What's so good about the 2000's?

[Janko]

Well, what was so good about 90's?!

I mean, only 80's and 60's have some sort of defined peculiar quality. Other decades are really not that peculiar...

What defined peculiar quality is that, by the way? Something that the 60's and 80's possess that the 70's, for instance don't... I confess that I can't see it.

60's - Hippies
80's - Yuppies

[japanesebaby]

Well, what was so good about 90's?!

I mean, only 80's and 60's have some sort of defined peculiar quality. Other decades are really not that peculiar...

What defined peculiar quality is that, by the way? Something that the 60's and 80's possess that the 70's, for instance don't... I confess that I can't see it.

60's - Hippies
80's - Yuppies

ok i sort of get your point but those groups are simply one phenomenon from those decades - yes certainly big movements but still just one thing. there's a lot more in there.
and if we are discussing the field of popular music as a whole, then hippies certainly don't define the whole 60's or yuppies the 80's. it's like saying that huey lewis & the news dominated the musical life of the 80s' and was what gave it its own peculiar quality... seriously.

ok, we can't name a group of people/movement from the 70's with a handy group name ending with "-ies", and 2000's and 2010's don't have a handy name like "sixties" - but:
sorry but i really don't know what you're trying to say with that?
because the names don't define the contents, it's the contents that create the name. names are linguistics, nothing more. and we can't say that 70's didn't have any peculiar musical quality just because of that(!) or that the 70's were not as defined era of its own or somehow stylistically more fragmented decade because of it.
:

[Janko]

sorry but i really don't know what you're trying to say with that? 

Hippies - liberal, anti war, anti-corporate, pro choice, antimaterialistic, idealistic, feminist, protestant, music that's free-floating-psychodelic-rebel...

Yuppies - conservative, corporate, competing, indifferent to wars and injustice, materialistic, down to earth, Genesis-Madonna-Huey Lewis and the News-new age-calm muzic...


70's were kinda in between, there were both progressive rock operas but there was also a punk rock, so...

90's with Reality Bites, grunge and rave culture - were pure undiluted hypocrisy and both intellectual and artistic ditch

[revolt]

Well, what was so good about 90's?!

I mean, only 80's and 60's have some sort of defined peculiar quality. Other decades are really not that peculiar...

What defined peculiar quality is that, by the way? Something that the 60's and 80's possess that the 70's, for instance don't... I confess that I can't see it.

60's - Hippies
80's - Yuppies

Well, hippies are just from about 1965-66 onwards, I believe. You have a similar case in the 70's: punks.

And 'yuppies' does simply define a life-style... Our conversation here was about THE MUSIC not about social issues. That is, I really would like to know what great music is there in the 2000's, social groups or phenomena like that don't interest me as much.

[revolt]

sorry but i really don't know what you're trying to say with that? 

Hippies - liberal, anti war, anti-corporate, pro choice, antimaterialistic, idealistic, feminist, protestant, music that's free-floating-psychodelic-rebel...

Yuppies - conservative, corporate, competing, indifferent to wars and injustice, materialistic, down to earth, Genesis-Madonna-Huey Lewis and the News-new age-calm muzic...


70's were kinda in between, there were both progressive rock operas but there was also a punk rock, so...

90's with Reality Bites, grunge and rave culture - were pure undiluted hypocrisy and both intellectual and artistic ditch

You are over-simplifying there. Those names you refer from the 80's are only a very small part of it, even on a commercial level. What about U2? The Cure? Depeche Mode? And so on...

"Rave culture" is only a small part of the whole electronic/dance thing. Perhaps if you took the time to really check the music out, you would be able to find that some of the most intelectually stimulating music ever was made in the 90's, in those particular fields.

Also, as far as music goes, you can just as well describe the 90's as the years of "world music".

[revolt]

Anyway, I'm still waiting for all of you to post here your recommendations as far as great 2000's music goes... I want names! 

What... No names, yet?

[Carnage Visor]

I mean, I could suggest some good 2000s bands, but my music taste is mostly deathrock/gothic rock. See, I like Phantom Limbs, Cinema Strange, Subtonix, because they sound like the music from the good old days.

But I don't know of any outstanding, mindblowing mainstream artists I(although I find myself rather enjoying the indie pop they play in the Ipod commercials over here in the US). I'm drawn to stuff that sounds retro or offbeat.

Other than indie bands, I don't really see anything good about 2000s music. It's mostly just dancehall reggae hip-hop and rap, with some whiney pop rock groups that are all image and lack musically.

