Hi everyone,
I thought I would discuss a YouTube video that, while not extremely compelling to me and while featuring an actor who, although he doesn't offend me that much, seems determined to continue writing skits that seem to be about my life without my permission, in spite of my lack of consent to this, my unfortunate circumstances, and my status as an uncompensated US law-abiding citizen, inspired me to think of an interesting question: Why isn't there more high-energy music, of the sort there was in 2009 and 2010, these days?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrNOYudaMAc
My immediate reaction was to ask myself: Is this a phenomenon driven by some sort of supply-side protest, perhaps related to song-writer dissatisfaction with the treatment of high-energy pop music creators such as Kesha Sebert and Britney Spears or the creation of new jobs that draw high-energy-only songwriters (??) away from popular music composition to other roles? Or, did cultural attitudes change nationally in the US, due to some political or societal shift in collective interests in music? (What happened to alt rock bands like Linkin Park from the early 2000's?) As a third possibility, did some innovative breakthrough in technology, such as an artificial intelligence or other CS breakthrough, lead to a modification of the music landscape that could be explained by forces other than strictly economic forces (e.g., I presented powerful ideas about relativization on this forum and
cstheory.stackexchange.com; perhaps more people suddenly figured out PSPACE = PH based on my ideas, and gained access to technologies related to genetic algorithms or annealing?)? Finally, I considered that it might be possible that some sort of plot--either a very old plot with a recently-activated condition, such as one created by a legal scholar, or some sort of political action by a powerful, well-known, knowledgeable, or wealthy figure--was undertaken to methodically bring about an outcome of this nature.
If you listen to music over the past decade, there is much less electronic and upbeat or high-energy music than there was in 2009 in particular. As a long-time music fan, I remember songs like "Sweet Escape" by Gwen Stefani in 2007, and electronic music bands like "The Prodigy" and "The Crystal Method" that really went away in a real sense after 2012 in particular, even before Keith Flint's tragic suicide in 2019.
My unproved guess is that it has something to do with demand from fans. If you listen to The Crystal Method's latest album that I remember, "The Trip Home," you can see that like many of TCM's previous albums, this music represents another big change from TCM's previous sound.
This is just anecdotal evidence and one example, but I suppose the interesting question to pose is: Why isn't there more high-energy pop music produced by the media these days? If it is a demand-from-fans issue, then what happened to our society to change demand for music?
-Philip White (
philip...@yahoo.com)