Recent thoughts about music, Part 1: "New" Music

I've been having a bad case of Writer's Block lately. I'll start on an entry, realize it's too ambitious for me to try to finish in one sitting, and save it in hopes of finishing it another day. I've had lots of thoughts about music, and have decided that the best way to go about it is to do it in separate parts. In this installment, I'll be focusing on what I think of new music. In my case, "new" could mean in the past ten years.

Back when I was really starting to get into music in the early 1990s, my main source of discovering music outside of radio and whatever my brother brought back with him from college was magazines. I've bought tapes and CDs just on the strength of what was said about them in magazines like Rolling Stone, Spin, or various Metal mags, Rip being my favorite one. The Telecoms Act of 1996 virtually killed radio, making formats and playlists narrower and narrower. But with the rise of satellite radio and music on the internet in the early 2000s, you didn't really need radio, and you could actually sample the bands you were reading about before you bought their music. Only one problem though: there is way too much music out there! I realized in the early 1990s that for every good/great band in a particular sub-genre, there were about a thousand mediocre/bad ones. The internet seems to have expanded that ratio to at least 10,000:1. I do hear a lot of music that is pleasant enough, yet doesn't really move me. It's stuff that I would probably enjoy more if I didn't have 55 years of Pop/Rock music history filling my head as it is. I feel like I've heard it all, and heard it done better. And on that note, why bother with new music when there's still so much good old music to catch up on, especially since the older CDs or vinyl are probably mastered better than the newer stuff. But that's a topic that I'll save for another time. Extreme forms of Metal are probably the best example. I can only take so many blast beats and Cookie Monster vocals before it just gets boring, and not many bands are really doing anything that hasn't really been done before.

Here were my favorite albums released between the years 2000-2010, in mostly alphabetical order and excluding local stuff.

Anthrax - We've Come For You All
At The Drive In - Relationship Of Command
Beastie Boys - To The 5 Boroughs
Black Kids - Party Traumatic
Bleeding Through - The Truth
Cannibal Corpse - The Wretched Spawn, Worm Infested (EP)
Danzig - 777: I Luciferi
Eagles Of Death Metal - Death By Sexy
Exodus - Shovel Headed Kill Machine
Fear Factory - Digimortal
Flight Of The Conchords - self-titled, I Told You I Was Freaky, The Distant Future (EP)
Franz Ferdinand - self titled
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Metallica - Death Magnetic
Metalocalypse:Dethklok - The Dethalbum, The Dethalbum II
Ministry - The Last Sucker
Outkast - Stankonia, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
Pantera - Reinventing The Steel
Queens Of The Stone Age - Rated R, Songs For The Deaf
Rage Against The Machine - Renegades
R.E.M. - Accelerate
Slayer - Christ Illusion
Static-X - Cannibal Killers Live
Superjoint Ritual - A Lethal Dose Of American Hatred
System Of A Down - Toxicity, Mezmerize, Hypnotize
Tenacious D - self titled
U2 - All That You Can't Leave Behind, No Line On The Horizon
Kanye West - Late Registration, Graduation, 808s And Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

To some, that might seem like a relatively lengthy list, but it's probably a fraction of most music freaks' "favorites of the decade" lists. And did you notice that there aren't a whole lot of new artists? Kanye West was one of the few to come out in the past decade that really grabbed me. Seeing as that I consider myself a "rocker" and am not really all that into recent Pop or Hip Hop, that probably says something about the sad state of Rock music. To paraphrase what I said earlier, I find a lot of newer Indie Rock fairly pleasant, but as for Hard Rock, if I had kids, I'd almost rather they listen to Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga than Shinedown or Nickelback.

My next installment will most likely be about The Loudness War. If you don't know much about it, there's a good entry on it on Wikipedia, which includes lots of entertaining links for further reading.
The Loudness War Wikipedia entry