Retromania summary

Do you think the quality of music has taken a nosedive in the new millennium? Perhaps you’ve gone to recent concerts by so-called innovative bands and been disappointed by their atonal chords and lackluster sound experiments.

The problem with modern experimental music is that its methods are stuck in the past, and the musicians are struggling to come up with something new and exciting.

This wasn’t the case in the 1990s. Then, music fans were constantly being surprised by innovative artists. The techno and rave movements exploded onto the scene, helped along by impromptu and drug-fuelled parties illegally hosted in abandoned warehouses.

But the turn of the century seems also to have marked an unfortunate turn in music history: the new millennium has brought no new music.

You can get a good sense of this stagnation by going through music magazines or websites such as Wire, Pitchfork or Fact. Their articles and reviews make clear that nothing new is happening.

Even the most experimental genres derive from ideas that have been around for at least 20 years, whether it’s the minimalistic repetition of drone or noise, the unstructured freewheeling of improv music or the disharmonies of atonal music.

And so the mainstream music of the 2000s pulls out all the stops in an attempt to appear groundbreaking.

Take the Black Eyed Peas, for example. In order to appear cutting edge, they lean heavily on futuristic and sci-fi scenarios in their videos and apply robotic effects when the lead singer is delivering lyrics such as, “I’m so 3008, you’re so 2000 and late.”

But the Black Eyed Peas aren’t as innovative as you might think. Their beats recall those that Missy Elliott used near the end of the 1990s, and their use of Auto-Tune – a device that corrects a singer’s pitch with unnatural accuracy to give it an electronic sound –  was pioneered by Cher in her hit song “Believe,” back in 1998.