I can believe that the long-term trend is upwards but the demographic reasoning seems like it should apply on the scale of decades not years. It doesn't explain why 2016 would be worse than 2015 or 2014.
Is that actually more likely? Sometimes statistical "streaks" are real. Given that "celebrity culture" really kicked off in the modern way we have it now in the 1960s, so the number of celebrities from that era is far higher than previous eras, and that those celebrities are now of the age when people typically die, I don't think there's anything illusory happening. It's likely to be a very real, and very easy to explain, phenomenon.
The link you sent is about an effect that occurs with random sequences.
Neither the baby boom, nor the huge growth of the media industry (radio, TV, recorded media, etc) after the fifties are "random".
And then there's the fact that the earlier real stars we have now (as opposed to merely people famous in the past but already forgotten) are in their 70s and 80s (e.g. the 60s and 70s musicians and actors etc, all still quite relevant for modern audiences thanks to vinyl, VHS, tape, TV, CD, DVD and cable distribution, and --something previous generations lacked until recently-- instant access to all their works and news from the streaming, YouTube and the web).
This is no clustering illusion, it's the inevitable combination of life expectancy + tons of people becoming stars en masse with unprecedented global distribution at more or less the same time that sees them now in an advanced age.
The magnitude of increase can't be explained by demographic factors. It's far more likely that this is mostly due to a statistical blip with only a minor contribution from everything else.
Prince doesn't really fit into that model, being 57, although maybe there's some modification for being a male of african-american descent? Congenital cardiovascular issues, and whatnot.
I don't have any idea, and any guess I'd make would be... lacking. I will say one thing however, which is that they would certainly have unlimited access to substances to abuse. I'm not sure what the life expectancy of an opiate addict who could afford a lifetime's supply really is. It may be that we're starting to find out, but then, maybe not.
I bet the genetic component starts to dominate over long time periods, mediated by access to top quality medical care. That in turn is probably further mediated by the fact that (see Michael Jackson) buying a doctor is not always in your best interest.
Not all individual celebrity deaths have to fit the model for the phenomenon to show up, though. The proposed model just has to be one of the largest (or spikiest) components. As long as people who die for other reasons are fairly constant, they don't prevent the spike from showing up.
The biggest and scariest issue is that all of these celebrities are going completely unreplaced.
I am a fan of rock and heavy metal, and it is clear that rock stardom is literally dying off. The days of filling American arenas with rock concerts are quickly coming to an end, and that deeply saddens me.
Where are the twenty-something kids with attitude who will replace a band like AC/DC? Is Justin Beiber the best we could do? It's pathetic. Even a guy like Bon Jovi... Who is next in that line?? Seems like nobody. It's depressing.
This is why I'm going to as many shows for bands like Iron Maiden as possible right now. When it's over, rock and roll may truly be dead.
This is one of those moments where I realize I'm getting old. I never understood life extention and the quest for immortality. As things change, eventually they leave you behind. Find me a 90+ year old who really cares to stay. And that's how I'm going to feel when rock and roll dies.
>Where are the twenty-something kids with attitude
Attitude is not relavent anymore. We are all introverts now, people have wide varieties of musical tastes and preferences .there is huge amount of experimentation going on in music due to the fact that process of creating music has become much more accessible. There are tons of awesome music being produced everywhere you just have to dig deeper.
Exactly. I personally know 3 different people who have multiple side projects where they record, mix, and produce amazing music, from their homes. It's much harder to stand out when so many people have great music.
I almost feel like a genre has to "die" at some point in order to live (i.e. gain relevance) again. Something that stays in the public consciousness past its prime gains association with being "something your parents like" and eventually "something your grandparents like", and these are bad associations if you want something to get wildly popular.
A lot of brands that have carpet-bomb "get everyone hooked at once" marketing campaigns, like Old Spice, end up with this effect where nobody wants to use the product since it's what their dad uses, and they don't want to smell like their dad. So Old Spice has set upon the strategy of letting its marketing go quiet for a few years, and then, pretty much once per generation, running a new fleet of ads claiming that Old Spice is "not your dad's deodorant", but is in fact best associated with buff 20-something men.
