Originality is Dead: Is This The End of Music?

I’m starting to wonder why I still listen to the radio, ever, or why I still return to the mainstream music press. I didn’t read a single music magazine for around five years between the late 90s and early noughties because I couldn’t afford to and equally couldn’t be bothered to. When I eventually got restless, wondering what I might be missing out on, I discovered that the answer was ‘nothing.’ The press were still banging on about Radiohead and Oasis and U2 and The Manic Street Preachers and the same shit that they’d been filling column inches with before. I felt as if, rather than the world passing me by as I dwelled in a temporary cultural vacuum, time had stood still.

The rest of the coverage was of bands I knew from watching terrestrial television and simply existing in society. Travis and all that mediocre slop that passed as indie while being hyped and marketed by the majors, as well as a hefty dose of watered-down nu-metal that the kids not hard enough for the heavier nu-metal bands – Lost Prophets, Linkin Park et al – were hardly news, and far from a revelation to me.

Now, I’ve long been a music obsessive, and consider exposure to music I dislike and am indifferent to an important part of my ongoing education. It’s important to know what’s out there, and bad music reminds me why I like the music I like. What’s more, you never know when something might surprise you. Sadly, I’m rarely surprised, other than by how derivative everything is. It’s been this way for almost a decade now: the only thing that’s changed is what’s being recycled.

Of course, endless recycling is broadly agreed as being emblematic of the postmodern age. I can more than appreciate that. We’ve come so far that it’s increasingly difficult, if it’s even possible, to be even remotely original. Perhaps as a species we are running low on imagination, but it does seem to be the case that it’s all been done before, and if it hasn’t been done, there’s probably a very good reason for it. I’m sure that it is possible to make music by scraping pieces or toast and bursting bubble-wrap, but who’s going to listen to it? There is a wealth of fringe and experimental music out there, and it has its niche audience, but blistering white noise and atonal drones are never going to be a major mainstream success, at least not on this planet.

Emulation of the canonical greats is entirely unsurprising: ripping off The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, David Bowie… these artists are heroes to many and are household names on a global scale. Similarly, and only a short step down the ladder of  classics are bands like Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Faces and so on. The only trouble with drawing influence some ‘classic’ acts like this is that no-one is ever going to recreate their success or their quality.

But for every landmark act of any era, there are countless lesser acts whose sounds epitomise the period. Fashion isn’t simply about clothes, after all. Every era contains a number of styles, of course: the sixties may have had Merseybeat, soul and doo-wop, but also saw the a proliferation of acoustic folk, the heyday of rhythm and blues – a world apart from today’s manufactured superslick r’n'b – and mod and the emergence of garage. If the seventies are renowned for soul and disco, they are equally the decade of prog and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, punk and also New Wave.

While the eighties was the decade in which new wave, goth and (hair)rock flourished, it has become synonymous with manufactured pop and synth pop, and while ‘cheesy’ chart pop immediately became the theme for ‘retro’ discos, within the synth-pop category, some bands are considered infinitely cooler than others.

We’ve had the sixties revival, the seventies revival and the eighties revival several times over. Punk never really went away, of course, but has been repopularised (and to an extent, commercialised) by the likes of Green Day and Blink 182; we’ve had the New Nave of New Wave, and garage rock has had a renaissance that essentially began with The Strokes and continues a decade on.  

It’s perhaps hard to define exactly why the eighties, of all decades, remain such a constant and endless source of fascination. Having revived and resuscitated and flogged the reanimated corpse of electro by endlessly recreated the sounds of the ‘cooler’ bands to name-check, the likes of New Order, and the ‘classic’ slick pop of Duran Duran (only without the ill-judged fashion), bands are looking to less obvious sources for inspiration. Consequently, we are now starting to hear bands that sound like Mr Mister, Howard Jones, A Flock of Seagulls and the myriad ‘forgotten’ acts (many of whom have been consigned to the dustbin of history for a very reason, although a few perhaps do deserve some belated recognition having long been eclipsed by Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, etc., etc.). What are we witnessing here? The beginning of the MOR and AOR revival, perhaps?

Terry Eagleton writes of postmodern fiction that it “draws attention to its own ‘intertextual’ nature, its parodic recyclings of other works which are themselves no more than such recyclings.” The same could easily be said of contemporary music. the only difference is that so much of the recycling is done without any sense of parody, irony or humour. The question is, as revivals occur with ever greater rapidity and the vaults dredged ever deeper, how long can we continue before all ideas are spent, recycled and completely exhausted? The music industry may well be all but dead, but what about popular music itself? Is this the end of music?

I don’t for a second believe that we will run out of music and suddenly there will be no more. But when was the last time you heard something truly new and innovative (that was listenable)? Even hip-hop, when it exploded was no entirely new, not least of all because it relied on using the beats from existing records as backing. So maybe this really is it. After millennia of tribal music, followed by centuries of classical music, from the advent of rock ‘n’ roll an the birth of popular music, it’s taken just over half a century of accelerated living to burn up everything. Yes, I’ve seen the future, and listened to it every day of my life. Where popular music is concerned, the future is already in the past.

If you’re loving my work, there’s more of the same (only different) at Christophernosnibor.co.uk.