Where do you see music in the next 10-15 years?

Future Funk isn't really "funk" thought. It's just French house with Sailor Moon samples and a "vaporwave" aesthetic (God I hate that word even thought I say it all the time.)

It's only a "new genre" because people love making up tons of new names for the same old shit.

Is it just me, or is country the only genre that isn't splintered into 14 billion genres? I see everyone in this thread discussing sub-sub-sub-sub-subgenres of various forms of music.

(x4) That track you linked, with the possible exception of the drums, is 95% sampling. It's not because it's not Daft Punk-level sampling (i.e. reusing an almost untouched loop à la Harder Better Faster Stronger) that it's not sampling.

Forgot how banging that Sedat track is, by the way.

Although, to my mind, even if the difference between french house and future funk is mostly cosmetic, I find that it's also a difference of mood, if that makes sense. To me, french house is really really unabashedly feelgood, but future funk carries over the vaporwave thing of always sounding kind of eerie at the same time, like it's almost disingenuously happy, in a post-modernistic surreal-capitalism sort of way. Much in the way vaporwave feels like a nightmare version of 80s elevator muzak, future funk feels like a slightly off version of french house.

edited 2nd Mar '15 3:24:23 PM by Akalabth

I think I would chalk that up to the hypercompression of the samples.

Even though it's hard to overcompress more than this for example.

I don't know, maybe it's entirely the aesthetic that contributes to that creepy vibe, but even the music alone sounds still off. I think it's not so much the sidechaining as it is the fact that everything sounds slightly detuned or passed through a slow vibrato.

edited 3rd Mar '15 12:14:53 AM by Akalabth

I wonder if classical music is due for a revival. Since roughly the World Wars, composers have been a largely closed guild of atonalists, serialists,and other experimentalists who believe displeasing listeners is the highest badge of honor. There's a gigantic vacuum there, which some of the future's more skilled popular musicians might just decide to fill.

And maybe the four-string banjo will undergo a revival... But I doubt it.

Well, when a genre lasts for multiple centuries, I lean towards giving its resilience the benefit of the doubt! Compared to other past genres with a chance at rediscovery, I like its chances.

But what I don't doubt is that at the moment, there's no satisfactory outlet for any musician wanting to make original high art: popular music as it's currently constructed is too crude a vehicle, contemporary classical is a hermetic dead-end that's chased away its remaining audience, and jazz—where it isn't going the way of modern classical—caters to a highly specific and straitened range of taste. Gifted musicians won't be content with teaching school or performing the works of past centuries forever.

Where do the composers of orcestral soundtracks (film, videogame, musical theater) fit into that?

Not uncomfortably, I'd guess—it's not a bad living for the handful of composers who can get that sort of work. But it's incredibly restricted by the nature of the movie/game/TV show/whatever, usually bound to its success/failure, and deadline-ridden in a way that the best art can't usually afford to be. Not that there haven't been genuine achievements in that field, but it's generally in spite of the job's demands.

Well, given what you said earlier about modern pop music being too crude to make high art out of... Remember they said the same about jazz and rock.

Sure ... and, at least in the case of rock, they were right. But all I mean is that if a genre's conventions are restrictive and stripped-down enough, they'll tend to set a ceiling on achievement within that genre—not an impervious ceiling, but solid enough in most cases. If your chosen style of music can never make a definitive break from the whole Three Chords and the Truth nonsense, and keeps getting cyclically pulled back to it by fashion, that style of music has non-transcendable limits that just isn't congenial to top-level achievement. It can still yield skillfully made and highly enjoyable stuff, but it's not an adequate medium for someone with Stravinsky-level musical insight & ambitions. And such talent hasn't gone extinct.

Modern classical isn't all dissonance and unlistenable 12-tone stuff, you know. Dan Forrest for example.

