How does it feel knowing that you will never see anything new in your lifetime?

[Jessica3cho雪血⊜青意]

Well, so I picked two years. We have 1942 and 1982. Here are the popular songs from these years

Top 80 Pop Song Chart for 1942

Find the top 80 Pop songs for the year of 1942 and listen to them all! Can you guess the number one Pop song in 1942? Find out now!

playback.fm

Top 100 Pop Song Chart for 1982

Find the top 100 Pop songs for the year of 1982 and listen to them all! Can you guess the number one Pop song in 1982? Find out now!

playback.fm

Try me to find a piece from the 1982 list which tries to pay homage to the 40s in any shape or form, outside of music having things that make it music like rythm.

Here's a list from previous year

Top 100 Pop Song Chart for 2021

Find the top 100 Pop songs for the year of 2021 and listen to them all! Can you guess the number one Pop song in 2021? Find out now!

playback.fm

First song, Levitating has very strong 80s influence.

Second song, Driver license, could have come out a decade ago and no one would tell if you didn't know the date.

Third song, Save your Tears, too has a very strong 80s influence.


But also try to tell me I'm wrong here. Being underground in the past by definition meant breaking off and trying something new. Not making nostalgia pieces. What could electronic music even be nostalgic for in the past? That completely didn't exist.

Oh look you found radio charts counting up the top radio hits from those years. Now if you want to pass me some nation polls, sales numbers, record distribution charts, and all record sales between 1935 and 1990 so that we can do a comparative analysis on what every household was listening to during that time and, being that most people who had the money to buy all the music they wanted were generally older generations that grew up on big band and swing hits, we can see what percentage of listening time was actually devoted to the radio and what time was devoted to grandma listening to her favorite Glenn Miller vinyl.

Seeing as I'm sure you and I both don't want to rummage through the records and do any sort of analysis on historical sales data, I'll leave it at this: Go to any store that sells retro vinyl and pull a percentage on 80's manufactured vinyls that were not 80's tracks, then on 80's manufactured vinyls that were 80's tracks. Then do the same with cassettes. Seeing as they did not have a widely available international music store on the internet like we do today, you can bet that whatever you find most manufactured by record companies, was most bought by consumers.

Then, if you want to break down the musical side of this, first we have to not pull the goalposts away from where they were sitting: I did not say the popular tracks of the 80's paid homage to the tracks of the 40's. I said it was rehashed: and it is. Show me one stylistic difference between the music of the 40's and the music of the 80's: What are we left with? The introduction of electronic instruments and post analogue digital mastering. Even then, we had electric guitars in the 40's. What is rock music? Jazzs with electronic tonage and overdrive amplification. What is Jazz music? Just about the only new form of music created in the last 200 years and even then it is just standing on the shoulders of blues and blue grass. Jazz scales and chord progressions are just modifications of the traditional blues scales combined with innovative takes on traditional scales. What is a melodic minor? A slightly altered Minor scale. What is a Dorian scale? A slightly altered Major. Now, what is Rock music? It takes the principles of Jazz music, the improvisational attitude and it streamlines it using traditional blues and bluegrass progressions. Either like, or you have neo-traditional rock which simply altered basic classical scales. And let me tell you, the Melodic Major scales have been around for a long time.

I mean, Rock even removed the brass that made Jazz so punchy. Rock is such toned down Jazz its almost embarrassing. Its no wonder we've been listening to the same rock songs for 5 decades now.

But, if we want to refer directly to these two music lists, lets analyze the two top songs on both: Survivor's eye of the Tiger and Bing Crosby's White Christmas. And none of that "You can't compare music using musical attributes!!!" nonsense ("outside of music having things that make it music like rythm.").

