Music in an age of atomisation

Is music stagnating?

Photograph by Stephan Vance - Chicago, United States

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” — David Graeber

---

A debate is growing about whether music — and culture more generally — has stagnated. Ted Gioia, a jazz musician, musicologist, and one of Substack’s most popular writers, is a strong proponent of the view that it has. He believes that risk-averse record labels are neglecting to invest in new artists, social media companies are shredding people’s attention spans with addictive technologies offering ever-more-fragmented ‘content’, and the avant-garde is on repeat, with cutting-edge ideas that have been cutting-edge for decades.

The people running the music industry have lost confidence in new music. They won’t admit it publicly—that would be like the priests of Jupiter and Apollo in ancient Rome admitting that their gods are dead. Even if they know it’s true, their job titles won’t allow such a humble and abject confession. Yet that is exactly what’s happening. The moguls have lost their faith in the redemptive and life-changing power of new music.

An opposing view is that these objections are the predictable and nostalgic grumblings inherent in the natural divergence of intergenerational tastes. With more music than ever, more sifting is required, but those who make the effort will find just as much gold. Katharine Dee proposed a further argument in her article No, Culture is Not Stuck, where she suggests that the primary vehicles for art and culture may have transformed so radically that traditional critics may no longer be able to recognise the forms of contemporary art and culture. Just as theatre gradually gave way to film as the most popular medium for story-telling and acting, other art forms may be undergoing similar transformations, causing us to misdiagnose transformation as stagnation. In her own words:

We’re witnessing the rise of new forms of cultural expression. If these new forms aren’t dismissed by critics, it’s because most of them don’t even register as relevant. Or maybe because they can’t even perceive them. 

Dee’s argument is interesting. The printing press ignited the mass production of books, records, and photographs that comprise our contemporary understanding of art, so it seems unreasonable to expect that the digital revolution should leave art forms unaltered. It’s possible, for instance, that certain computer games may be considered art in the future. Despite this, I am unpersuaded by the idea that we are seeing nothing more than the growing pains of a world undergoing a technological metamorphosis. In my view, Gioia’s claim that we are witnessing stagnation is reasonable and should not be too easily dismissed.

In my last post, The albums making my year, I wrote a list of my favourite albums from 2024, some of which I expect to be considered classics in the future. If we look at individual artists or records, good music is undoubtedly being made. The picture changes, however, when we view music from the perspective of genres. We are one-quarter of the way into the 21st century, and except for K-pop, no new household-name genre has emerged on a similar scale to blues, jazz, rock, or hip-hop, despite the world population at the start of the 21st century being more than triple what it was at the start of the 20th century. A similar stalling can be observed in classical music, where the last two major stylistic movements, minimalism in the United States and spectralism in Europe, happened in the mid-late 20th century. Since then no major movement has been observed.

A more stark shift in modern music has been the move from communal music-making towards individual music-making. In mainstream culture, the band has virtually disappeared. The podcast The Rest is Entertainment, hosted by the Guardian journalist Marina Hyde and author and comedian Richard Osman, stated that bands had almost completely disappeared from the music charts: in the early 1980s and 1990s, bands topped the charts for more than 140 weeks, whereas in early 2020 that number had plummeted to 3 weeks. In the mainstream, bands have been replaced by brands and even though there are often multiple songwriters involved, they function more like companies than collectives.

Finally, a more disturbing trend comes from a study — confirming previous similar findings — which concludes that over the last five decades, song lyrics have become simpler, angrier, and more personal. To quote the report:

In essence, we find that lyrics have become simpler over time regarding multiple aspects of lyrics: vocabulary richness, readability, complexity, and the number of repeated lines. Our results also confirm previous research that found that lyrics have become more negative on the one hand, and more personal on the other.