Okay, then try to tell me that the following can't qualify as high art (EDIT: just substitute the last song in the sequence for this one, which is the one that's supposed to be there but isn't for copyright reasons):

edited 3rd Mar '15 2:31:40 PM by Odd1

I'm going to address a few points here:

French House took lessons mostly from Chicago House, Detroit Techno, along with a few bits of different stuff, from the original Funk and Disco stuff as well as 'casino-style muzak', Saint Etienne or Acid Jazz.

True, that track features a few samples. And yes, I know of retouched samples, micro-samples, and I read a book on the history of sampling and electronic music (one could say that the first sampling device would be the mellotron, though it was limited in both sound scope and time its "sample" lasted.

A better suggestion that features less sampling, since it was more computer software-based from Etienne de Crécy would be his Super Discount 2 album.

I could agree, though French House became a thing long before Future Funk was even an idea in someone's mind. French House (and the general 'French Touch' aesthetic, e.g. Air) actually competed at the time (and, ultimately, won more prominence over the years) with the British techno and Britpop scenes, respectively^note Saint Etienne can be considered to be a link between the more dance-oriented stuff from the early 90's coming out of Britain and the French House scenes.

I don't want a revival. I want a more forward direction. I don't want to go back to mere tonality and rehashings of the 17th and 18th centuries, I want to see more modern music technology alongside the conventional classic instruments, cyborg opera singers capable of changing their voices in real-time, stuff like that.

Keep also in mind that the wave of atonalists, experimentalists and such came forth because of the world wars, as a way of coping with the disasters generated from the World Wars (if they hadn't happened, we wouldn't have had the electronic modernity of Stockhausen, the musique concréte of Pierre Schaeffer and others).

YMMV, imo. Three Chords and the Truth is a valuable idea, because it allows to express some raw emotions which are sometimes quite needed, as well as being an useful venue to air political or social grievances (and, for example, bypass the laws established by the old conservatories and the rock music realm that had become too complacent and stale by the mid-70's - the Punk evolution and the Post-Punk aesthetics were quite vital for other developments to ensue and to break with the British socio-cultural class system, at least for a while).

Speaking as someone who can listen to Rennaissance classical music, and then listen to the Sex Pistols or The Slits, and then listen to some Derrick May, and so on and so forth.

It's not about the technical talent, it's about the music sounding great, regardless of whether you have talent or not. Give it a go, even if you can't sing or play properly. As long as you do your best and put your mind and/or heart in it. Use violins, use computers, trash cans, anything, as long as you can make something decent, different or original out of it.

edited 3rd Mar '15 3:54:52 PM by Quag15

As Duke Ellington said, "If it sounds good, it is good."

I, for one, believe that most good 50s rock 'n' roll is in and of itself art, in the same way that Scott Joplin's rags are art, or Louis Armstrong's work with the Hot Five is art.

edited 3rd Mar '15 4:22:48 PM by Aldo930

All music is art, bar none.

Even Mrs. Miller? Or Shooby Taylor?

The sanest answer to debates about the definition of art is, Everything is art. "Art" is not a synonym for "good".

This pretty much sums up what a song has to do in order for me to like it. It doesn't have to do anything specific, it just has to sound good to me.

To again quote the Duke:

"It makes no difference if it's sweet or hot / Just give that rhythm everything you've got!"

Heh. That quote amuses me even more, as I've recently learned what hot and sweet mean in that context.

Ironically, when the Swing movement really took off, Duke Ellington hated it.

Of course, that was because... Well, today we have the luxury of only listening to the swing bands that have stood the test of time. Duke Ellington didn't have that luxury. (Incidentally, those swing musicians who've stood the test of time are largely the ones that Duke did have respect for, back then.)

Duke Ellington also hated rock music. I'm not gonna defend that one.

Most of the swing guys hated rock.

Then in the 60s they were all forced to record rock tunes in many, many hopeless attempts to seem with it.

edited 3rd Mar '15 5:52:37 PM by Aldo930