| 90s also had a massive, massive grunge movement - and a lot of that was great.
Have you heard Big Black? 3 guys on guitars / bass and a drum machine chugging out rock beats. And it rules! It's just done in the right way, you know? Anything can work, depending on who's at the controls.
All sorts of music survive, I'd say usually the absolute cream of the crop is hard to define anyway. People who say that funk will always survive, for example, most probably have a particular affinity with a record or band from their past who perhaps helped define or redefine "funk". Saying that though, how many rubbish bands will there be who fall under the same description? Lots.
"Pop" will always be there, but in what sense? On one hand you could refer to pop as bland, manufactured crap designed to bring in the bucks. You could also define it based on the merits of the writing of a short, snappy and structured song. One negative, one positive.
Take R&B as another example. I'm not exactly an old man, but even I remember when R&B referred to some old dude who sang about the times of prohibition and gave his guitar a woman's name. Now R&B refers to a bunch of talentless idiots talking aggressively and way too fast about what they've got round their neck, or how many "hos" they have in their "*****mobile" or whatever. That's just my take on it though.
It reminds me of the Irish comedian Dylan Moran who was doing a piece about music and the origins of certain styles. He observed that a lot of original blues artists (we're talking proper Delta blues here) would basically sing about what they didn't have - be it money, food, love, rights..... Now musicans that claim to be making music founded on those origins are screaming about how much bling they have and how much firepower they're carrying. I don;t know, maybe it's a success story? Doesn't seem to add up though.
Anyway, my point is that music is true, and that's about as far as you can take it. There will be a convincing arguement for any style being valid and the same style being invalid. So when it reaches that point you have to start getting more detailed.  |