Whiskeytown's Faithless Street would be anything but a blip on the radar? If you don't listen to alt.country, you probably have never heard these records. Yet, if you're into the alt.country sub-genre, you might agree that these two records were hugely meaningful. A record's impact today is relative. Relative to how popular it's genre is with the general public and relative to how meaningful that genre is to us personally.
Not many people knew about these two records at the time, but year after year, they go from friend to friend (or peer to peer, as it were). How can the impact of something be gauged if it's a slow trickle instead of a big splash? There are lots of great records going from friend to friend at this very moment that, over time, will come to be regarded as "important" records. It's just going to take time.
This brings me to one last observation. Maybe music consumers are more sophisticated today than they were 30 years ago. Maybe the fragmentation of the music into hundreds of sub-genres has made the ability to reach a universal audience without playing to the lowest common denominator a cultural impossibility. There can't be another Led Zeppelin because there's hundreds of different outlets for finding rock music today, whereas in 1969, the local FM radio station was a single-source provider. |
You know... I don't completely disagree with what you are saying above, just making a point here but we are somewhat on the same page.
I don't think it is all about TV or other forms of entertainment, that is a chicken and the egg argument from both sides. Are other forms of entertainment causing the decline of music or is the lack of good quality music causing the advancement of other forms of entertainment?