[revolt]

I mean, I could suggest some good 2000s bands, but my music taste is mostly deathrock/gothic rock. See, I like Phantom Limbs, Cinema Strange, Subtonix, because they sound like the music from the good old days.

Aren't you a little too young for that kind of attitude? I mean, "because they sound like the music from the good old days" is certainly an acceptable argument but it also seems kind of strange coming from young people...

But I don't know of any outstanding, mindblowing mainstream artists I(although I find myself rather enjoying the indie pop they play in the Ipod commercials over here in the US). I'm drawn to stuff that sounds retro or offbeat.

Well, I wasn't necessarily asking for mainstream acts. My guess was mainly that possibly some interesting 2000's stuff could be lurking somewhere in more "alternative" or "indie" fields, so to speak. By the way, "offbeat" is quite alright by me (but "retro", no thanks).

[japanesebaby]

well, going back to the original question, i can try to answer the question from a personal point of view. why do i consider 2000's "better" (for the want of a better word) than the 90's for instance. because i suppose that's where the quesiotn was drawn from, discussing the 90's first in that other thread - anyway!

i've actually thought about this and found myself unable to present any comprehensive list of 2000's artists that would simply overblow the 90's 6-0, whichever way i look at it. i'm actually not surprised about that, it's actually very understandable: i probably said this someplace else already but i'd say it's quite impossible to really say this decade was "better" than that. unless you are really deliberately restricting your musical tastes to certain genre - which i'd personally find a silly thing to do anyway because good music does not have anything to do with gener anyway (and that's simply a fact, whatever the others might say, and therefore it's not under discussion  ). so i can't present a formidable list that would alone "prove me right" here. but let's try and let's pick just a few things under discussion first, because otherwise it'll be too much.
and sorry, i can't talk about the 2000's without talking about the 90's 8although this is not the 90's thread) - but for me, the one defines the other.



i really think the main reason why i do have a somewhat positive impression of the 2000's derives from how i perceive(d) the 90's:
the first few years of the 90's very perhaps some kind of peak of everything that was good in the latter half of the 80's. then came the mid-90's which apart from a few good things was rather barren and genuinely uninteresting. at this point i have to say that perhaps my impression is somewhat(?) heavily influenced by my own location. perhaps it was different elsewhere but all i can say is that around here the post-92 era was really bleak musically. nothing worthwhile seemed to happen. (and actually this is very clearly connected to the economical/political situation: in the early 90's my country was battling what has been called one of the worst ever economical disasters/depressions in the modern day europe. that meant a lot of things in the music industry seemed to be almost at a standstill. for instance, the concert life seemed to be almost non-existent, festivals going into bankruptcy and so on and so on. and ok you can say that "that's not the reason to hate the 90's!" and you'd be right. but still, it did affect everything very heavily. and it meant that if there was anything interesting at all during those times, it came from abroad. and what was being imported from abroad? oh, brit pop and all that nonsense. so...

(btw please remember that i am deliberately leaving out  these "offbeat" genres - and for instance all electronic music here. perhaps i'm focusing too much on describing the mainstream and the lack of interesting phenomena in the mainstream, but it's  a bit deliberate. perhaps what i'm trying to say here is that the 2000's are actually a lot better than for instance the 90's ever were, IF/WHEN we're observing the mainstream. that doesn't mean i'd have any doubts that the reputation of the 90's can be salvaged by looking into the less-mainstream acts. and actually i guess that's what defines the 90s: it was mostly a rather barren era, an era without any real potential "movements" - unless you abandon the mainstream altogether and go sideways. and actually that's  where we come to the real importance of those poor 90's: a lot of stuff that was underground-ish back then actually started to emerge back into spotlight/become more widely acknowledged in the 2000's. so i actually find the final years of the 90's to be the most important/interesting/fruitful era in the long time. a lot of things start really re-emerging then and stop being pushed to the marginal:

the so-called post rock scene: mogwai, explosions in the sky, 65dos, sigur rós

perhaps at least partially thanks to radiohead, even the UK starts getting over the idiotic "brit pop is all we (or anyone else) need!" phase. even in the UK bands with completely different attitude start to emerge: most notably bands like placebo or muse, for instance. at their best they are pretty hard to categorize (like muse is) and sometimes people even label them under some sort of "neo-prog" or something (although i don't know what that means :-P). these are actually bands that are hard to clump together since they are quite different from each other, but the thing they have in common is that they are a complete antithesis (imo) for everything that british rock/pop seemed to stand for just a bit earlier in the mid-90's.

