Sometimes, when it comes to music, I worry about having recency bias - but I still think that's preferable to falling into the same trap as so many music fans seem to do at my age: get tangled up a nostalgia loop, start buying Mojo and Record Collector and grumble incessantly about how there's no interesting music being made anymore.
For that reason, this article by The Line Of Best Fit's Joe Muggs struck a chord. In it, he takes issue with the alarmingly widespread view that there haven't been any significant musical revolutions to match punk or acid house for years, that the internet has had a flattening and homogenising effect and that culture is stagnating.
Muggs' point is that seismic changes have indeed been taking place but that critics have been unable to recognise them as such - perhaps because those changes are much broader and more nebulous than merely the emergence of a new genre: "[R]eally these revolutions are manifestations of a bigger meta-revolution, which explains why it is still hard to pin down a 'sound of now'." Or perhaps the lack of recognition is because your average white male music writer is (wilfully?) ignorant of what's happening outside his bubble.
Muggs doesn't deny that streaming has had an enormous impact, but this, he suggests, has been predominantly positive in bringing much more variety into the mainstream and creating a truly global arena. Those who were largely still marginalised and on the periphery even a decade ago - women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ people - are now at the heart of everything, no longer "seen as ground-breakers or one-offs".
What's more, he claims, "artists can now not so much escape the constraints of genre but be a genre in themselves". I'm regularly struck by young acts that synthesise a breadth of genres into something novel, all because they've grown up with instant access to so much music and never felt the need to police themselves into staying in a single established genre.
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