The same happens in clothing (look at e.g. 80s clothing coming back into fashion just as everyone's mom had finally stopped wearing it.)
Now, I've never seen anyone cite explicit evidence of it occurring in music as well, but it would fit the general mechanism. It might be why e.g. disco has mostly stayed dead (it's survived in the public consciousness with the image of the aging, pervy "uncle", a white guy with an afro wearing white suede and rollerblades, trying to retain his relevance); while genres like jazz are perennial (getting once again associated with being "young and cosmopolitan" at each turn of the clock.)
If rock can truly die—if we can let go of "classic rock" music stations and dads sporting worn-to-dishrags "rock concert" tees—and allow the ground of the genre's image to lay fallow for a bit, we might be able to sew something new there.
Popular genres change overtime. Right now EDM is filling arenas. That doesn't mean rock is dead and if you think it is you're not looking hard enough. There are LOTS of great rock bands - they're just playing clubs and theatres.
Sure! They're not exactly new but if you haven't check out The Gaslight Anthem plus the side projects and solo work of the frontman (Brian Fallon, The Horrible Crowes, Molly and The Zombies). A few others I'm listening to:
Rock and roll lives on in a much more potent, pure form in basements and bookstores and independent venues all over the world. Arena rock is dead, because it's bland, diluted, and controlled by corporations.
It's possibly ( I won't generalize there so I disagree ) bland and diluted now, but this was not always so. The death of radio and the rise of the CD are always my usual suspects for why any sort of musical monoculture failed.
"Basements, bookstores and independent venues" dooms the practitioners to being hobbyists.
That's slightly different because hacker culture creates a public commons that practitioners can use to make money. It is not clear to what extent this actually happens.
Perhaps EDM works like how hacker culture works. I just don't know much about that . But for more traditional musicians it seems harder to... monetize the work. But this was probably always true - it was not uncommon for touring musicians in the radio era before TV to take on sponsors. The span in which people were sustained mainly by record sales was pretty brief.
The amount of music easily available today is overwhelmingly larger than it was thirty or forty years ago, and the path to fame for a new band is radically different. As a consequence, we have more music nowadays but we won't get many more of those larger-than-life stars that dominated public culture in decades past. Justin Bieber might look like a big thing, but he doesn't hold a candle to e.g. Michael Jackson in the 80s.
Michael Jackson wasn't as unique as you think, every generation is going to have their own enduring stars that release hits over multiple decades. Indeed, Katy Perry in her early 30s has already equaled Michael Jackson in terms of number of hits in the Billboard Hot 100 and the number of #1 Singles from an album release (Bad vs. Teenage Dream). Rihanna recently tied the Beatles for second place in total time at #1 on the charts. If you think these aren't as significant as [fill in your favourite act from decades past] then you're not the right demographic.
Only this assumes that the music industry and its impact on culture is a constant.
Katy Perry might has "equaled Michael Jackson in terms of number of hits in the Billboard Hot 100" but those hits now came with much less sales than in Michael Jackson's era.
Ever worse, at MJ's time, if you had a hit, everybody heard it -- the channels were few and not that fragmented. Nowadays you can be Katy Perry, have a #1 hit, and half of the country wouldn't even know it, much less know how to sing it.
The cultural impact of Katy Perry is thus reduced to some teenage (or early teenage) kids, and tabloid gossip people reads and forgets that very minute.
And of course now there are 100 other things for a young person to do, between gaming, mobile, social, internet, anime, etc -- back then music was much more crucial.
>If you think these aren't as significant as [fill in your favourite act from decades past] then you're not the right demographic.
That's the thing though. You didn't have to be in the right demographic to think the Beatles significant. And even in the same demographic, you can have like 90% of people not giving a shit about Rihanna, whereas you couldn't for the Beatles.