Taken as a whole — the lack of new music genres, a more individualistic approach to making music, with often simpler, angrier and more personal lyrics, in addition to the isolating effects of social media — it appears there has been a significant change in music culture. In this new culture, musicians are more isolated in their work, while encouraged to maximise audience size and engagement without demanding too much of people’s attention. This might be good for business, but it is not good for art.

This leaves me unconvinced that all we are witnessing is the inability to perceive new artistic and cultural forms. Instead, it seems we are observing something larger unfolding: the rise of atomisation and individualism.

To make sense of this, music and culture need to be considered within the wider political and economic landscape. Musicians live amid the same political and economic pressures as everyone else and can be just as prone to internalising the values that give them the best chance of survival.

So, where might a rise in individualism stem from?

The clearest description I have found is in a recent book called The Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson, which opens with the following lines.

Imagine that the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of Communism. That’s more or less where we find ourselves today. The dominant ideology of our times — that affects nearly every aspect of our lives — for most of us has no name.

The Invisible Doctrine. The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life) by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson

The book meticulously describes and documents the development and implementation of the radical philosophy of neoliberalism, famously promoted and enacted by American President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Intellectuals such as Fredrick Hayek and Milton Freidman developed the philosophy, proposing a virtual eradication of the state in favour of deregulated markets. The Chicago School of Economics incubated the philosophy, which continues to be promoted by a series of obliquely-funded think tanks around the world, as well as various media organisations.

Though the politics may be technical, its central creed is simple, which the book describes as follows:

What is neoliberalism? It’s an ideology whose central belief is that competition is the defining feature of humankind. It tells us we are greedy and selfish, but that greed and selfishness light the path to social improvement, generating wealth that will eventually enrich us all.

It casts us as consumers rather than citizens. It seeks to persuade us that our well-being is best realized not through political choice, but through economic choice — specifically, buying and selling. It promises us that by buying and selling we can discover a natural, meritocratic hierarchy of winners and losers.

When British Prime Minister Margeret Thatcher said, ‘There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families’ she was not expressing just her personal beliefs, but this bleak philosophy; a Cold War fear of extreme collectivism was used to promote a philosophy of extreme individualism, with societies reordered to reward those who conformed.

Neoliberalism has been successful because it has not just reordered our political and economic lives but our cultural lives too. All of us, to varying degrees, have internalised its values, imagining ourselves as either winners or losers in the game of life. Neoliberalism lurks in the shadows of society, aware that if it were fully revealed most people would be revolted by it.

So, has music stagnated? To a degree, I believe yes. But I don’t think this is purely for technological or business reasons, but rather because we live in a political and economic system that broke in 2008 and has been disintegrating ever since. Music cannot thrive in this environment. There are many exceptions, of course. Kamasi Washington’s debut album, The Epic, was a rallying call for the power of collaboration; created by a group of lifelong friends, they hired a recording studio for a month to work together on each others’ projects. Shabaka's recent album Percieve Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, is the product of one of the world’s most prolific collaborators, who brings together a cast of sublime musicians. I could list many more examples. However, these artists’ values conflict with neoliberalism and survive despite it.

While musicians do not have access to the levers of power that governments and financial institutes do, they arguably have greater power — the power to define the spirit of the day and spread ideas and emotions. Hope ignites, making people believe in a future where they cease to see themselves as atomised and powerless, but as part of a human web. This leads us to question, what if enough people simply ceased to believe the following delusion, as described by Monbiot and Hutchinson:

Of all the fantasies human beings entertain, the idea that we can do it alone is the most absurd, and perhaps the most dangerous. We stand together or we fall apart.

Democracy is faltering, our environment is breaking down, and our economic and social structures are vulnerable in a way that they have not been for decades, and yet rather than treating neoliberalism as extreme, those who criticise neoliberalism as regularly treated as extreme.

Artists and musicians have the power to reimagine the world and our future together. They can bring power from the bottom up. So what might happen if we gave up on neoliberalism in the same way that we gave up on communism? What world might come forth? What new ways of living might emerge? What new music might we create?