"real" progressive rock re-emerges: porcupine tree, new reason revolution, etc. - and then a bit later prog rock starts a very fruitful "conversation" with metal bands (take bands like opeth etc.). that's a really interesting vein in the 2000's, i think!
besides you can listen to Yes again without having to explain it to everyone around you.

to mention a few.


with this i'm not saying things only matter if and when they are brought into mainstream. of course not. sometimes it's toatlly the opposite, a lot of times things stay better IF they stay out of mainstream. what i mean here is just that i do feel the musical atmosphere is more "healthier" if/when it is capable of accepting rather innovative musical phenomena in its mainstream - i don't think the atmosphere in the first half/mid-90's was ever really capable of that. at least not to the extent it has happened in the last years of the 90's/2000's.


(oops, a lot of words. hey sorry )

[japanesebaby]

oh, one more small thing, to root for the 2000's: i have found it delightful that some some really great artists have made some really great (surprise) comebacks in the 2000's. starting from kate bush etc.
surely comebacks alone wouldn't save any era, but adding this to the previous points i made i think it might say something about the times.

[japanesebaby]

Other than indie bands, I don't really see anything good about 2000s music. It's mostly just dancehall reggae hip-hop and rap, with some whiney pop rock groups that are all image and lack musically.

well i do agree that looking at places like MTV it's nothing but hip-hop/R&B shit-crap for sure. but why even pay attention to all that, to MTV etc.? MTV is not a music channel anymore, it hasn't been one for a long time. it's just a hip-hop/R&B lifestyle channel for people who don't want anything else than that. so the real music is elsewhere.
so 2000's are really a lot more than all that. you just have to look around with an open mind and see for yourself.
like i mentioned above, for instance the prog (whether neo or "non-neo" ) scene is very much alive today and it's certainly not lacking innovative and musicality. and not all good things has to be more or less similar to good old early 80's (besides, that would actually make it rather uninnovative, wouldn't it?).
like said, good music is never defined by genre alone.

[revolt]

oh, one more small thing, to root for the 2000's: i have found it delightful that some some really great artists have made some really great (surprise) comebacks in the 2000's. starting from kate bush etc.
surely comebacks alone wouldn't save any era, but adding this to the previous points i made i think it might say something about the times.

Well, the 90's are not inferior to the 2000's when it comes to great comebacks or rebirths of long-time artists that were starting to decline (or had been declining for a long time): Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, U2... Can you get more mainstream examples than this? I think not.

[revolt]

well, going back to the original question, i can try to answer the question from a personal point of view. why do i consider 2000's "better" (for the want of a better word) than the 90's for instance. because i suppose that's where the quesiotn was drawn from, discussing the 90's first in that other thread - anyway!

i've actually thought about this and found myself unable to present any comprehensive list of 2000's artists that would simply overblow the 90's 6-0, whichever way i look at it. i'm actually not surprised about that, it's actually very understandable: i probably said this someplace else already but i'd say it's quite impossible to really say this decade was "better" than that. unless you are really deliberately restricting your musical tastes to certain genre - which i'd personally find a silly thing to do anyway because good music does not have anything to do with gener anyway (and that's simply a fact, whatever the others might say, and therefore it's not under discussion  ). so i can't present a formidable list that would alone "prove me right" here. but let's try and let's pick just a few things under discussion first, because otherwise it'll be too much.
and sorry, i can't talk about the 2000's without talking about the 90's 8although this is not the 90's thread) - but for me, the one defines the other.



i really think the main reason why i do have a somewhat positive impression of the 2000's derives from how i perceive(d) the 90's:
the first few years of the 90's very perhaps some kind of peak of everything that was good in the latter half of the 80's. then came the mid-90's which apart from a few good things was rather barren and genuinely uninteresting. at this point i have to say that perhaps my impression is somewhat(?) heavily influenced by my own location. perhaps it was different elsewhere but all i can say is that around here the post-92 era was really bleak musically. nothing worthwhile seemed to happen. (and actually this is very clearly connected to the economical/political situation: in the early 90's my country was battling what has been called one of the worst ever economical disasters/depressions in the modern day europe. that meant a lot of things in the music industry seemed to be almost at a standstill. for instance, the concert life seemed to be almost non-existent, festivals going into bankruptcy and so on and so on. and ok you can say that "that's not the reason to hate the 90's!" and you'd be right. but still, it did affect everything very heavily. and it meant that if there was anything interesting at all during those times, it came from abroad. and what was being imported from abroad? oh, brit pop and all that nonsense. so...

