Great post. I shall begin mulling...

"Nothing new in pop music has got to be the true measure of this decade's meaning. There has been no new style created - no punk, no grunge, no hip-hop, no jazz." You've noticed a really interesting phenomenon. If you look at every other decade since the '50s there has been some kind of revolution in music. Exploring why this is would be a very interesting study. I don't know what the answer is but it is very telling of something....

"Exploring why this is would be a very interesting study..."

That is, errr, the whole point of this post, Hans. Don't be going off somewhere else "doing a study" and get all proprietary over it. Confess! You had plans to explore the idea elsewhere!!!

[Sorry - watched too many Daleks this weekend.]

There used to be the "13-year cycle" in music, and now...? We sort of got out of the habit of innovating when the grunge movement was co-opted by the mainstream far faster than had ever happened before. The resistance movements dried up (notably after the Seattle protests). People stopped bothering to care about stuff, because they realized it was futile and would simply get spun, so a lot of the impetus to create anything kind of evaporated.

At the same time the internet gave us the illusion of communication, so the sense of desperate need to communicate a message disappeared as well...

There hasn't been any new art - I haven't even seen any outraged pieces about the latest disgusting/ridiculous/stupid performance art, lately.

The new movement in indy movies is "mumblecore" which basically means "badly edited, clumsily written, badly lit, and badly acted by film-students -core," nothing particularly interesting there.

In short, everything's crap and the kids these days are boring. I demand a return to people trying to shock their elders! Come on, kids! Shock me!

Oh, right, sorry; its just that I really have no understanding of any reasons why this decade produced no musical revolution. Is it technology? Is it the corporatization of the music biz as Renee suggests? Are all the "scenes" so fragmented that no underground movement can take root before the monied interests get their snout into it? I really don't know, perhaps because I am old and square. Or, to echo Renee, the kids these days are just boring....

Old and square - you are in a band, Hans. I napped on the sofa both afternoons this weekend. I am old and square.

I will agree about misic to a point, when it comes to radio regular played drivel, but I will say that there is a bit of new interesting music coming out of northern Europe in the past few years that is very experimental and odd, but good. Check out a band called Mum (with an accent "ay-goo" above the 'u'). That and a lot of decent semi-minimalist independant music from a lot of US and Canadian bands makes up all the "new" music I can digest nowadays (check out The Superfantastics from Halifax.)

My verdict is that the kids are in fact boring..my eldest's music ranegs from un-understandable lyrics to mopey emo crud, that if you remove the singer all sounds the same. None of the lyrics speak to solutions, only whining about problems.

Musical evolution is still underway, but is less noticeable because the "bully pulpit" of radio, TV and film have diminished in importance.

In the past the entertainment industry could put its marketing efforts into a few major projects and see major returns; now that the 'net has made the music (and novels, and films) of all the eras widely available, the "blockbuster" model no longer functions as well as it did. Now the industry spends its time trying to promote what few blockbusters it thinks it still has, and is trying hard to avoid adjusting to living in an era of fewer sales spread across a much greater spectrum of products (a.k.a. the Long Tail).

It is the difference between shopping in a North American supermarket and a North African bazaar. The supermarket can structure its displays to put special emphasis on certain sale items, in accordance with agreements worked out by head office. In a bazaar you have a loose grouping of independent agents and it is harder (if not impossible) to privilege the products of one over another for special marketing emphasis.

The 'net has given us a bazaar where previously we had only a supermarket. The supermarket still exists, but is not working very hard at adapting itself to living with a bazaar next door.

For me the sound of the Aughts is ambient/trance, for somebody else it will be the pop-R&B of Rihanna or Beyonce, or folk queen Feist, or yarl-tastic acts like Daughtry and Nickelback. The talent is not absent, but it no longer has defining narrative because the vectors of pop-culture narrative definition have reduced influence.

As far as normalcy of war goes, that is only because we perceive it to be less than an existential fight. And despite all evidence to the contrary, we believe that it will not follow us home. If we perceived that a loss in Afghanistan would result in the vapourisation of New York, London or Toronto fifteen years down the line, we'd be a little more concerned with the outcome and give it a little more attention.

How can you deny the radical musical innovation Lady GaGa represents. First off, it takes real spunk for a forty year old to pretend to be twenty three...second, humping noises through the Auto-tune sound better than Donna Summers and that is a huge innovation.