Both are a traditional 4/4 standard, written in Treble, and have been moved exactly 3 fifths from a base key. Not just that, though, one is played in C Minor while the other is A Major, which have almost identical notes, excluding the D sharp, but as the D is subdominant in the A Major scale anyways, it could probably be used to add nuance without destroying the harmony of the tune anyways, which is actually what Eye of the Tiger almost does when it used a D(add9) progression shortly into the song. Then, we can look at the starting notes of the vocals of both of these songs:
Eye of the Tiger: G - B - G - G - F - D - G - F
White Christmas: C - D - C - C - B - C - D - D#

Wait a minute, are these both 1 - 2 scale movements? By ghast! Both these songs hardly make a 3, 4 ,5 ,6, or 7th harmonic leap?! In fact, throughout the sheet music on both, the singers hardly even have to get close to leaving their single octave for more than a couple 4/4 patterns, the single octave they share. Its almost like there is 0 musical creativity put into the composition of these works. Though, I will give it this: The most distinguishing factor might be the I - VI - VII chord progression. It really adds variety to the song when White Christmas uses a I - II - V - IV progression. Oh wait, except when you get to the chorus in Eye of the Tiger it switches itself up to a I - II - V - IV progression. /: They got so close to not being a rehash of popular technique. Oh well, I tried. Sure, modern technology gave it a unique sound, though it was mostly from improperly using the same technology that had helped generate the sound of White Christmas, but for some reason, over the past 100 years, humans have been almost incapable of breaking away from these generic and surefire musical techniques that just make it all sound so.... samey. /:

 

[iusethistopost]

Well, so I picked two years. We have 1942 and 1982. Here are the popular songs from these years

Top 80 Pop Song Chart for 1942

Find the top 80 Pop songs for the year of 1942 and listen to them all! Can you guess the number one Pop song in 1942? Find out now!

playback.fm

Top 100 Pop Song Chart for 1982

Find the top 100 Pop songs for the year of 1982 and listen to them all! Can you guess the number one Pop song in 1982? Find out now!

playback.fm

Try me to find a piece from the 1982 list which tries to pay homage to the 40s in any shape or form, outside of music having things that make it music like rythm.

Here's a list from previous year

Top 100 Pop Song Chart for 2021

Find the top 100 Pop songs for the year of 2021 and listen to them all! Can you guess the number one Pop song in 2021? Find out now!

playback.fm

Sound aside, just on a factual basis the tracks from 1982 are mostly original compositions - though looking at the top ten, I Love Rock 'n' Roll was a cover from 1975 and Pass the Dutchie was an adaptation of another 1981 reggae track (both rock and reggae being heavily reliant on interpolation). What's changed is a compression of time between market trends and the expansion of the time that culture is mining. The top one hundred of 2021 is more reliant on samples - though Olivia Rodrigo's take on Paramour and the Weeknd's take on Michael Jackson are more aspirational than direct rips.

Simon Reynolds, a music journalist who's opinion I trust on this stuff, does seem to think that cultural production had a noticeable shift with the arrival of sampling and then the internet - he outlines it in Retromania

Both are a traditional 4/4 standard, written in Treble, and have been moved exactly 3 fifths from a base key. Not just that, though, one is played in C Minor while the other is A Major, which have almost identical notes, excluding the D sharp, but as the D is subdominant in the A Major scale anyways, it could probably be used to add nuance without destroying the harmony of the tune anyways, which is actually what Eye of the Tiger almost does when it used a D(add9) progression shortly into the song. Then, we can look at the starting notes of the vocals of both of these songs:
Eye of the Tiger: G - B - G - G - F - D - G - F
White Christmas: C - D - C - C - B - C - D - D#

Wait a minute, are these both 1 - 2 scale movements? By ghast! Both these songs hardly make a 3, 4 ,5 ,6, or 7th harmonic leap?! In fact, throughout the sheet music on both, the singers hardly even have to get close to leaving their single octave for more than a couple 4/4 patterns, the single octave they share. Its almost like there is 0 musical creativity put into the composition of these works. Though, I will give it this: The most distinguishing factor might be the I - VI - VII chord progression. It really adds variety to the song when White Christmas uses a I - II - V - IV progression. Oh wait, except when you get to the chorus in Eye of the Tiger it switches itself up to a I - II - V - IV progression. /: They got so close to not being a rehash of popular technique. Oh well, I tried. Sure, modern technology gave it a unique sound, though it was mostly from improperly using the same technology that had helped generate the sound of White Christmas, but for some reason, over the past 100 years, humans have been almost incapable of breaking away from these generic and surefire musical techniques that just make it all sound so.... samey. /:

This is like saying Rauschenberg's Buffalo II has the same relationship with media as a Manet Waterlily because they both use the color blue. Bing Crosby and Survivor could have written the same chords, but Bing Crosby did not have a drum machine, a digital sampler, or Ableton. Just like the Lumiere brothers did not have a handheld gopro, and Manet didn't have screenprinting, jpegs or a CNC machine. Technology has changed art's relationship to itself.

