A good chunk of that is going to be because the 90’s was around the time when digital tools became accessible, good, industry wide things, and we haven’t had a kind of big musical innovation since that point, as far as the technology itself goes. That transition probably happened more noticeably in the 2000’s, but you could tell it was happening over the course of the 90’s for sure. The music industry has also not changed that much, we’re still very much living in that reagan kind of neoliberal huge music label era, but that’s kind of been around forever, so I kind of doubt that’s been a major change from the 60’s up to now. You could maybe say that streaming and the internet has changed music, and it certainly has, because now there are no gatekeepers, everyone listens to everything, and lots of artists put out like, a 10 minute single that changes styles six times so it might be propagated better online, instead of like a 90 minute experimental album. But then, there are more room for both of them, because people are more easily able to find what they want, and the latter was never gonna be mainstream anyways.
If I had to point out a larger genre shift, there has definitely been a large mainstreaming of rap and this kind of “pop country” more recently. You had those in the 90’s, kind of infamously, but hootie and the blowfish does not really sound like modern country through some cultural progression that I don’t really understand because I’m not brushed up on it. NWA and Tupac do not sound the same as modern rap, which has been getting a lot more of a “soft” kind of vibe, which I’d probably attribute to the influence of like, kanye, and maybe some lo-fi stuff like nujabes, and maybe just a mainstreaming of the genre at large. The subject matter has shifted, the tone has shifted, and the music itself has changed. Those genres would not sound the same, relative to their 90’s counterparts.
The biggest thing I can think of that probably makes 60’s and 70’s music sound out of place next to 90’s music is probably how hair metal got killed by grunge, which I couldn’t really attribute to any one reason in particular. There’s a pretty clear line between your rock acts, which have been going forever, and your later metal acts, and that line still exists with grunge, but grunge marks a kind of tonal shift. You’d also have to ignore the whole of disco and club music, that motown shit from the 70’s and 80’s, which died out pretty hard, but most everyone does that anyways, so who cares. I don’t know if I’ve heard many 70’s or 80’s stations that actually play disco, certainly, not in proportion to how popular it was, usually they just play like. Stevie wonder, from what I’ve heard, shit like that. Or MJ. The thing you could probably derive from disco, from the 70’s and 80’s into the 90’s, would probably be like, drum and bass, and eurobeat, stuff like that, and then you’d get stuff like daft punk later on which has a pretty clear connection to disco generally.
I dunno, this is all to say, shit has substantially changed in almost every mainstream genre I can think of in the last like, 60 years, from the 60’s. Some stuff has remained pretty similar, and some stuff has had an almost cyclical nature, but that’s just kind of the nature of music, I think.
That’s an interesting point about the accessibility of digital tools. Without a completely new way to craft a sound nothing could sound all that different.
Although I do like “real” country music (sorry about the gatekeeping) “pop country”, Nashville pop, or whatever you want to call it, is the one genre of music I dislike the whole of. I guess it’s different from other country but it’s similar enough to generic pop I wouldn’t consider it new.
I do agree about rap/hip-hop though. The artists I listen to now are very different than what I listened to in the 90s and there is a much wider variety of style. I wonder how much of that is due to how easy it is to discover new artists now. Back in the 90s learning about underground rap artists, or underground anything, wasn’t easy.
So strange that everyone looks back at hip-hop in the 90s and 90% of the time it’s about stuff like Tupac and NWA, while another parallel current with bands such as De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and Arrested Development gets overlooked.
Those bands were extraordinary, like Hip Hop in a tradition of Stevie Wonder, and kept putting out excellent albums that sound just as fresh today and are just as influential as anything from that era, but mid-decade the music industry swept them aside swiftly and unceremoniously, to make way for West Coast and Gangsta Rap.
I didn’t mean to suggest 90s rap was one-dimensional but it does seem like there is more variety now. But I wasn’t in an environment where I could buy local/touring hip hop tapes out of the trunk of a car, where I was that sort of thing was mostly punk and metal, so I never experienced all there was to offer. Maybe what I perceive as an increase is just due to streaming services making discovery so much easier.
Oh, I didn’t mean you, sorry if that’s the impression I gave, I was just pondering on things the way I’m remembering them.
Now that you mention “tapes out of a car”, before the internet there was another way that music spread in those days, for those of us who lived in smaller cities. Somebody would go to the cool city and take along his portable stereo, record tapes of the cool radio station, then back in town those tapes would circulate and get copied like bootlegs.
From LA in the 80s, it was KROQ with Punk, Post-Punk (The Stranglers, Joy Division) and Technopop (Depeche Mode, Human League, etc.).
In the 90s it was MARS FM with Techno and House.
I can only imagine the Hip-Hop that was being played in low-power radio stations in places like NYC or Philly.
A friend used to go to San Francisco every summer, brought back a bunch of tapes from the LIVE 105 graveyard shift, all carefully catalogued with dates, DJs and playlists. It was like KROQ but more subtle and varied, listening to those tapes felt exotic and meaningful.
One time he brought back a tape of KFJC, one where I first heard things like Liquid Liquid and Pharoah Sanders; that one felt like my mind got a firmware upgrade. Extraordinary.
Since the internet and starting with Real Player, now the entire world is at our fingertips (and ears), and I’m glad about this, but I will forever be grateful for those tapes from back when we weren’t directly plugged into “the action”.
