yep... and thats the main charge i levy against S/A/W , who peddled manufactured artists as 'acceptable' . for some reason and over time, it stuck. corporations saw it as a great way of increasing profits with little investment.

those of us who thought S/A/W wouldnt get away with it, have been proven sadly wrong.

A lot of the stuff of Gerry Marsden's era was "samey." That's because a lot of pop songs from that and successive eras are written around four chords.
Like Ab, Cm, Db, Eb or variations on that..

As i've mentioned before, those songs where the top line was written first and the chords written around those notes, are the only ones that don't.

Thank you, thatsa really interesting post. I would have loved to be around for music in the 70s. So many amazing new genres.

Thanks for that. I personally love State of Independence. Donna was pure class.

Bit of a depressing thougt that. Trip Hop was the last time a new movement came along and interested me.

They probably do still use the same things we did - music and fashion but I'm suggesting that the prevailing culture is designer goods and perhaps the music is this electropop and R&B stuff in the charts. Sure it's not so easy to be seen as a SUBCULTURE as with some genres before, it appears more concerned with haute couture and bling... like capitalism has won out the minds of the youth. Maybe the kids don't crave rebellion, they are enticed by sexualisation and materialism?

I guess on eof the perceived differences to before is that, arguably, many parents may now be listening to more revolutionary / hipper / more credible artists that their offspring.


That is generalising and we'll do much of that on threads like this one. While it's often the case there will always be examples that contradict as well.


Are the parents listening to top 40 singles artists though? I suspect this might not be the case. There was always stuff in the charts that your granny liked and some of it was truly naff. Now the parents aren't listening to the equivalent of The Dooleys or Brotherhood of Man - it's not so bad now, surely? (Except for the housewives who like Westlife and Michael Bublé!) When I watched the Top 40 countdown as a kid it was usually 10% 'great', 10% 'meh' and 80% 'kill it with fire!'.


It's a hard thing to discern: where pop music as a genre in itself stops as most of it falls into other genres as well. I don't even know which artists would constitute "twee non specific pop" now. Maybe people are too self-conscious to even be that now... or to accept it. Who in the charts is not trying to project an aura of cool now? I'm wondering if, beyond a few novelty records, twee un-self-conscious pop died with the late 70s / early 80s new wave boom. I can't think of many pop people not trying to be cool (or was it failing miserably despite trying ) since Bucks Fizz and Black Lace.

Maybe this Hip Hop/R&B with its bling style is the current generation defining pop fashion. It seems that a lot of the mainstream R&B acts and producers have been fusing their sound with the contemporary Electropop/Dance and this is the current mainstream. The black artists have been doing this and many of the up and coming white pop artists are adopting this style too. I guess this is the contemporary 'edgy' but personally I don't see it as a subculture - like Punk or Rock 'n' Roll: it mostly sells sex and promotes materialism, in line with so much else in society.

In the 50s popular music (Rock 'n' Roll) has strong origins in Jump Blues and R&B. In the 60s to 80s British Pop became a whiter thing for the most part. In the 90s post- and during the Dance era the balance maybe shifted a bit more towards black music again and now black music's influence and associated style seems to be what is dominating again.

I thought I should look back a the original post>>>



What's currently popular still speaks to the youth of the day. Most of us older people might not like the music (but are we supposed to?) and might see the current situation as lame but it's very easy to consider only say the last five or ten years to several past decades of musical activity when making these kind of comparisons. Some of the past popular music styles may have sunk into people's consciousness more than others because of an attention-grabbing way the fans dressed which would have stood out from the norm but at other times youth will have dressed more conventionally and not been so instantly identifiable.

There have aways been parents with discerning musical taste; not everyone was a old square. Each generation of future parents grew in a different environment with a different soundtrack. Usually kids are by default, dismissive and scathing regarding their parents' musical choices but this is really just an expression of their immaturity. The parents aren't necessarily listening to bad music at all.

Something completely inaccurate in the post is the notion that old acts were gone. There have always been 'old acts' making comebacks. If we want to fit all these musical originators into the 18-25 age range that gives a maximum of seven years to be relevant. Acts don't just go away. Many do, many don't and those who don't can stick around for a long time. As do their fans.

Hmm - re punk... Glenn Matlock admitted to swiping the idea for the bassline to Pretty Vacant from ABBA's SOS... and they in turn were cued to melodic and folk stuff - AND Phil Spector...

MArk King picked up the baton from Larry Graham and early funk drummers...

God - I miss the musicianship of Level 42.. and other acts of that calibre...

yep of course its generalising, and id suggest its also accurate.

there are alot of artists now who have both adult and youth appeal back in the past it was fairly well defined, but not so much now. the x factor artists too have an adult following, plus acts like 'king of leon'.

god i hope not for their sake..... its all so wet, weak, bland, uninspired... wheres the balls? wheres the creativity and identity?