I think it's a good thing. It implies that what counts as popular culture is becoming more complex and nuanced, and not as directly orchestrated by a few corporate interests.
I think it's the opposite: as it's not widespread anymore, it becomes less nuanced (in each particular incarnation) and more solipsistic.
And the discussion about pop (and that's what pop ways, after all: a big discussion) is poorer/reduced, as fewer people participate to it per segment of "popular" culture.
Like them or not, past musicians, due to the centrality of pop music to everyday life, the huge amplification of their message (not easy to escape in micro-niches), and lack of alternative diversions, were part of a huge cultural discussion. Not encompassing everybody of course, but still huge, which gave added meaning (even if it was just an "interpretation" and nothing inherent) to their work and news, and especially gave it potency beyond "affecting a single person".
One good thing is that the number of "your generation's music vs my generation's" debates will vanish.
Hell, I'm having trouble figuring out what teenagers are listening to today. Radio will not tell you that. Apps like hypemachine may tell you what's popular on blogs, but I can't figure out a pattern. It's like there has been an explosion of artists and I can't understand the music landscape.
It's not just the Internet. It's that culture has changed. Not everything is based around music, and even when it is, it's got the televisual/life-story elements (admittedly aided by social media) that are magnitudes more involved than before.
No earlier generation had anything like X Factor or the Kardashians. They are phenomena as large as or larger than the nearest equivalent cultural omnipresences of earlier days (Elvis, The Beatles).
It might be a case of diving deeper to find the bands that appeal to a metal fan. The Wall Street Journal (of all places!) had an article on The Weird Global Appeal Of Heavy Metal, the rise of metal in places like Indonesia, Chile, Brazil:
I've personally started listening to a lot of German bands - Rammstein helped lead me to Oomph, Unheilig, Eisbrecher, Donots and others. It feels great to love bands that have had #1 albums overseas, and yet hardly anyone has heard of them where I live.
This is not a new sentiment, and maybe nothing to worry about:
"It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation."
― Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
It is probably just a sign that your era has or is ending. It is supposed to be like that. Remember when rock first appeared there must've been people just like you complaining about their dying era and how this new Elvis guy was pathetic. Is better to adapt and discover new genres. It's fun. Just keep an open mind. To me is far worse to be stuck in the past.
It's the thing when one goes too high, the fell is worse. I can't be objective but I believe the post ww2 era was a special spot culturally for western cultures that cannot be replicated. Less boundaries, new mediums, new industries, new market and economy, with a decent post war peace mindset (post cold war, Berlin wall). Nowadays it's a plateau and the people who made it emerge are going away and the spirit of the era with them. At one point I guess we'll have to embrace it and celebrate a new space for new forms and art, because the giants impose a reference, a scale to measure art and productions against[1]. It may unleash new growth, new qualities. Even though I wonder what really new thing can happen. Internet promises are thin (to me). Maybe large scala computation + medicine will yield something deep but somehow I fear it touches on the human species altogether (current times are caressing SF, droids, SDVehicles, automated space, biotech). It's odd.
[1] see the never ending reboot movies.
ps: although I also have a strong feeling that classics are what remains even after an era goes. Timeless ideas like shakespeare's drama you know.
There are only so many cool riffs you can put together before every thing starts to sound too similar. Progressive rock/metal bands explore a wider range of combinations, but they're harder to get into, so they'll never reach that level of popularity.
"I am a fan of rock and heavy metal, and it is clear that rock stardom is literally dying off. "
I would claim all you need to rock is a guitar. Good electric guitars have never been as cheap or accessible, nor have pedagogical offerings as advanced.
Exceptional ability really does not create huge artists nowadays as much as marketing does.
Outside of big bucks marketing I would claim all sorts of music is thriving.
Guitars are expensive, you don't already have them, plus you need an amp. Then you either need to convince your friends to buy instruments and form a band (or join one), or buy a bunch of expensive recording equipment because recording drums and guitar well is difficult (and did I mention expensive?).