 

[SELCOUTH]

The turn of the new millennium set the stage for a sea of originality and innovation. Almost everything from 2000-2010 was new and fresh. It makes me sad to know that every new app, platform, game or other piece of media will forever be riding off the success of its predecessor. The culture of the early 2000's felt genuine and happy and leaves me with a warm feeling whenever I reminisce upon it. It makes me sad I will never be able to experience the feelings I felt then. It makes me sad to know I will never again go through it all for the first time as I did then.

This isn't necessarily true. A lot can happen in 5 years. A nuclear war for example. You havn't yet experienced a nuclear war have you? But I digress. I think that getting older leads to a sort of, "loss of magic and mystery" to it. The better we understand things, the less magical they become to us. If you really delve into it, your parents probably experienced all the same stressors that you are and maybe even more while they were raising you. It couldn't have been all sunshine and rainbows. The average adult had to work the same boring jobs most of us do today, albeit less technologically advanced. They had to pay bills and run bullshit errands just like we did. Just because the time period was different doesn't really change that. It probably sucked just as much to be an adult in the 90's early 2000's as it does now. A lot of the time, we seem to have this bias towards things in the past because we were kids with absolutely zero responsibilities back then. Being an adult is hard, just try to enjoy the little slivers of magic that you get when they DO happen. It sounds cliche as can be, but when my son was born I got to experience that magic again a few times. There are tons of new and exciting things happening all around us, but we are too stuck trying to survive as adults to really get to experience any of it. Just try your best to make the most of when you DO get to experience those things

 

[Jessica3cho雪血⊜青意]

This is like saying Rauschenberg's Buffalo II has the same relationship with media as a Manet Waterlily because they both use the color blue. Bing Crosby and Survivor could have written the same chords, but Bing Crosby did not have a drum machine, a digital sampler, or Ableton. Just like the Lumiere brothers did not have a handheld gopro, and Manet didn't have screenprinting, jpegs or a CNC machine. Technology has changed art's relationship to itself.

I disagree, because the colour blue isn't how the movie was made. I think a more apt comparison would be like saying that James Cameron's Avatar and Disney's Pocahontas are the same movie because, though they are very different looking on the surface level and use different eras of technology, the basis is the same story, using the same story beats, in a similar act sequence.

I agree that the evolution of technology has created some new wondrous things and can greatly change the look/sound/experience of art, but I still believe that, at its basis, none of the work itself is terribly creative. Just more advanced and aged than other pieces.

 

[NW_Cryptid]

Please understand I write this with no malice nor intent to offend or insult. However I know what I say may come across as harsh, that being said; please by all means feel free to disregard my words, life is too short to care about random opinions of people on the internet.

So here's the thing... I think it's kind of narrow minded and pessimistic to believe we will never see anything new in our lifetime. I understand that what our "lifetime" is will of course be different for everyone, and no I don't mean in the "I could get hit by a car today" kind of way. I know we have boomers, zoomers, and just about everything in between who come and go from this site; or at least people who claim to be. My point here is that if you go seeking it, you can find it. In the last 3 - 4 years now I've enjoyed being a game dev and I've personally seen not just new games, but comics, web novels, some anime and hell even technologies coming out that are truly as "original" or experimental as anything can be these days. I'd argue that there's a large difference between a company or individual being inspired by something and "riding off the success of its predecessor" and it shows in the work they create. I think the bigger issue at play here is how the internet has changed in relation to how many of the users here seem to actually use it. What I mean to say is that in the years leading up to 2010 the internet more or less spoon-fed people all these new crazy creations and ideas, and because the people who were using the internet as a means to create were still majority led by individuals who actually had a passion for creation, what we saw more often than not; was a truly inspired and original piece of work from someone who put a lot of genuine effort into creating it. These days most of the people here avoid about 90% of the internet and are thus sheltered from a lot of that creation, the other big contributor here being that a lot of people see the internet and creation of anything be it content, games, anime, or even tech; as a sort of "cheat code" for getting rich quick. You'll see more shovelware crap thrown around by half-wits who had nothing better to do than make "Half Life 2 but all the tiddies have better physics and the combine are MILFs" I don't know where that concept came from but you get the idea. These days a lot of this shit is [Franchise That Is Popular] + [Other Thing that is popular] = [My Totally Original Idea] which is tiresome and boring. However that's not EVERYTHING that's out there, and if you go searching for it, and you don't mind the adventure of meeting new people, trying new things; and discovering new communities then you'll find new and creative things all over the internet. Truly original and creative work is out there, and I find it all the time by exploring what the internet really has to offer, not in places like twitter or facebook but in places like this, where I've discovered things like Disillusion, which I fully intend to be picking up and looking into since it was created by none other than Rik-Disillusioned. Even if it's inspired by trippy games from the 90s like LSD Dream Emulator, and eastern mind lost souls, it still looks like an original and creative work of art that will likely give me enough enjoyment for the small asking price of $3. This is what I mean when I say you just need to go looking for it now, I would have never discovered Disillusion if not for this site, Steam would surely never have shown me a game like this because it's not some triple A title made by some big studio that will shill out tons of money to be on the front page.