As for twitter - I can't remember my login and I am still picking up followers.

seanie, songs about solutions are soooooo boring. Imagine "I can't get no Satisfaction" as "I am Somewhat Satisfied". Somewhere in a dark recess I am hearing Joan Armatrading and pushing the auto tune.

"loss of political grip upon the imagination of the population" this is a feature not a bug Alan. For too long people thought government and therefore politics was the solution, then they realized it was the problem, then they realized it was not going away, now they have absolutely minimal expectations and are none the less disappointed. (Part of what scares me about Palin is that she is actually raising expectations on the right just as the big 0 raised them on the left.)

On the other hand, this problem should be self liquidating simply because governments at all levels are largely out of money. Hopey, changey stuff costs a bomb and doesn't work. Without money at least we won't have so many expectations destroyed.

The brief glimmer of engagement cause by St. Algore and the climate change/AGW/anti CO2 hysterics died at the first breath of recession and as the "science" became increasingly unsettled and the so-called "consensus" was revealled as the put-up job it is. Another generation of kids learned the hard way that politicians and political "scientists" are willing to lie, exaggerate and just make stuff up to achieve their agenda. That is a valuable lesson.

Canadian politics remains boring. Which is pretty much how we like it. The Liberal Party has been revealed as shallow and reduced to a few enclaves and, of course, the cocktail party media. Jack Layton and the NDP have been revealed as the water bugs on the stagnant Liberal puddle. The CPC is, very, very, very, slowly trying to reverse forty years of Trudeaupian destruction with an incredibly boring return to actual Canadian values - "why yes, there are cultural practices Canadians find barbaric, sorry if that offends you".

It was a ho-hum decade. But one in which I had two children both of who have already discovered that, even third time around, their father still does not like ACDC. Garage band greatness awaits them. Especially as the older one cannot sing a note - a necessary quality for metalheads.

Our hope is always our kids' capacity to surprise us. And they pretty much always do.

I dunno, Chris. I have my Eno albums from the 1970s including Music for Airports. I am not mentioning the model of music delivery but styles of music. I think the decentralization of music distribution has had the unintended consequence of stylistic innovation's death. Lady Gaga is, after all, just a bad Madonna cover circa 1989 or so.

Jay, all disruptive technologies have proven is that disruption is disruptive. There hasn't been any proof that climate change is false just disproof of the evidence for it's existence. It's the same claim to fame that Palin offers - scoffery. The next decade will see the reemergence of authority.

Harper is actually turning out better than I thought - but that is saying very little and does not reflect the panicky "I see Trudeaupian destruction" set. He's hardly George Grant either. There is no clock being turned back but a new social engineering project on the go. But I am liking large parts of it. The parts that minority government control allows.

I am not mentioning the model of music delivery but styles of music. I think the decentralization of music distribution has had the unintended consequence of stylistic innovation's death. Lady Gaga is, after all, just a bad Madonna cover circa 1989 or so.

With respect, it is tempting to think this because you are wedded to the old narrative (i.e. popular music has a singular linear progression, from jazz to swing to rockabilly to protest anthems to disco to arena rock to New Wave to grunge) and the old method of distribution (radio, physical media).

If you are getting your music from peer-to-peer sharing or indie distribution, stylistic innovation is not dead, but it is proceeding quietly, unheralded by the old distrbution machine. But it no longer has the appearance of a unifying theme (disco, grunge, whatever). Instead of a linear progression from genre to genre, we get concurrent progression along a multitude of genres, all of whom get the spotlight for a fraction of the time of their predecessors.

I don't miss the era of the studios pimping the music you ought to listen to. It's refreshing to think that from this point forward, there may not be music that defines a generation, but that each member of that generation can define it for themselves.

You seem to be speaking in tongues. I mean there are no shifts in music and you seem to say that I am wrong because there are no shifts in music. I don't miss macro-pop either but at least when someone was good they got a chance at moving past being a blip on YouTube. Punk rock didn't come out of marco-pop. Neither did jazz or folk.

Example. It was fun to have the four song tape for the Bare Naked Ladies, enjoy their first album and then watch the long slow death after. They should never have crapped on the Halifax bar scene on Album #1. Now? No one would have heard of them past the first four songs.

