Music changes. A lot. Right under our very noses. It morphs and spawns and grows and multiplies. As I say often: music is a meme, and a particularly virulent one, at that.
I personnally love this fact, but it seems a lot of people resent it when their favourite artists "change" their sound. Musicians can come under fire from their fanbase for "selling out", "branching out", "going this or that way". But the only truth in such affairs is that musicians are supposed to be creative individuals. As far as I am concerned, if you refuse to accept this kind of natural progression, you might just be into this band or artist for the wrong reasons.
The proverbial "When it changed" is not a finality, it is a stepping stone.
Allow me to editorialize: If your comfort zone is too small to encompass the full spectrum of available music, then you're getting less bang for your buck. I'd encourage anyone to ask around their entourage and try to find out why they like the music they like. Where's the hook, why bother, why is it interesting? It's one of the best ways to connect with new music without feeling lost or disconnected.
I'm not here to sermon anyone into thinking the way I do. It's just an honest proposition. Listen to more and you'll learn to like things you'd never thought you'd appreciate. Discovering new music is a very stimulating form of mental gymnastics.
Musicians strive to create that special something that will sound fresh, new, and unique enough to be their popular identifier once broadcasted. It's nothing new, and it's also what record labels have been actively seeking for decades. "Who's going to be the next [insert previous groundbreaking artist here]?"
New sound
The number one gateway to establishing a new sound is new technology. Would rock'n'roll have evolved from its folk and jazz roots without the advent of the electric guitar and accessible amplification systems? Would Emerson Lake and Palmer have sounded the same without their iconic wall-of-Moog modular synth station? Would we have witnessed the birth of Acid House without the Roland TB-303's glurpy-durp sound? Would a rocker like Billy Idol have been capable of creating a concept album like Cyberpunk without access to the early ProTools systems? No. No, and no again.
Point in case: Consider the waves upon waves of music spawned at the advent of MIDI back in the 80s. Or even closer yet, the recent slew of songs with Antares Autotune-enhanced vocals as their point of focus.
I could go on and on but you get the idea: New means -> new experimentation -> new material -> new genres.
Another very popular method is creating a hybrid. Crossover carries the near-guarantee that you will explore new grounds with your music, bridging the gap between the old and the new. If you like something but find it could do more, mix it up and see the result. A little from collumn A, a little from collumn B.
And sometimes, a fluke is simply a fluke. A few years ago I was composing an electronic track and near the end, I added what you could nowadays call a slower, 2-step/dubstep beat, completely unaware of what it was. I have a tendency to 'layer things up', particularly with my beats, and it was just a way to create a heavy emphasis on the 1st and 3rd beats of the bar (in this case a low, booming kick and a 'chucky' 80's-style reverbed-up snare). It's not called two-step, buuuuut.... "a rose by any other name", right? I didn't know this beat by name (except maybe uh... "slow heavy support half-time backbeat"), but I was tapping into the pool of composition possibilities regardless of its label. In essence: a rythmn is a rythmn is rythmn.
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Okay, so I've poured the first part of my brain mélange into the sink. Now onto the main topic:
"Versions 1.0 and 2.0"
Believe it or not, a lot of well-known music we hear today stems from another lesser-known genre from which its component elements are derived: essentially, a 'prototype' of itself. Just one step behind in the musical family tree, there is always a not-quite-so-famous-anymore bigger brother who taught lil' bro the ropes. Generally, the older of the two genres will have waned in popularity a bit, leaving the newer to expand where it tapered off.
The examples come in copious amounts: 50's Rock'n'Roll has Swing... Heavy Metal has Psychadelic Rock... Hip Hop has Funk/Soul... Trance has Acid House... Drum'n'Bass has Oldschool Jungle... House has Disco... Dubstep has 2step Garage... Grunge has Punk and New Wave... Nu-Metal has Neothrash... Reggae has early Ska...
And so on and so on.
Often enough, the 'seed genre' (as I've come to think of it) will declines for the duration of its offshoot's rise in popularity. Then as the new subgenre matures and begins to hit its own peak, the parent genre starts to make a comeback. It's an age-old play on offer-and-demand: What we've had for too long, we discard. What we no longer have, we request. Basically a huge sine wave.
I'd venture as far as to compare the passage of a new subgenre of music into its own genre to the establishment of a colony. People A send a few representatives of their nation off to a new land, they gain insight from their newfound surroundings and necessary isolation, and begin to transform into a new culture: People B... All this within a few generations. Easy parralel to trace, really.
Over the decades, crossover, remix, dubbing and mashup have all helped spawn countless musical styles by revisiting known tropes and refreshing them through varying adaptations. This is appropriate because the same way a remix of a song is a new version of it, a subgenre is often a 'remix' of its parent genre.
(For those wondering: a 'cover' is a song played anew through different instruments while a 'remix' or 'dub' uses the original song material and plays with its constituent parts)
This information age means ideas travel fast and there are no secrets. It's only a matter of time before someone discovers your stuff, likes it, and decides to take it in a whole other direction, lengthening the lifespan of your idea and creating a new plateau for other offshoots to develop. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.
You will notice a lot of "back to basics" movements spawning here and there, focusing on different past genres, generally in the form of an hommage to the long lost pioneers of what has become "in" today: the same way old clothing styles come back in fashions 20-30 years later.
Music parenting: Adopt a beat today and raise them in your image. ;)
Cheers, Avian out.
