I’m too tired to fully explicate this, but the idea in my head is something like this. The great era of popular art (movies and pop music [that is, anything from jazz to rock to rap – anything with a backbeat], mainly) that’s lasted for a century or so was the product of a few one-time technological innovations – the reliable recording of audio and images plus the ability to distribute those recordings en masse. Mechanically reproduced art, basically. As soon as these technologies became viable there was a great wave of cultural innovation. Genre after genre was created and explored by artist after artist.
Think of the way that rock music developed from a primitive (not in a bad sense) model in the 50′s, to something more fully fleshed out in the 60′s as artists figured out what rock was, to all sorts of weird and baroque experimentation in the 70′s. That’s crude, but you get the basic idea. In an incredibly short span of time artists were figuring out what rock music could be, what its limitations were. There have been spasms of creativity in rock music since, but it’s fair to say that rock has slowly been drying up as a source of innovation since the 70′s. Why? Well, like I said, artists figured out what rock music was. There was less scope for things that were both novel and good. It’s still possible to make great rock music, even albums that stand up with the original greats, but it’s harder to surprise. Not impossible, but harder and harder. And so the culture moves on. Just as importantly, Real Artists move on. The productive subcultures go away, one by one. Hence why people say that rock music is dead. It isn’t dead, but it is eternally senescent in much the same way that classical is. All rock is now made in reference to the past.
However, at some point it’s not just that individual genres are losing their potency, it’s that the whole grouping of genres enabled by this new mode of artistic production are losing their potency. Punk was an interesting challenge to an overblown status quo. Grunge was a less interesting challenge to an overblown status quo. The third time will be utterly predictable and boring. Rock and rap and electronica are all different, but the parallels are obvious and at some high level things start to blend together. It’s predictable. You can still make good movies, but it’s hard to make one that’s unpredictable. What was the last new movie that surprised you in that way? Even the languages of shock and irony become played out. You can’t get heavier than doom metal without going below the range of human hearing. You can’t get noisier than noise music, or more ambient than ambient. Both popular music and its more experimental derivatives have been explored at this point. Not totally, but to an ever-increasing degree.
It’s taken a century, but this is the end of the line for innovation in popular art, the end of the golden age.
Or so the theory in my head goes. The other option is that the rate of cultural innovation has genuinely permanently increased and that we’ll see new and interesting popular genres get churned out indefinitely. It’s possible – it’s hard to distinguish between an S-curve and an exponential one when you’re on it – but I’m doubtful. It would hardly be the first time a whole style of art similarly lost momentum. I already mentioned classical music. Think too of the deconstructive impulse of Modernism. Exhibiting a urinal in a gallery is a genuinely interesting gimmick, but only for the first time.
In the end, there’s only so much you can do with a backbeat. Or with the shot reverse shot.
Which isn’t to say that art is dead forever, mind. (Or that pop art is going away. It’s popular for a reason!) That sort of mindless declinism is just tedious. I have no doubt that there will be equally interesting artistic innovations sooner or later. Though it is hard to see from where. So far video games have fallen woefully short of being Art Art (even the best written games are terribly mediocre compared to anything else), and the internet has been useful for distribution but not really for artistic innovation, with minor exceptions. So I dunno, we’ll see. But I don’t think there will be another rock music.
(Thanks to @argumate for some of the ideas here. I don’t think I’ve written this post before, but who can be sure of that kind of thing anymore.)
