The case against the death of musical revolution

Despite critics hailing this as an age of cultural stagnation, a quiet, globalised explosion of taste is happening right now led by teenagers, writes Joe Muggs.

When was the last musical revolution you witnessed?

It’s not really something we talk about that much lately is it? But what would you say if I told you that shifts – yes, shifts, plural – in music culture bigger and more significant than punk or acid house had taken place in the past decade?

It’s funny: I was already some way into this essay when a big two-part piece dropped from Resident Advisor’s editor-in-chief Gabriel Szatan saying, in short, that club / electronic music is in the doldrums, “hyper-fragmented in theory, yet consensus-driven in practice”, incapable of creating a defining sound of now or an “electronic classic [album] for the decade to call its own.” There’s more to it than that – he adds various caveats in the course of the twelve thousand (!) words – but the message is clear: innovation is stalled on an “endless plateau” and “the party might be over.”

He’s not the only person saying this, and it’s not just in dance music. People like Australian brand strategist Eugene Healey and ultra-wry Irish cultural observer Frankie McNamara aka Mediations For the Anxious Mind are racking up serious numbers on video platforms citing theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Mark Fisher and telling us that algorithms are washing out and fragmenting culture, everything nowadays is a ghost of a ghost and a simulacrum of a simulacrum, and qualities like progress, innovation, excitement, authenticity and subversion are long distant dreams from a past world before the digital fall.

The irony here is that we’ve seen this thesis before. It’s all pretty much a retread of Simon Reynolds’s 2010 Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past – and that itself was just a theorisation of an all-too familiar consensus in certain media circles. Back when I first started writing professionally at the turn of the millennium, I was told endlessly by editors – from broadsheets through to supposedly cutting edge fashion, youth culture and dance music titles – that subculture (especially dance culture) was over, everything was flattened out by The Internet™, and all we had to look forward to was different rearrangements of the same playing pieces on the table.

I was a wet-behind-the-ears rookie, but I knew deep in my bones it wasn’t true then. It took me a lot of frustrating conversations and pitching meetings to articulate, but the argument I came up with around 2001-02 to counter the claims that information glut was homogenising everything was this: the internet hasn’t changed the fact that it still takes six years to get from being 15 to being 21, with all the fundamental changes in brain wiring, critical coming-of-age experiences and accumulated quantity of cultural input – or a little more glibly, “no matter how fast information travels, culture still moves at the speed of life.”

And sure enough, even as we were having these arguments, the nascent movements that became grime, dubstep, folktronica / neo-psychedelia, post-classical, the nu-rave-indie-sleaze mishmash that defined the decade for so many, not to mention multiple vast revolutions in hip hop and R&B, particularly centred on the shift of the US musical centre of gravity to the south. As is abundantly clear now millennials are hitting middle age and getting nostalgic, the 00s was anything but lacking in innovation and excitement. All too often though, at the time these were treated as curios, just eddies in the wider flux – and the reason for this is because they didn’t fit the second-half-of-the-20th-century culture media model of what innovation is.

That model, from rock’n’roll onwards (hence decades of saying X or Y “is the new rock’n’roll”) revolved around a landmark record and a landmark moment in a specific place and time. Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show, the Be-In at Haight Ashbury, Sex Pistols at The 100 Club, Shoom and the Hacienda, all those endlessly predictable Classic Albums lists, blah blah blah. And it also revolved around information bottlenecks, a limited number of prestige press outlets, writers who raced to name things in an often proprietorial way – history pre-emptively written by the assured victors, who inevitably were overwhelmingly, yes you guessed it, middle class Anglo-American straight white men.

The internet really did change things – and we can probably, funnily enough, actually pin that down to one revolutionary moment: 1 June 1999, when Napster launched. That really was the smashing of the dam, the explosion of availability – with all the bittersweetness of glorious abundance cut with the devaluation which comes with the removal of scarcity. It also broke the illusion of linear progress and a single canon – once you could instantly hear the thing you were reading about, and fill an iPod with Diwali Riddim variations, 80s French coldwave, 60s Nigerian funk, John Cage or Britney Spears’s entire ouevres and whatever else, the entire notion of influence and lineage got rearranged. So it was not surprising that people, even switched-on cultural observers or creators themselves, might be baffled and lack the tools to describe what was happening.