(btw please remember that i am deliberately leaving out  these "offbeat" genres - and for instance all electronic music here. perhaps i'm focusing too much on describing the mainstream and the lack of interesting phenomena in the mainstream, but it's  a bit deliberate. perhaps what i'm trying to say here is that the 2000's are actually a lot better than for instance the 90's ever were, IF/WHEN we're observing the mainstream. that doesn't mean i'd have any doubts that the reputation of the 90's can be salvaged by looking into the less-mainstream acts. and actually i guess that's what defines the 90s: it was mostly a rather barren era, an era without any real potential "movements" - unless you abandon the mainstream altogether and go sideways. and actually that's  where we come to the real importance of those poor 90's: a lot of stuff that was underground-ish back then actually started to emerge back into spotlight/become more widely acknowledged in the 2000's. so i actually find the final years of the 90's to be the most important/interesting/fruitful era in the long time. a lot of things start really re-emerging then and stop being pushed to the marginal:

the so-called post rock scene: mogwai, explosions in the sky, 65dos, sigur rós

perhaps at least partially thanks to radiohead, even the UK starts getting over the idiotic "brit pop is all we (or anyone else) need!" phase. even in the UK bands with completely different attitude start to emerge: most notably bands like placebo or muse, for instance. at their best they are pretty hard to categorize (like muse is) and sometimes people even label them under some sort of "neo-prog" or something (although i don't know what that means :-P). these are actually bands that are hard to clump together since they are quite different from each other, but the thing they have in common is that they are a complete antithesis (imo) for everything that british rock/pop seemed to stand for just a bit earlier in the mid-90's.

"real" progressive rock re-emerges: porcupine tree, new reason revolution, etc. - and then a bit later prog rock starts a very fruitful "conversation" with metal bands (take bands like opeth etc.). that's a really interesting vein in the 2000's, i think!
besides you can listen to Yes again without having to explain it to everyone around you.

to mention a few.


with this i'm not saying things only matter if and when they are brought into mainstream. of course not. sometimes it's toatlly the opposite, a lot of times things stay better IF they stay out of mainstream. what i mean here is just that i do feel the musical atmosphere is more "healthier" if/when it is capable of accepting rather innovative musical phenomena in its mainstream - i don't think the atmosphere in the first half/mid-90's was ever really capable of that. at least not to the extent it has happened in the last years of the 90's/2000's.


(oops, a lot of words. hey sorry )

I'm in a bit of a hurry, so sorry if I do not quote specific senteces from your text...

Regarding post-rock, I don't think the 2000's brought anything new, or more well thought-of, or more inspired than the 90's... All major post-rock albums ('major' in an artistic sense) are from the 90's: the first album by Godspeed You Black Emperor, "Millions Now Living Will Never Die" by Tortoise, "Hex" by Bark Psychosis, "Surrender to the Night" by Trans Am, "Lifelike" by Ui, "The Amateur View" by To Rococo Rot... I'm sure I'm forgetting some here, but all these are albums from the 90's.

Actually, probably the only new post-rock-associated development in the 2000's was its incorporation in metal... I'm talking about the so-called "post-metal" bands like Isis, Cult of Luna and so on... But as far as artistic results go, this didn´t really last, because the best albums of this subgenre were all made in the early 2000's.


PS: I only know 2 Mogwai albums so I cannnot say I'm an expert as regards their music, but I believe their 2 best records are also from the (late) 90's, not from the 2000's.

PS2: From what I know of Explosions in the Sky, they are more or less just a copy of Godspeed and the Canadian Constellation label variety of post-rock... That doesn't make them any bad, of course, but it kind of renders them irrelevant as an argument for the 2000's-being-better-than-the-90's...

[revolt]

and sorry, i can't talk about the 2000's without talking about the 90's 8although this is not the 90's thread) - but for me, the one defines the other.

