Won't let me include links in anon asks, but think you'd be interested in the review essay "Out With the New" about Simon Reynold's book Retromania. Relevant to your recent musings about innovation in pop music.
In an interview with The A.V. Club, Reynolds commented: “You can date the beginning of the non-appearance of [new musical] movements almost precisely to when the internet becomes a major force in music culture. As soon as that really starts to take hold as being the major means through which fans talk to each other and everything else that came with the internet, it’s almost from that point onwards that there’ve been no movements on the scale of hip-hop and rave.” Lanier offers more of a theory for this connection. The problem as he conceives it is a combination of technological “lock-in” (MIDI, a tool invented in the Eighties to represent musical notes in software, is now an almost universal and practically unavoidable component of digital music technology—the trouble being that this confines digitized music to a certain range of pre-established possibilities) and more generally the fact that digital aesthetic technology is predisposed to fragmentation and copying, meaning that as digitization has spread so too has derivative, “second-order” culture.
The import of post-punk (and later rave) for Reynolds is that it turned pop modernism into more than just a theory or an aesthetic preference. There it described a bona fide ethos for living, one which survived and prospered outside the ghettos of the art world. One almost has to think that the commitment these scenes inspired bore a direct relation to their sense of being historically unique, which raises an interesting question about the relationship between the vitality of an artistic movement and its sense of time. Modernist art as Reynolds sketches it—centered on the principle of answering and “surpassing” old culture—depends on the concept of historical continuity: a series of distinct artistic phases, each forming in reaction to their predecessors and, in turn, inspiring their own fresh opposition. This sort of modernism doesn’t hang together without the idea of temporal succession, not only because it depicts a necessary antagonism between old art and new, but because it’s premised on the idea of a deficient present that needs to be broken with in favor of tomorrow. Again, the dominant metaphor is of forward-motion: rushing ahead into the unknown, the New.
My generation can be said to straddle two eras: still in touch with the idea of historical succession in and through music, we arrived at maturity just as the digital revolution took hold and that sense of linearity and temporal definition started to dissolve. “Atemporal” is how Reynolds characterizes the contemporary pop environment—a zone at once engulfed by the debris of the past and yet eerily timeless. “If you are under the age of 25,” he writes, “and have grown up with a relationship to music based around total access and the erosion of a sense of sounds belonging to a historical sequence, thinking about music in terms of development through time becomes alien and unrecoverable.”[3] The term Reynolds coins for the feel of the last decade in pop is “hyper-stasis,” meant to capture the sensation of velocity within closed loops, motion without travel; as if culture now formed an enormous, barely mappable totality within which all possibilities were already contained. For artists, history becomes more than just a burden; it becomes the complete enclosure within which their activity takes place, too huge to escape—perhaps too huge to even recognize as an enclosure. In all of this, the loss of contrast is a recurring motif: either temporally (now/then) or politically (us/them). It is even detectable in the redundancy of certain terms of art redolent of physical journeying (the idea of an avant-garde or of artistic “movements”—concepts made hollow if, creatively, there’s nowhere to go).
And yet I’ve had a feeling for several years now—the best way I can describe it is as a vague sense of cultural weightlessness, the impression that while there’s an overwhelming amount of high-quality art out there to enjoy, there’s also something terribly insubstantial about it, taken in sum. Or if not insubstantial exactly, then contained, settled, offering a type of pleasure that seems to be always and already conscious of its own limits. Pop is only a single case of this, but it’s an exemplary one. It’s as though some trick of perspective were at work: close up, the form is teeming and rich and apparently endlessly interesting, whereas as a whole it feels inconsequential, indistinct and strangely dull—a field of creativity disconnected from history, confused about what it can or ought to aspire to.
So – I know little about popular music. But I suspect that the phenomenon being described here is just one manifestation of a thing that we’ve started seeing in (almost) every creative medium. Prose, comics, cinema, video games, you name it.
And the change isn’t really in the art. Mostly. To some extent it’s in the creators, since they’re people who are paying attention, they can’t help but notice the way that the structure of the world has changed. But mostly it’s in us, in We the People, the viewers and the readers. Mostly the paradigm shift is a shift in what art can mean to its audience.
If you want an illustration of artistic success at its pinnacle, you’re not going to do better than William Shakespeare. Shakespeare really did redefine human existence, for at least a large swathe of humanity. His words and metaphors and plots have had lasting impact on the ways that we think about fundamental aspects of our lives (love, ambition, indecision, life stages, etc.). If you’re a writer, Being Shakespeare is pretty much the biggest dream that you can meaningfully dream.
And he deserved to have that kind of impact, his work really is that good. (Much of it, anyway.)
It didn’t take root by magic. It worked because society was structured in such a way that his work could catch on and spread fast, could stick, could become part of a canon. At some point the process became self-perpetuating. We know that Hamlet is great because it was taught to us by our English teachers because they know that it’s great because they were taught etc. – and because we’re constantly seeing Hamlet quotes and allusions in all sorts of places, so it’s super-resonant and feels like a fundamental part of the cosmos, and that works because a critical mass of people know that Hamlet is great because…
It takes a lot of luck, for that kind of thing to work. Shakespeare is great, but there are plenty of writers just as great whose names you’ve never heard. Becoming a God of Art, and genuinely changing the world, has always been the longest of long shots no matter how much talent you have.
But at least it was something that could happen. It was a dreamable dream.
The last books to have made it into anything resembling a real cultural canon, I’d posit, were the Harry Potter books. Which, notably, were kids’ books that came out right before Universal Internet Penetration spread even to the children.
We all know how big the world is, now. We all know how many alternatives there are. We all know how easy it is to find exactly the thing you want, and consume that thing forever, and burrow into your little sub-sub-subculture. We all know how little anyone needs the mainstream.
We all know what success looks like –
– it looks like a few thousand people, maybe a few hundred thousand or even a few million if you’re really viral, paying attention to your stuff and donating to your Patreon and buying your merch. They’ll pay your bills and fawn over you and make you feel like a rock star, at least until they get bored and find something else to love, because there will be something else, the cultural churn is endless and the fires of the content forges burn all through the night.
– or maybe you’re one of those rare fortunate souls who gets sucked up by the Central Pillars of Media, and then millions upon millions of people pay attention to your stuff, and your personal life becomes the stuff of tabloid legend. And you make a lot of bank and maybe you have a breakdown and you definitely don’t last, either you fall or you just fade, because the Central Pillars of Media are better at content churn than anyone and they know all too well that they can’t let the global audience get bored.
You don’t become Shakespeare.
How could you? How would that work? Where is the audience that is going to keep paying attention to you, and pass you on to its kids and its English students, and not move on to something shinier? What force is going to make you universal, is going to make every reference to you resonant, when most of the world has scurried away down subcultural badger-tunnels and doesn’t even know anything about you?
To some extent it was always like this, but we could pretend it wasn’t, because only elite culture got any spotlight. Now everyone can make his own spotlight, and we see them all, and we are blinded. And to some extent it is genuinely new, because we don’t have real gatekeepers anymore, which is good for finding a niche audience but also means that you can’t get a force multiplier from winning the gatekeepers’ favor.
And so, as you say, we have lots of great art in every flavor. And, as you also say, it doesn’t feel like it’s building up to anything magic. Your masterpiece is not going to change the world, even if it succeeds. It’s going to make a small crowd of people pretty happy, along with a million other things that are having exactly the same kind of effect, and then it’s going to become obsolete. That is the good ending.
Knowing that, as a creator or a consumer, does rather take some of the spice out of things.