The TL;DR is that new stuff is out there, that culture, that love of creation and invention is still around us but it's been diluted in a cesspool of garbage and internet white-noise. If you go looking for it, and you're not afraid to explore the depths of the internet you will find underground communities making new things, trying and failing with their creations until they finally find something that works. Whether it be music, games, technology, you name it, it's out there. So to answer your question of "how does it feel" it feels hopeful, I might not be a zoomer with their twitter, facebook, or tiktok to keep them glued to a screen for hours; but I'm no Doomer Boomer who's going to sit defeated by a world forced onto me by those with money either. If they build you a road littered with potholes and garbage, but you know it connects to a paradise city of new and exciting people, creations, and experiences just 30 miles south of here, and you decide the road is too scary or annoying to be dealt with, you can either pretend that the city never existed so you don't feel like you're missing out, or you can be brave, hit the road, and explore the world in search of others like you because fuck their potholes and fuck their garbage why let them have power over you?

 

[zalaz alaza]

I thought the noise movement in the late 90s-00s was a pretty cool new invention in music that more or less happened in my life. though maybe that is before the time of most people here and to be fair it got its start somewhere before that.

also it seems AI art is something new that weve never seen before. i.e there seems to be some common thread through all the AI-art ive seen. I worked on a project where we ran a small gan to produce ai art and then real artists painted the images. In the human versions there seemed to be something missing.

These things stick out to me as I cannot really find any historical comparison to them, but also I would def say new stuff gets invented on a semi regular basis. Maybe it is boring or sucks but it does happen

 

[SELCOUTH]

Please understand I write this with no malice nor intent to offend or insult. However I know what I say may come across as harsh, that being said; please by all means feel free to disregard my words, life is too short to care about random opinions of people on the internet.

So here's the thing... I think it's kind of narrow minded and pessimistic to believe we will never see anything new in our lifetime. I understand that what our "lifetime" is will of course be different for everyone, and no I don't mean in the "I could get hit by a car today" kind of way. I know we have boomers, zoomers, and just about everything in between who come and go from this site; or at least people who claim to be. My point here is that if you go seeking it, you can find it. In the last 3 - 4 years now I've enjoyed being a game dev and I've personally seen not just new games, but comics, web novels, some anime and hell even technologies coming out that are truly as "original" or experimental as anything can be these days. I'd argue that there's a large difference between a company or individual being inspired by something and "riding off the success of its predecessor" and it shows in the work they create. I think the bigger issue at play here is how the internet has changed in relation to how many of the users here seem to actually use it. What I mean to say is that in the years leading up to 2010 the internet more or less spoon-fed people all these new crazy creations and ideas, and because the people who were using the internet as a means to create were still majority led by individuals who actually had a passion for creation, what we saw more often than not; was a truly inspired and original piece of work from someone who put a lot of genuine effort into creating it. These days most of the people here avoid about 90% of the internet and are thus sheltered from a lot of that creation, the other big contributor here being that a lot of people see the internet and creation of anything be it content, games, anime, or even tech; as a sort of "cheat code" for getting rich quick. You'll see more shovelware crap thrown around by half-wits who had nothing better to do than make "Half Life 2 but all the tiddies have better physics and the combine are MILFs" I don't know where that concept came from but you get the idea. These days a lot of this shit is [Franchise That Is Popular] + [Other Thing that is popular] = [My Totally Original Idea] which is tiresome and boring. However that's not EVERYTHING that's out there, and if you go searching for it, and you don't mind the adventure of meeting new people, trying new things; and discovering new communities then you'll find new and creative things all over the internet. Truly original and creative work is out there, and I find it all the time by exploring what the internet really has to offer, not in places like twitter or facebook but in places like this, where I've discovered things like Disillusion, which I fully intend to be picking up and looking into since it was created by none other than Rik-Disillusioned. Even if it's inspired by trippy games from the 90s like LSD Dream Emulator, and eastern mind lost souls, it still looks like an original and creative work of art that will likely give me enough enjoyment for the small asking price of $3. This is what I mean when I say you just need to go looking for it now, I would have never discovered Disillusion if not for this site, Steam would surely never have shown me a game like this because it's not some triple A title made by some big studio that will shill out tons of money to be on the front page.