Excusable at that point, maybe. But as the years went on a certain and not insignificant sector of the media and academia clung intently to the certainties – and the sense of tenured positions and innate authority – of the late 20^th century “rock press” model. The Continuity Melody Maker voices of Reynolds saying “glutted musicians make clotted music” in Retromania, or Mark Fisher’s 2014 Ghosts Of My Life with its insistence that information age post-modernity is characterised by stagnation leading to “lost futures”, became ubiquitous in academic citations, and the same assumptions – leading to a sense that change is throttled and there can’t be A Big New Thing – underpinned so much of establishment press, particularly the UK / US broadsheets and Pitchfork (a site whose “paper of record” status it’s not unfair to suggest Resident Advisor has always aspired to).

Writers with those twentieth-century models etched into their very sense of being and purpose were always looking out for the new rock’n’roll, the next punk, the next hip hop, and dispirited and pessimistic when they couldn’t spot it. (N.b. some might at this point raise the spectre of “poptimism” in 00s and onwards journalism here – that is a complication, but would take a whole other essay to address; but put very crudely, for me personally that doctrine always felt like another attempt to cling on to or remake the authority of the old rock press, albeit in new and admittedly slightly less Old White Dude garb).

For me, the “it’s all blurring together” discourse was the one thing that really was constantly rehashing the old. But outside the offices of editors and their star writers, culture, and younger generations, kept finding new ways to process the endless deluge, and in many ways getting better at it. Dance culture’s melting of genre boundaries in the 2010s led to a lot of the same anxieties we are hearing now that there is no new revolution – very vague terms like “bass music”, “post dubstep”, “EDM”, became catch-alls and meant different things to different people, but didn’t actually signal a death of newness:”: something I wrote about for Red Bull Music Academy back in 2011.

And so it continues – but just lately, the flaws in the stasis / homogeneity arguments have become even more glaring thanks to one key factor: my own kids reaching their teens and finding their own tastes. I’ve witnessed first hand how 13- and 14-year olds can transition from Minecraft immersion and rhythm games through brostep and breakcore into an online culture of production battles and competitive music scholarship where goldmines of information about both the tools to make music and the theory and cultural lineages behind it are being swapped through webs of Discord servers, Subreddits, YouTube comments threads, TikToks and reels. Close-knit communities of teenagers from the Philippines, Morocco, rural Brazil, Buttfuck Arizona MAGA towns and wherever else are not just sharing their music journeys but learning in depth about each other’s distinct cultures, festivals etc.

These communities are truly radically different in their sophistication, nature of their practice – and most crucially their globalism – from previous online music communities; they make MySpace look like paper fanzines. And that globalising is the first of the huge revolutions of the past decade. Szatan actually touches on this in his RA piece, admitting that “hell, everything coming out of Brazil” alone amounts to “incredible, future-facing music”. Like, YES? A nation BIGGER THAN WESTERN EUROPE has mind-blowing, innovative new sounds flowing like tap water, and that is constantly entering the global music bloodstream? That on its own IS new and revolutionary. And that’s just one country and one sub-section of music – there is infinitely more besides. Come on, think back to 2016: could you have imagined that the global AAA-list of pop stars would include Korean and Nigerian acts or a Puerto Rican singing almost solely in Spanish? Or that South African takes on house music and Punjabi trap would be established parts of the international sonic vocabulary? Be serious.

Seeing and hearing through teenagers’ eyes and ears has also brought home the dramatically changing nature of stardom, especially as it frames women, LGBTQ+ people and neurodiversity. Women – and queer or sexually ambigious women in particular – now rule popular culture in a way that again, was unimaginable a decade ago. This hit home like a sledgehammer for me very recently when I went to see Mitski at the Royal Albert Hall. My review is here but what I didn’t say – because I thought it would end up being all people focused on – was that I left the building feeling intensely that I’d witnessed something very close to seeing David Bowie at his 1970s peak of popularity and creative extremity.