Didn't we at the time of TV's Dawson's Creek, go through an era of, "little girls, with little voices, singing little songs?"

Oh come on, Sheeran, Ezra, Sam Smith et al are the epitome of boring and bland!

i have no idea what youre on about! not having any knowlege of dawsons creek, except it was another aussie soap!

Well, I don't expect everyone to know everything.

No, it was an American teenage soap. There were some CDs issued of the music used in the episodes.

Think of stuff by the Corrs. That's very similar.

I think the internet has completely changed music and most other aspects of popular culture. In turn, the traditional outlets, radio and television included, have had to alter their approaches accordingly. Someone mentioned the limited amount of artists we see on mainstream television these days. That's true, but there are now so many ways to listen to music and see bands perform that we're no longer reliant on the likes of Graham Norton's show to book a decent band we like.

Whilst it may have affected record sales, the internet has also made it so much easier for bands to put their music out into the public domain and, if they're picked up by a popular blog or webzine, they can become popular in ways they never would have been able to before the internet. The live music scene is thriving because of this, i'm lucky enough to have been to numerous amazing gigs in the past year. None of these bands would be known by your average guy in the street but they can sell out decent sized venues.

Someone else mentioned that people's music tastes had narrowed. I'd argue quite the opposite has happened. As i recently noted in the vinyl thread, i think it's less common these days to find young music fans who are largely into just one style of music. It's now more likely you'll have someone who is into rap, folk, electro, and the artists they like are all connected on some deeper fundamental level (possibly they're all artists that are pushing the boundaries of their particular style).

The internet has also aided the resurrection of a lot of careers. Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs are good examples. Two wonderful folk singers from the 1960s/1970s who had disappeared from view until a group of like minded artists in the 2000s started mentioning them in interviews, their records were dug up and disseminated online, and now both those artists are back performing live and releasing music! I'm in my twenties but i'm just as happy to listen to artists in their fifties and have no problem with them playing headlining sets at festivals or gaining media attention. This does not prevent young artists creating innovative new music.

The sad thing about the impact of the net is that a shared experience that we might have had when we all sat down to watch TOTP, or when we all tuned into the same radio station, is now gone. The positive thing is it's now ultra simple for anyone anywhere to listen to anything that's ever been recorded at the press of the button, and to get in touch with like minded music fans no matter how far away they may live from you.

This board may not be typical, but it was completely dominated by contemporary pop until I started sticking some jazz stuff on as a change.

I mentioned before, that I think the horizons have always been narrow for most teenagers, in every era. You could actually make a case for TOTP taking some of the blame.
Teenagers and adults in their early twenties of every era, have been less willing to seek out alternate genres of music.

Some have always collected albums of a particular few artists.

I subscribe to a USA board which has a far more varied selection of popular artists of different eras. There'll be minimum of a thousand people on-line at any time and the front page can last for no more than ten minutes before it becomes page 2 at some times.

Then there's the jazz boards where the topics can be as diverse as it is possible to be.

Yeah, i think it's been said before that this board, with its focus on tv and celeb culture, does tend to largely attract people who want to talk about 'of the moment' chart acts. I think if you go to any dedicated music board you'll find a wider variety of tastes represented, certainly more so than you find here. I also suspect that the average age of users on here is slightly older than other boards i've posted on in the past, which may point to why some posters are a little bemused as to how things operate now.

As for the taste of teenagers, i'd partially agree with you, that age is a time when people often become really obsessive over a select few artists. However, i think the internet has widened even these people's tastes, and if someone becomes passionate about music at that age their taste is likely to diversify given how we experience music these days.

lol.. shows what i know!

ok... when did this happen?


on the subject of modern technology / internet ... id have thought it would make it much easier to launch a new fashion, youth movement, genre. 'we' did all that in some isolation and managed it very well.

im sure that if we had the internet 'back then' these movements would have not only spread quicker, but would have offered a larger range and made the more obscure/less commercial tracks, more popular making the charts richer then they already were.

I think what you're doing is taking particular aspects of the internet and applying them to how they might have been used in the past, without taking into consideration a range of other influences the net has had. Yes, it can certainly spread information at speed, but along with this relative ease of dissemination comes a real lack of uniformity.

I think for something to become a movement it needs widespread participation, and that's far less likely (although certainly not impossible) when you have an infinite amount of channels/stations/websites. Society is more culturally fractured now, in terms of the art we all consume, meaning it's less likely for one band or one style to dominate. Don't get me wrong, bands can still be popular, but it's rare you get an act these days that is making inventive music AND is popular on any wider level.*

I think another aspect to take into consideration is, as people have already said, popular music isn't the be all and end all these days. It strikes me that, at a particular point in history, it offered people a way to express themselves i.e aligning oneself with an artist (dressing like them, defining oneself as a fan of x or y) allowed an individual to express something about who they were. In this age, when everyone has a soapbox (social media, youtube etc.) it's far easier to enter into cultural debate (whether anyone is really listening is another matter!) and advertise what you're about.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in this debate, there are also a range of other considerations regarding what the net is doing to our attention spans. I find it quite fascinating.