Kids already have computers and with a cheap USB mic can make non-rock music that is ready to be released on the radio in their bedroom for $200.
Completely disagree. You can get a guitar+amp starter package for less than $200. That's all you need to jam with some friends in a garage. Then start gigging with other friends bands - you don't need to record anything.
But if you want to record you don't need expensive equipment. I recorded my first band with Cubase on a shitty home build tower PC. I had no audio interface. I had a headphone splitter than I plugged two mics from a 'sing star' (rock band for singing) PS2 game into and used those to mic the bass drum and throw one over a rafter in the garage as an overhead mic. Quality obviously wasn't great but listening back now it's actually good enough and if I had the mixing experience I do now could be a whole lot better.
And I think it's that last point that's key. If you want to make electronic music you need a DAW with decent VST's (so Logic at £199.99 is your best value) - then you need to spent a long time learning how to write, how to mix, master, sound design. As someone who has been in bands and produces electronic music the latter is much more difficult to get started in. You can get with two other friends in a garage, learn three chords on a guitar and start writing songs or playing covers of other songs and have a hell of a lot of fun. Electronic music is time consuming to create, requires a much steeper learning curve before you can create anything good, and it's pretty solitary.
You're clearly not looking hard enough. There is so much new music available. In my opinion we're in a sort of golden age of music. It is trivial for artists to publish new music and it's even easier for consumers to get it.
Discoverability remains a problem but even still, it's a lot easier to find new stuff than it was just 10 years ago. You still have to do some work if you want to find new examples in genres you like.
Arena filling artists are not all that different now than they were at any other time. It's pop music to one degree or another. The genres that are more popular get the bigger venus. AC/DC style hard rock enjoyed a run in the 80s but is currently 'out' but that does not mean it's dead or will die but the next Iron Maiden won't be shoveled to you via top 40 radio, you'll have to discover them and i guarantee you they're out there.
Surprisingly often I find myself thinking about poker in everyday life (even while not playing poker, that is). And surprisingly often I find something I learned in poker is also applicable in life outside the game. In this case, the concept of variance comes to mind. Basically that values (for instance number of deaths of celebrities) are spread out. Sometimes there are more, and sometimes there are less. And that's just how it is, it doesn't automatically mean there's a trend change either way.
Or, from another field: it might look like some stock investors are "hot" or "cold", but that doesn't mean that investing with a currently-"hot" investor will give you any better odds. The variance in the market is high; sometimes people get a streak of wins without that being any more than luck.
(Some people, like Warren Buffet, do more; but if you know enough about their strategies to differentiate between the people getting lucky and the people "playing smart", you know enough to do your investing yourself.)
Day trading is similar. I have even read poker books to help with my day trading. There are tons of knowledge-of-self and life lessons within both.
In this case, I think we have both variance and a cycle. Given the age range of many bigger than life stars, the current cycle is just gearing up. Within that cycle we will have clustering and variance.
57 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadThis year is likely just an outlier.
Neither the baby boom, nor the huge growth of the media industry (radio, TV, recorded media, etc) after the fifties are "random".
And then there's the fact that the earlier real stars we have now (as opposed to merely people famous in the past but already forgotten) are in their 70s and 80s (e.g. the 60s and 70s musicians and actors etc, all still quite relevant for modern audiences thanks to vinyl, VHS, tape, TV, CD, DVD and cable distribution, and --something previous generations lacked until recently-- instant access to all their works and news from the streaming, YouTube and the web).
This is no clustering illusion, it's the inevitable combination of life expectancy + tons of people becoming stars en masse with unprecedented global distribution at more or less the same time that sees them now in an advanced age.
The steady yearly increase is what's important.
I am a fan of rock and heavy metal, and it is clear that rock stardom is literally dying off. The days of filling American arenas with rock concerts are quickly coming to an end, and that deeply saddens me.