I had seen a billions-of-streams POP STAR who was also acting as a librarian for avant-garde culture, a beacon for the queer and neurodiverse, and garners a special kind of love because of that. This was radical outsider values in the heart of the mainstream as much as Bowie, Blondie, Talking Heads, Nirvana, Goldie ever were – but this was music by a woman for women and girls (including trans and nonbinary), a culture that I could only ever be an outside observer or at best guest in, in an entirely new way. Just look at Mitski’s Radio 1 Big Weekend performance, which is online for another week. The front half of the crowd is almost entirely female; boys and men are in the tent, they enjoy it, but they instinctively know that the full experience down the front is not for them. This is radical and it’s new.

Mitski is an extreme example, but just look at the ultra-mainstream: this is the era of girls and women who are hyper-literate, tell stories of real life with emotional brutality and surgical precision, understand that their own “lore” isn’t just marketing or titillation, but part of the art, and an audience that delights in their work as such. Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter (Seriously, “I beg you, don’t embarrass me, motherfucker” is some Joan Didion, Joni Mitchell-ass writing), Laufey, Phoebe Bridgers, Billie Eilish are writing their own place in the megastar firmament – with Lana Del Rey and Hayley Williams still present as elders loved by the same young audience. And more, outside the overtly “singer-songwriter” zone, the likes of Doechii and Pink Pantheress are presenting a different sort of literacy – in their cases 360 degree visual and narrative autership, with their own canons of past filmic and artistic influence – again speaking to the overwhelmingly female audience whose language they are speaking to vast success. But as a phenomenon, all this is broadly ignored by a mainstream press that can’t see past the “need” for yet another Taylor or Charli feature.

There’s more. Take for example the ability of Black artists to create “alternative” identities without having to answer to – whether adopting or rejecting – the indie-establishment definitions of what that is, nor face questions about why they’re not doing “Black music” in the way that, say, Skin or Kele Okereke endlessly did. In the UK alone, to have artists like Dev Hynes, Jim Legxcy, Little Simz, SAULT, Space Afrika, Loraine James, Dean Blunt, Shabaka, Tirzah, Klein, Obongjayar, Cobey Sey, Nala Sinephro, Wu-Lu and more as established figures on the scene, for their presence to be normal rather than being seen as ground-breakers or one-offs, is again not something that people would be confidently predicting in 2016 or even 2020.

On it goes – but really these revolutions are manifestations of a bigger, meta-revolution, which explains why it is still hard to pin down a “sound of now”. That is, that with each passing generation, streaming-era native artists and fans alike are learning to build their own personal canon, and therefore their own personal sound world. Whether it’s Mitski’s Bowie-Blondie-kd-lang-Pixies-Lynch-Gaga, Emma-Jean Thackray’s extraordinary – but somehow consistent – collision of Marillion, Yorkshire indie, spiritual jazz, disco, UKG and Fela, or Shy One’s sense of the deep and long flows of UK Black / soundsystem music that she plugged into almost from birth (a story I told at some length here), artists can now not so much escape the constraints of genre but be a genre in themselves. And those who do that most intentionally reap huge rewards. This is mapped out in last year’s excellent book, Songs in the Key of MP3 by Liam Inscoe-Jones who cites Hynes, FKA Twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and SOPHIE as the groundbreakers of this era, tracing the process through their life stories and work.

So, no: we are not living in a time where the algorithm has rotted creativity and culture has come to a standstill. We weren’t in 2001, we weren’t in 2010, and we’re not now. Not even close. But we are suffering from a lack of tools within large sections of journalism and academia who still haven’t learned the lessons of Napster, more than a quarter of a century later. Revolutions in who gets to be heard, how they reach their audiences, the way we curate, the very way we hear – and radical, brilliant albums, shows, festivals, online rabbit holes, experiences that couldn’t exist were those revolutions not taking place – have been happening right in front of our eyes. These are revolutions that affect orders of magnitude more people, and involve more music and lived experience, than punk or acid house ever did at their crux moments. They are what define the current moment, and yet they don’t generate headlines or critical excitement… and THAT is a problem.