The TL;DR is that new stuff is out there, that culture, that love of creation and invention is still around us but it's been diluted in a cesspool of garbage and internet white-noise. If you go looking for it, and you're not afraid to explore the depths of the internet you will find underground communities making new things, trying and failing with their creations until they finally find something that works. Whether it be music, games, technology, you name it, it's out there. So to answer your question of "how does it feel" it feels hopeful, I might not be a zoomer with their twitter, facebook, or tiktok to keep them glued to a screen for hours; but I'm no Doomer Boomer who's going to sit defeated by a world forced onto me by those with money either. If they build you a road littered with potholes and garbage, but you know it connects to a paradise city of new and exciting people, creations, and experiences just 30 miles south of here, and you decide the road is too scary or annoying to be dealt with, you can either pretend that the city never existed so you don't feel like you're missing out, or you can be brave, hit the road, and explore the world in search of others like you because fuck their potholes and fuck their garbage why let them have power over you?

Thankyou for the insight friend. Would you mind directing me to other niche creative hubs on the internet? As much as I love this site, I'd love to find other places like it where I can actually discuss things like this with people that aren't completely stuck in the regular social media loop.

 

[remember_summer_days]

You either achieve contentment or you don't. You can't always remain an excited kid for eternity. Yeah, it's time of decline, but also time to look inwards and find meaning.

The fall of Rome created one of the greatest saints. The most obvious is Saint Agustine. Even if you're not a believer, he became one of the biggest contributors to western culture and laid the foundation from which it would be rebuilt. I believe we're living in similar times. Perhaps it's a bit too optimistic to think this generation will create anyone with awesomeness close to St Agustine, but the next great men/women have already been born. Whether our century will recognize them or not, history will be too hard to erase.

 

[remember_summer_days]

This is a very interesting sentiment I've seen some people have. I think we're living in a time of unprecedented innovation and a culture of creating the next new thing, and it scares me a bit. In my own industry, I've taken to many animators who are excited as heck for VR. I've even gotten professors trying to hype me because in a few years most of animation will be done in VR software. I hope that never comes to be, I find the idea of an 8 hour workday with a VR headset on almost scary. Maybe I'm just a reactionary, but the people leading these technological innovations seem naive. I'm sure the creator of Twitter thought it would be a network that would bring the world together, rather than the toxic wasteland that it is.

Back to the OP. I think what lies behind this feeling of 'nothing new' is boredom. Despite so much new and innovative stuff releasing nowadays, I can't help but feel bored by it. Perhaps because there are so many new things that my mind can't process their importance. I would say they also lack meaning, but what do I know, I think it would be fairer to say I can't get meaning from these things.

As for the future, I'm actually hopeful we will produce some great works of art, maybe not my zoomer generations, but the ones that follow. Times of decay have, to be fair, only sometimes, produced periods of excellent art. Think 1860-1900 Russia, or post WW1 Europe. To give the devil's due, you could argue all of that was pre-collapse art, and our society might have already collapsed. So perhaps we've already created those great works of art and it's all downhill from here. Time will say.