This actually should get the alarm bell ringing in your years...  Because if it is impossible to talk about the 2000's without mentioning the 90's, it means that the 2000's are derivative, that is, INFERIOR to the 90's. Because you certainly can talk about the 90's without mentioning the 80s, about the 80's without reference to the 70's, and so on...

the first few years of the 90's very perhaps some kind of peak of everything that was good in the latter half of the 80's. then came the mid-90's which apart from a few good things was rather barren and genuinely uninteresting.

i actually find the final years of the 90's to be the most important/interesting/fruitful era in the long time. a lot of things start really re-emerging then and stop being pushed to the marginal:

So: you think that the beginning of the 90s was great and the ending of the 90's was also great... The only problem there for you seems to be the middle of the decade! But, you see, it was precisely in 1984-1986 that POST-ROCK emerged as a true force in the music world. Not just one or two bands, but a whole array of them! Not to mention bands that, even though they should not be specifically labelled as post-rock, have some sort of connection with it and also helped the average quality and innovation-ability of 90s rock rise substantially: Soul Coughing, Morphine, Red Snapper, Laika...

the so-called post rock scene: mogwai, explosions in the sky, 65dos, sigur rós

I think I can spot one of your "problems" here: you only mention one particular subgenre of the post-rock "movement", the epic/atmospheric/goes-up-goes-down style...

But post-rock is actually much more than this!

You have the whole CHICAGO scene, which is actually a world in itself, and that for me represents the most exciting part of post-rock (too bad they probably were never able to produce a true masterpiece, but just an array of good/very good albums): Tortoise, Ui, Trans Am, Him, etc. Their influences range from jazz to dub to krautrock and what not.

You also have the GERMAN scene, which is generally more electronic and perhaps more cerebral, represented by the likes of To Rococo Rot and Kreidler (I confess that here "The Amateur View" is perhaps the only album that I find truly GOOD, because these guys can be really boring, sometimes).

And... I was going to swear there have been FOUR major scenes in post-rock but right now I can only recall three... Maybe it will all come to me later. 

[japanesebaby]

actually it just occurred to me that perhaps we are looking at the whole subject of "decades" a bit differently, from the very beginning of the conversation.
i think i've been (rather deliberately) trying to observe the sort of general atmosphere of the decade, the general impression i've gotten about it, about the musical environments and so on - and that means i'm probably talking a lot more about mainstream than you.

if i really start listing individual remarkable albums and put them on the time line simply according to the year they came out, then perhaps i wouldn't say the 90's were so dull. surely there were a lot of interesting things which were starting to emerge in the 90's, i very well admit that, but however fine they were, they were not strong enough to have much impact on the general atmosphere, and eventually to be able change the course of the mainstream. it took some time before they really started to have that much impact on the musical life around us (if they ever had any impact on it at all. i mean, not all wonderful things ever manage to really emerge and redeem everything that they'd certainly deserve). but sometimes things grow strong enough and end up really having positive impact on the general atmosphere. that's why i talked about post rock and prog/ neo prog, as examples of things which, let's say which presence in the mainstream today actually do make it all much more bearable.
one thing is for sure at all times. there will always be loads of crap in the mainstream. that will never change, never has, never will. so instead of staring at that constant load of garbage, piling up decade after decade, i think the thing to focus on is to try and see how much good ingredients there are in the mainstream - IF any. and in this respect i think the 2000's are much more "lucky" than the 90's.

for instance this is all why i am talking about post rock in 2000's context: surely it emerged in the 90's, but it was still a rather marginal thing that didn't yet have much impact outside its own scene. but look at the 2000's and you can see that actually those marginalized post-rock influences actually started to make it to mainstream too - and THAT's something good. because it means the mainstream was/is not completely dull today. the same with all those prog/neo prog influences: of course they existed "already" in the 90's but they were more or less totally marginalized then. so there was very little "hope" that they would have been able to refreshen the general musical atmosphere at that time. it took some time before they really emerged and by then we were already in the very last years of the 90's/already in the 2000's. and at least i find it all a very healthy thing for the musical atmosphere today, that there are artists/styles in the main stream today who certainly could not have been there ten years ago - just because ten years ago the overall climate was so utterly dull and almost against all kinds of innovative/progressive things. today all that is allowed again - and THAT's why i like the 200's more.

so perhaps we're simply looking at this from a different point of view?



(about all the various scenes of post-rock: when i mentioned some artists i didn't even intend to give any sort of comprehensive list. surely there is much much more. and to be honest i don't even know anything about the chicago scene so it's better that i don't try to appear like i could even talk about it. but the reason i just mentioned a few bands is because i just meant them as examples of some sort of influences which i think are valuable ingredients of the wider general musical climate of today.
this is also the reaosn why it's so difficult to talk about one decade without also talking about the one that was preceding it. because the musical atmosphere of any decade greatly depends on the one before it - that's where it takes it's "flavours" and colours, it's themes to develop, whether it'll be in good or bad.)