Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
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Music of the 21st Century

14:27 / 04.11.01

Sorry if this topic's been covered already.

Any thoughts to the first true 21st C album. Plenty has come out, but I'm looking for something that is more a reaction and evolution of the last 100 years of music, rather than a regurgitation.

My votes, Kid A and Amnesiac by Radiohead, including all the miscellaneous tracks from the singles.
This music has taken everything, from rock to jazz to techno to ambient and recreated it in new ways. That they managed not only to produce these two albums, but then tour them with great success and effect elevates the songs from their medium.

Agree? Disagree? Rhubarb?

Zoom.

reidcourchie

15:25 / 04.11.01

Can't comment on that because I've never heard it. For me it would have to be Lateralus by Tool, which although a very, very good album I'm not sure it would meet your criteria.

Ronald Thomas Clontle

15:33 / 04.11.01

Listen, I really like Radiohead a lot, so I'm not putting down your assessment of them... I just think that Radiohead is too closely tied with 20th century tendencies to really be the answer to your question about the music of the 21st. All of the music on those two records comes their collective fascination with music from (or derived from) the 60s, and I think that the music that will come to define the next 100 years won't have as much to do rearranging old ideas so much as creating new ones altogether. It sounds so impossible now, folks are brought up to think now that the bus has stopped, that we've reached the end of musical progress... not so. I really don't think so.
I don't think anyone back in 1901 saw any of the music of the following 99 years coming from a mile away, and naturally, we can't see our future clearly either.

So I don't know if any of the music that is out there right now holds the key to the future, and if there is, it's very likely something that we'd never really peg...

[ 04-11-2001: Message edited by: Flux = Rad ]

09:20 / 05.11.01

I don't care if it's forward or backward looking, as long as it moves me.

09:20 / 05.11.01

i have to agree with flux=rad , i also love radiohead and really like their recent output but it seems to me that no matter how hard radiohead tried to create cutting edge music you could still classify their last two albums as a fusion between various music genres that all hail from the last century. What I'm clumsily trying to say is, there is music that sounds similar to radiohead and until they create a genre of music totally new that makes even the avant garde go 'what the fuck' like for instance the impact james joyce's 'ulysses' had on his literary contemporaries of the time then they won't have created the first 21st century album.

14:09 / 05.11.01

To my ears, Melt Banana's 'Teeny Shiny' sounds like the rock and roll of the future..

21:20 / 05.11.01

Flux makes a good point - if we're talking about futurism in musical terms, Radiohead's appropriation and interpretation of so many influences on their last two albums kind of disqualifies them.

Squarepusher's Go Plastic could arguably be the first 21st century album, simply because it sounds so different to anything that's come before. Or at least, that I've heard.

[ 06-11-2001: Message edited by: E. Randy Dupre ]

13:16 / 06.11.01

quote:Originally posted by reidcourchie:
Can't comment on that because I've never heard it. For me it would have to be Lateralus by Tool, which although a very, very good album I'm not sure it would meet your criteria.

I second Lateralus.

Ronald Thomas Clontle

15:01 / 06.11.01

I find it interesting that virtually everyone seems to see music moving in a direction that primarily integrates electronic instruments and recording techniques with free jazz tendencies, and a hip hop aesthetic.

Sometimes I wonder if there is an element to that formula that is just slipping everyone's mind, and once that is in place, the ball will really starting moving down that hill, and snowball out of control...