Groundhog Day politics (each day brings more shocking but equally numbing news of the insane and inane), global pandemic, wealth unfairness, general mankind trapped droidlike on a hamster wheel … surely, when it comes to the soundtrack, something has to pop.
The mid 70s had punk: shockfactor rejectionist music bursting briefly onto the scene without a cause or mission, but impudently setting a post Floyd and Zeppelin flag (their talent survived it). Probably punk’s greatest musical achievements were to be in its own rejection in its wake.
First several years later in the glory and sometime genius of 80’s synth and pop fusion. A soft romantic inventive reaction to the punk book-end on large rock, glam, disco and 60s psychedelia and folk.
The 80s were an unimaginable departure from what went before. Not least thanks to the beauty of hip hop and later trip hop. Punk, insofar as it is an antiestablishment motif, had a second attempt, a decade later in Jane’s Addiction, Grunge and Green Day in equal cool and uncool derivatives,
But we’ve gone all the way to 2020, and tensions abound. The 90s made their mark, the 2000s less so, unless Coldplay is as timeless as it is inoffensive. What abrupt musical shock is going to take us from the drab over engineered re-regurgitation of old, folky lofi, elektronic timid mishmash, legato electronic nonsense music … to a new unimaginable plane?
Please tell me there is a new exciting genre on the way, or at least another Punk blip we can get behind for a while to clear the decks for something new. Or is music basically all done? We’ve already done and heard it all? From here on it’s the same alphabet, resorted?
