by Sam Larson

Created on: March 13, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

At the risk of being considered a naysayer I'd like to point out that this thread topic is needlessly pessimistic and petty. There have always been problems with contemporary music. Strauss was too dissonant for his contemporaries. Jazz was associated with sexual abandon and drug use. Elvis was the harbinger of immorality and his gyrating hips were banned from American TV. In the '70s the problem trend was overproduction, with bands like Yes and Steely Dan releasing overblown and pretentious albums of prog rock. Punk was destructive and violent, smooth jazz is tacky, New Wave was artificial and soulless, Industrial is nihilistic, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah.

But here's a thought. We stand here at the bright and shiny dawn of the twenty-first century, in an era where more bands are releasing more albums than ever before. The Internet, specifically myspace, youtube and digital downloading, have made new music more accessible than ever. There is more music to listen to now there there has ever been and it's all only a click away.
So here are my two cents for anyone who made it this far into this article. There's a lot of crap being released these days. There are a lot of bands that get radio play that probably don't deserve it and I'm not going to argue with anyone who claims that. It's true, utterly true. However, the bywords of the new frontier of music are freedom of choice. We, as listeners, are no longer shackled to what the Top 40 radio stations pump into our home, or what MTV tells us is the newest, hippest thing. The Internet has democratized the production and distribution of modern music. So yes, there's a lot of crap to wade through out there, but there also some stellar new music being produced. All it takes is the time to find it. I disagree with anyone who claims that there is no new, important or vital music being produced anywhere on the planet. The people who claim that are needlessly bogged down in a negative view of what they perceive as the problems of an industry. As I said earlier, there will always be problems and no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you wish for it, the problems will never disappear. Or if they do they'll be quickly replaced with something even more obnoxious. Because after all, "problems" have more to do with personal taste than anything else.
My suggestion to the reading and listening public is that the world wide music scene is too vast to be encompassed by a blanket generalization regarding the problem trends that we see happening around us. Get out there, find some of these new and lesser known bands and discover for yourselves that there really is an entire world of music out there and, surprisingly, some of it in fact worth listening to.

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