Where are the twenty-something kids with attitude who will replace a band like AC/DC? Is Justin Beiber the best we could do? It's pathetic. Even a guy like Bon Jovi... Who is next in that line?? Seems like nobody. It's depressing.
This is why I'm going to as many shows for bands like Iron Maiden as possible right now. When it's over, rock and roll may truly be dead.
This is one of those moments where I realize I'm getting old. I never understood life extention and the quest for immortality. As things change, eventually they leave you behind. Find me a 90+ year old who really cares to stay. And that's how I'm going to feel when rock and roll dies.
Attitude is not relavent anymore. We are all introverts now, people have wide varieties of musical tastes and preferences .there is huge amount of experimentation going on in music due to the fact that process of creating music has become much more accessible. There are tons of awesome music being produced everywhere you just have to dig deeper.
A lot of brands that have carpet-bomb "get everyone hooked at once" marketing campaigns, like Old Spice, end up with this effect where nobody wants to use the product since it's what their dad uses, and they don't want to smell like their dad. So Old Spice has set upon the strategy of letting its marketing go quiet for a few years, and then, pretty much once per generation, running a new fleet of ads claiming that Old Spice is "not your dad's deodorant", but is in fact best associated with buff 20-something men.
The same happens in clothing (look at e.g. 80s clothing coming back into fashion just as everyone's mom had finally stopped wearing it.)
Now, I've never seen anyone cite explicit evidence of it occurring in music as well, but it would fit the general mechanism. It might be why e.g. disco has mostly stayed dead (it's survived in the public consciousness with the image of the aging, pervy "uncle", a white guy with an afro wearing white suede and rollerblades, trying to retain his relevance); while genres like jazz are perennial (getting once again associated with being "young and cosmopolitan" at each turn of the clock.)
If rock can truly die—if we can let go of "classic rock" music stations and dads sporting worn-to-dishrags "rock concert" tees—and allow the ground of the genre's image to lay fallow for a bit, we might be able to sew something new there.
"The original. If your grandfather hadn't worn it, you wouldn't exist."
Random word trivia: you want "sow" in the last line.
- Spring King
- Hinds
- Royal Blood
- Diiv
- Cloud Nothings
- DMA's
- Beach Slang
- PUP
- Dave Hause
"Basements, bookstores and independent venues" dooms the practitioners to being hobbyists.
Do you prescribe this theory to hacker culture as well?
Perhaps EDM works like how hacker culture works. I just don't know much about that . But for more traditional musicians it seems harder to... monetize the work. But this was probably always true - it was not uncommon for touring musicians in the radio era before TV to take on sponsors. The span in which people were sustained mainly by record sales was pretty brief.
Plus, doomed to be relegated outside the mainstream culture, as a pastime for small circles of people with common taste (like polka lovers).
Katy Perry might has "equaled Michael Jackson in terms of number of hits in the Billboard Hot 100" but those hits now came with much less sales than in Michael Jackson's era.
Ever worse, at MJ's time, if you had a hit, everybody heard it -- the channels were few and not that fragmented. Nowadays you can be Katy Perry, have a #1 hit, and half of the country wouldn't even know it, much less know how to sing it.
The cultural impact of Katy Perry is thus reduced to some teenage (or early teenage) kids, and tabloid gossip people reads and forgets that very minute.
And of course now there are 100 other things for a young person to do, between gaming, mobile, social, internet, anime, etc -- back then music was much more crucial.
>If you think these aren't as significant as [fill in your favourite act from decades past] then you're not the right demographic.
That's the thing though. You didn't have to be in the right demographic to think the Beatles significant. And even in the same demographic, you can have like 90% of people not giving a shit about Rihanna, whereas you couldn't for the Beatles.
And the discussion about pop (and that's what pop ways, after all: a big discussion) is poorer/reduced, as fewer people participate to it per segment of "popular" culture.
Like them or not, past musicians, due to the centrality of pop music to everyday life, the huge amplification of their message (not easy to escape in micro-niches), and lack of alternative diversions, were part of a huge cultural discussion. Not encompassing everybody of course, but still huge, which gave added meaning (even if it was just an "interpretation" and nothing inherent) to their work and news, and especially gave it potency beyond "affecting a single person".