*Just a note specifically on music itself: I think it's highly challenging to make original pop music, largely because to be popular it commonly requires some conformity to pop norms (length of track, melodic hooks) that have been explored constantly for over half a century. However, there is original music being made that is relatively popular (often in genres such as hip hop that are young compared to other popular genres) and, as i said before, there are a whole range of artists, young and older, making great music. They're not necessarily household names but they can still sell out decent sized venues and lie behind the boost in vinyl sales. You do have to search it out now, but if you like music you'll not see that as a chore. It's great being able to listen to what you want when you want rather than relying on television and radio entities to decide who you will hear and when you will hear it

The Internet/web is a complex system which doesn't have a central controlling influence and so it is very hard to predict all the effects it can have or how it will work. So even though theoretically artists should have a ready made distribution system for their music. It's unpredictable how popular they might become.


Yes, people have access to social media which they didn't have before. There are social movements like the Occupy Movement post 2008, the Anonymous group, Gamers (think Gamergate). Maybe in the past these movements would have had a greater visibility in popular music?


The live scene does seem more alive in recent years and this idea of having to search out new music is fine but those are consumer viewpoints. You need to look more at the motivation, incentives and reasons young people would get involved in making music.
Clearly one influence is wannabe culture which is evident through XFactor and The Voice type tv programmes.

What I find sad, is the perceived level of ability by the public demonstrated on programmes like "The Voice" and the "X-Factor."

"Any old tat" seems to get a rapturous reception, no doubt encouraged by unseen studio managers.

A common situation seems to be amongst young kids,
What do you want to be when you grow up?"
"Famous!"
You can see many of the contestants haven't put the work in, they're seduced by the enthusiasm for them of friends and family.

The inability to hold "long tones" when singing is often absent.

What was it Pete Townsend said?" I shut myself in my bedroom until I could really play."

"Singing whilst standing in front of a bedroom mirror with a hairbrush in their hand," is as much of the musical training, many seem to have had.

It’s certainly very unpredictable, though i suppose you could say the same with music promoted via any kind of medium. Some artists will take off and others will not, often for inexplicable reasons.

It's been the case in the past that bands that have ‘organic’ roots in music websites/zines, tend to graduate on to a more traditional mainstream arena if they become popular; appearing on television, at awards ceremonies and shifting a decent amount of physical units. I’m thinking about an act like Arcade Fire who owe their early success to particular internet webzines but now are very much an arena touring behemoth.


I think the consumer aspect is important though, as it opens up the channels through which young musicians can then promote their music and make a living. Without that younger people will be put off trying to make it seriously as a musician.

I see no real evidence that the creative impulse of young artists has slowed down over the years i’ve been listening to music. I just see changes in what’s going on in the mainstream, it’s now more than ever very celebrity based and predictable.

Whilst i’m at it i’d like to respond to something you said earlier in the thread which i thought was interesting. You mentioned that Kid A had not had much influence. I actually think it’s had a huge influence on young indie groups, but in a very strange way. I can think of a number of bands whose sound directly descends from Radiohead’s later stuff (Kid A onwards) but they've failed to fully grasp what made RH's work great. In short: I think a lot of the stuff that has been directly influenced by Radiohead is terrifically boring!

ROFL. Most of the trouble in the world is caused by "youth movements" and little comes of them. Just violence, arson, and dramatics.

The only one I can remember working was the civil rights revolution in the American South, and that only worked because the accident of the Kennedy assassination, allowed a titanic and long experienced politician from the Southwest, Lyndon Johnson to become president and ram through the civil rights law. Kennedy would never have been able to do it. He simply didn't know enough.

The dynamic for the civil rights emerged from the African American community and civil rights activists, people like Rosa Parks, Bayard Rustin, Dorothy Height etc etc. the Johnson legislation was just a culmination of that. Robert Kennedy was the thinker anyway.

Social change is a process that often has to be contended for..the right to own property, the right to vote, the right to minimal wages, gay rights, reproductive rights etc.. Often these are youth inspired movements but they are not owned by young people.

Yes, it has always been unpredictable as that is the nature of markets which are also complex systems. But the kind of pattern you describe used to happen but is it happening now?


I think Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Jamendo(?) etc work for consumers but not so well for artists. I would agree that the creative impulse has not lessened just transferred to different media to some degree. And I suspect that musicianship has diminished to some degree. Although I was long of the opinion that new technologies would actually enhance creativity.


I'm open to persuasion on that. The influence of the pre-Kid A Radiohead are clearer perhaps because they are more successful. I'll listen around more for the post Kid-A stuff.