A good chunk of that is going to be because the 90’s was around the time when digital tools became accessible, good, industry wide things, and we haven’t had a kind of big musical innovation since that point, as far as the technology itself goes. That transition probably happened more noticeably in the 2000’s, but you could tell it was happening over the course of the 90’s for sure. The music industry has also not changed that much, we’re still very much living in that reagan kind of neoliberal huge music label era, but that’s kind of been around forever, so I kind of doubt that’s been a major change from the 60’s up to now. You could maybe say that streaming and the internet has changed music, and it certainly has, because now there are no gatekeepers, everyone listens to everything, and lots of artists put out like, a 10 minute single that changes styles six times so it might be propagated better online, instead of like a 90 minute experimental album. But then, there are more room for both of them, because people are more easily able to find what they want, and the latter was never gonna be mainstream anyways.
If I had to point out a larger genre shift, there has definitely been a large mainstreaming of rap and this kind of “pop country” more recently. You had those in the 90’s, kind of infamously, but hootie and the blowfish does not really sound like modern country through some cultural progression that I don’t really understand because I’m not brushed up on it. NWA and Tupac do not sound the same as modern rap, which has been getting a lot more of a “soft” kind of vibe, which I’d probably attribute to the influence of like, kanye, and maybe some lo-fi stuff like nujabes, and maybe just a mainstreaming of the genre at large. The subject matter has shifted, the tone has shifted, and the music itself has changed. Those genres would not sound the same, relative to their 90’s counterparts.
The biggest thing I can think of that probably makes 60’s and 70’s music sound out of place next to 90’s music is probably how hair metal got killed by grunge, which I couldn’t really attribute to any one reason in particular. There’s a pretty clear line between your rock acts, which have been going forever, and your later metal acts, and that line still exists with grunge, but grunge marks a kind of tonal shift. You’d also have to ignore the whole of disco and club music, that motown shit from the 70’s and 80’s, which died out pretty hard, but most everyone does that anyways, so who cares. I don’t know if I’ve heard many 70’s or 80’s stations that actually play disco, certainly, not in proportion to how popular it was, usually they just play like. Stevie wonder, from what I’ve heard, shit like that. Or MJ. The thing you could probably derive from disco, from the 70’s and 80’s into the 90’s, would probably be like, drum and bass, and eurobeat, stuff like that, and then you’d get stuff like daft punk later on which has a pretty clear connection to disco generally.
I dunno, this is all to say, shit has substantially changed in almost every mainstream genre I can think of in the last like, 60 years, from the 60’s. Some stuff has remained pretty similar, and some stuff has had an almost cyclical nature, but that’s just kind of the nature of music, I think.
That’s an interesting point about the accessibility of digital tools. Without a completely new way to craft a sound nothing could sound all that different.
Although I do like “real” country music (sorry about the gatekeeping) “pop country”, Nashville pop, or whatever you want to call it, is the one genre of music I dislike the whole of. I guess it’s different from other country but it’s similar enough to generic pop I wouldn’t consider it new.
I do agree about rap/hip-hop though. The artists I listen to now are very different than what I listened to in the 90s and there is a much wider variety of style. I wonder how much of that is due to how easy it is to discover new artists now. Back in the 90s learning about underground rap artists, or underground anything, wasn’t easy.
So strange that everyone looks back at hip-hop in the 90s and 90% of the time it’s about stuff like Tupac and NWA, while another parallel current with bands such as De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and Arrested Development gets overlooked.
Those bands were extraordinary, like Hip Hop in a tradition of Stevie Wonder, and kept putting out excellent albums that sound just as fresh today and are just as influential as anything from that era, but mid-decade the music industry swept them aside swiftly and unceremoniously, to make way for West Coast and Gangsta Rap.
I didn’t mean to suggest 90s rap was one-dimensional but it does seem like there is more variety now. But I wasn’t in an environment where I could buy local/touring hip hop tapes out of the trunk of a car, where I was that sort of thing was mostly punk and metal, so I never experienced all there was to offer. Maybe what I perceive as an increase is just due to streaming services making discovery so much easier.
Oh, I didn’t mean you, sorry if that’s the impression I gave, I was just pondering on things the way I’m remembering them.
Now that you mention “tapes out of a car”, before the internet there was another way that music spread in those days, for those of us who lived in smaller cities. Somebody would go to the cool city and take along his portable stereo, record tapes of the cool radio station, then back in town those tapes would circulate and get copied like bootlegs.
From LA in the 80s, it was KROQ with Punk, Post-Punk (The Stranglers, Joy Division) and Technopop (Depeche Mode, Human League, etc.).
In the 90s it was MARS FM with Techno and House.
I can only imagine the Hip-Hop that was being played in low-power radio stations in places like NYC or Philly.
A friend used to go to San Francisco every summer, brought back a bunch of tapes from the LIVE 105 graveyard shift, all carefully catalogued with dates, DJs and playlists. It was like KROQ but more subtle and varied, listening to those tapes felt exotic and meaningful.
One time he brought back a tape of KFJC, one where I first heard things like Liquid Liquid and Pharoah Sanders; that one felt like my mind got a firmware upgrade. Extraordinary.
Since the internet and starting with Real Player, now the entire world is at our fingertips (and ears), and I’m glad about this, but I will forever be grateful for those tapes from back when we weren’t directly plugged into “the action”.