Hell, I'm having trouble figuring out what teenagers are listening to today. Radio will not tell you that. Apps like hypemachine may tell you what's popular on blogs, but I can't figure out a pattern. It's like there has been an explosion of artists and I can't understand the music landscape.
No earlier generation had anything like X Factor or the Kardashians. They are phenomena as large as or larger than the nearest equivalent cultural omnipresences of earlier days (Elvis, The Beatles).
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-weird-global-appeal-of-heavy...
And then you've got the heavy metal bands in Iran that are far more hardcore, facing jail time or execution for their music:
http://www.metalinjection.net/metal-crimes/iranian-musicians...
I've personally started listening to a lot of German bands - Rammstein helped lead me to Oomph, Unheilig, Eisbrecher, Donots and others. It feels great to love bands that have had #1 albums overseas, and yet hardly anyone has heard of them where I live.
"It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation."
― Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
Isn't this good?
It's a very personal responsibility to feel relevant as the world changes, and it's assuredly more work than staying with the familiar.
[1] see the never ending reboot movies.
ps: although I also have a strong feeling that classics are what remains even after an era goes. Timeless ideas like shakespeare's drama you know.
I would claim all you need to rock is a guitar. Good electric guitars have never been as cheap or accessible, nor have pedagogical offerings as advanced.
Exceptional ability really does not create huge artists nowadays as much as marketing does.
Outside of big bucks marketing I would claim all sorts of music is thriving.
Kids already have computers and with a cheap USB mic can make non-rock music that is ready to be released on the radio in their bedroom for $200.
But if you want to record you don't need expensive equipment. I recorded my first band with Cubase on a shitty home build tower PC. I had no audio interface. I had a headphone splitter than I plugged two mics from a 'sing star' (rock band for singing) PS2 game into and used those to mic the bass drum and throw one over a rafter in the garage as an overhead mic. Quality obviously wasn't great but listening back now it's actually good enough and if I had the mixing experience I do now could be a whole lot better.
And I think it's that last point that's key. If you want to make electronic music you need a DAW with decent VST's (so Logic at £199.99 is your best value) - then you need to spent a long time learning how to write, how to mix, master, sound design. As someone who has been in bands and produces electronic music the latter is much more difficult to get started in. You can get with two other friends in a garage, learn three chords on a guitar and start writing songs or playing covers of other songs and have a hell of a lot of fun. Electronic music is time consuming to create, requires a much steeper learning curve before you can create anything good, and it's pretty solitary.
Discoverability remains a problem but even still, it's a lot easier to find new stuff than it was just 10 years ago. You still have to do some work if you want to find new examples in genres you like.
Arena filling artists are not all that different now than they were at any other time. It's pop music to one degree or another. The genres that are more popular get the bigger venus. AC/DC style hard rock enjoyed a run in the 80s but is currently 'out' but that does not mean it's dead or will die but the next Iron Maiden won't be shoveled to you via top 40 radio, you'll have to discover them and i guarantee you they're out there.
"Rock is Dead" -- The Who
Your comment made me want to revisit Feynman's Letter: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2015/10/do-not-remain-nameless-...
Lots of pages out there to read about it, here's one that might give more insight than my comment: http://www.thepokerbank.com/strategy/other/variance/
(Some people, like Warren Buffet, do more; but if you know enough about their strategies to differentiate between the people getting lucky and the people "playing smart", you know enough to do your investing yourself.)
In this case, I think we have both variance and a cycle. Given the age range of many bigger than life stars, the current cycle is just gearing up. Within that cycle we will have clustering and variance.
And now with the Internet making us aware of so much of what's going on and who's doing it, that trend is amplified.
And the more one focuses on that trend, or how long ago something happened, the older one feels.
Which is another reason that living in the moment is often a very good thing.