While we are at it, it is you that are wedded to a narrative - to borrow a toss away. Why wallow in "love the digital era, love everything about it"? We have lost pop music and been left with wandering troubadours waiting for a song making the TV ads. The great leveling. Socialism by robots.

I do not think the digital era is unquestioningly good, but thekey difference is I do not take the lack of macro-pop to be a sign of the descent of music in general. With respect, I am not the guy posting entries on his blog saying that pop music is dead because there is no generalised shift in taste.

You expect there to be an over-arching genre to define each deacde, and there isn't. You therefore assume that pop is dead. This is what I mean by being wedded to the paradigm. Pop is not dead, it lives on in Rhythym & Sound, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Kelis, Jose Gonzalez, Kylie Minogue, Detroit Experiment, Fischerspooner, T-Pain, et cetera.

The fact that they do not share a unified style does not mean pop music is dead. It means there is no longer a lazy musical shorthand to mark the passing of time.

I never said "dead" so much as dead in the water. Nothing new.

And I only assume there is an over-arching genre for every decade because there has been both an over arching genre and exciting innovate in every decade. Look, Hans is in a band and he agrees with me and you only have Jay on your side and his kids are in a band so I am sure that means I win.

[Ed.: (in a loud piercing John Cleese voice) Kylie Minogue!!!]

Experiment: before there was the stalling of time by the internet, who was concerned that "there is no longer a lazy musical shorthand to mark the passing of time." Punks and bluegrass players, that's who. The rejecters of the man. YouTubers and iPodders are the man, man. It's playing to the suits. Same suits different people inside.

Look, Hans is in a band and he agrees with me and you only have Jay on your side and his kids are in a band so I am sure that means I win.

Well that remark alone comes pretty close to winning the thread, for me.

[And Kylie did release a lot of music early in the decade. As did a lot of horrifying old throwbacks, like Dexy's Midnight Runners. In Dexy's case it was very different stylistically from their earlier, more famous efforts, so the old dogs have learned some new tricks.]

I think Aughts have progressed in an organic way, evolutionary rather than a revolutionary reaction to the styles/genres that went before. Smaller but still measurable steps toward a different sound, across a broad spectrum of genres.

Well, I really don't disagree with that, especially in a way. I think one good thing about it is at least the leveling. All music is now getting the same treatment. For me that means access to bluegrass without investing a bundle in the CDs. Instead, I now own and play two banjos and a mandolin very badly - spend what is left on Doctor Who DVDs.

I think that what is really happening is that we are being cast adrift at a certain level of interest. I don't see macro-pop dying. I see smaller labels dying. It's all gone like fanzines. 2009 is more like 1991 than 1999.

Each previous decade of music had a musical revolution that was tied to a social situation. Hip-hop, punk, grunge. There might be individual innovation going on here and there nowadays but no revolutions approaching ages past. I make no judgment about the quality of the music being produced simply that there is no new style or genre that has emerged like all other decades in pop music.

And Lady Gaga is not the only 40 something pretending to be in their 20s. As mentioned, I am in a band. We are not innovative but we are just as good as all those others you mentioned. We are even on Youtube. Check us out: www.slugnworld.com!

Does that not suggest, then, that the expression or reaction to that social situation is finding an outlet other than music? Perhaps even... blogging?

Could be but blogging is too decentralized and too much about the media and not the substance to be a social revolution even if the ads say so.

woops. that's www.slungworld.com.

Whereas songwriting is never about the media and happens in large Vegas-style conventions, right? Come on.

There are other media than conventions... like coffee houses and AM radio. Remember - people communicated before the internet.

I don't know why you want to turn every comment into a snipe at "the internet" but I was referring to centralisation. And having studied and written on goddamn wax Roman tablets I do know a thing or two about pre-electronic media.

I like to snipe at the internet because there isn't a well developed criticism of the internet. And this is a discussion about the internet. I know you know a lot of things. So does Hans. But why is it you can only talk about how wonderful the advent of the internet has been?

The internet is the onramp to the information superhighway! It allows people to communicate! And buy pornography! Lots and lots of pornography! And communicate! What's not to love?

... the problem is that communication feels more real than it is. And unless you meet them for beers from time to do, you haven't actually made any friends, even if your cravings for interaction are somewhat sated.

Hey, I have an idea...

Watch it. We tried the glee club in 2006 and it wasn't pretty.