 

[Chen]

I find things that are new or exciting to me every day.

 

[Bogdonovich]

There's a Douglas Adam's quote from 1999 that kinda covers this


We're just getting older and looking back at what we used to do. Like I'll look back at old phones and how crazy the designs were in the 2000s and miss it, but at the same time I could create an insane visual customization on iOS but don't because I'm just used to iOS. If I were younger I probably would spend more time and care about that. I imagine a lot of the crazy designs with cellphones didn't really appeal to people in their 30s+ back then.

---
The article that excerpt came from is worth a read, though do note I had an SSL certificate issue I had to bypass as Douglas Adam's site is really old and probably very lightly managed these days.

My great grandmother saw Geronimo out on the plains of Texas and saw man land on the moon. Anyway, here's my danwave: Is the new?

 

[SELCOUTH]

The fall of Rome created one of the greatest saints. The most obvious is Saint Agustine. Even if you're not a believer, he became one of the biggest contributors to western culture and laid the foundation from which it would be rebuilt. I believe we're living in similar times. Perhaps it's a bit too optimistic to think this generation will create anyone with awesomeness close to St Agustine, but the next great men/women have already been born. Whether our century will recognize them or not, history will be too hard to erase.

I think there are plenty of already awesome people who have been born, It's just that there are SO MANY damn people in the world that it's hard to stand out from the crowd anymore. Since we live in a relatively safe time period in history, it's hard to find importance in anything but entertainment. Back then it was pretty clear cut that your biggest celebrity would be whatever king/emperor was ruling over you. Then would come the people of the church, then the nobles. We needed to be this way for survival, because a lack of influence from these people would result in complete chaos down the line. There were less people to compete with for influence in general as well. Nowadays, people have freedom to follow whoever they choose, be whoever they choose (Within reason), and go just about wherever they choose. It makes it hard to pin down what people alive today are true examples of greatness, because we have such a vast pool of people to choose from.

 

[slimemold]

Nostalgia is psychic death.

 

[mydadiscar]

Everything I would consider good has already been made. At least I do not have to wait for it like I would have if born sooner.

 

[Virago]

You're just basically getting a front row seat at the sausage making factory. The process is the same as it ever was, but now with the modern internet and information overload you can see it happen in real-time, so it feels less original, while before you just got the end product devoid of developmental context.

 

[NetFreeTrader]

The process is the same as it ever was, but now with the modern internet and information overload you can see it happen in real-time, so it feels less original, while before you just got the end product devoid of developmental context.

Yeah. It takes more effort now to pick out the good stuff if you wade through the B.S.

But there are good ways to bypass the B.S. Recommendations from places like this, and other places like friends.

 

[thareddriver]

Nostalgia is psychic death.

That statement really resonates with me, and I have no idea why.
Could you talk a bit more about that?

 

[Sable]

That statement really resonates with me, and I have no idea why.
Could you talk a bit more about that?

It's Idle to assume an indulgence in nostalgia.

You are allowing the events of the past to have an effect on your state in the present and are absorbed by things which for all purposes do not exist. Being nostalgic for the past does not assist you in the future, if anything it can cause you to become stagnant, hence "psychic death".

You are so consumed by what was that you do not pay attention to what is or work towards what could be.

 

[tofuDWU]

to be frank I doubt we'll "never see anything new", maybe less innovation in a small space of time, but innovation nonetheless. We'll still live to see the early stages of deep immersion VR (probably), amongst other technological advancements.

it's a stagnant mindset like yours that results in a lack of advancement, if everyone thought like you, every technological advancement we've had in the past 2 decades would have presumably not even happened.

but going onto your point about 2000's culture feeling more genuine - you're right. It was also more simplistic. We'll never have it back, but if we're not able to adapt to change then how do we keep moving forward? Besides, there'll always be small safe havens like Agora Road. If this site goes down I reckon a new one will spring up with enough time. You're far from the only one who misses the simplistic, original feelings that early 2000s internet had. I grew up in the later stages of 2000s internet, and even now I'm trying to find people who want to go back and for now I think I've succeeded

take care man, stay hopeful.

 

[Jessica3cho雪血⊜青意]

Something about this thread keeps calling me back to say how gay the idea of "You will never see anything new in your lifetime" is.