Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Getting Worse
One usually hears that there’s no money to be made in music anyextra. However then, there was no money to be made in music when Bob Dylan begined his profession both—at the least according to Bob Dylan. “In case you may simply support yourself, you have been doin’ good,” he says in an interview clip included in the quick compilation above. “There wasn’t this huge billion-dollar indusattempt that it’s at the moment, and people do go into it simply to make money.” He seems to have made that comment within the late 9teen-eighties (to evaluate by his Hearts of Fireplace look), by which period each the industry to nature of popular music had advanced into very different beasts than they have been within the early sixties, when he made his reporting debut.
“Machines are making a lot of the music now,” Dylan provides. “Have you ever seen that each one songs sound the identical?” It’s a complaint people had 4 many years in the past, supposeing of synthesizers and sequencers, and it’s one they’ve at the moment, with streaming algorithms and artificial-intelligence engines in thoughts.
Not that Dylan might be accused of failing to vary up his sound, and even of refusing to acknowledge what advantages they supplied to the individual musician: “You possibly can have your individual little band, like a one-man band, with these machines,” he admitted, however obvious the limitations of these machines on the time. However he beneathstood that this new convenience, like that introduced by so many other technological developments, got here at a cultural value.
Even within the seventies, reporting was becoming perilously simple. Within the sixties, no matter should you have been the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or certainly Bob Dylan, “you performed round, you paid sufficient dues to make a report.” However bands of the following generation “count on to make a report immediately, without anyphysique even hearing them.” As for the solo acts, “should you’re a good-looking child, otherwise you’ve bought a superb voice, they count on you to have the ability to do all of it,” however “should you don’t have experience to go together with it, you’re simply going to be disposin a position,” a mere instrument of professionalducers who took authorial cost over the data they overnoticed. All these many years later, when it’s grow to be easier than ever to search out any type of music we may possibly need, no one have to be much less surprised than Bob Dylan to listen to “a lot mediocrity happening.”
Related content:
Bob Dylan’s Well-known Televised Press Conference After He Went Electric (1965)
Brian Eno on the Lack of Humanity in Modern Music
The Actual Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse: Rick Beato Explains
How Computers Ruined Rock Music
How Bob Dylan Created a Musical & Literary World All His Personal: 4 Video Essays
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.