Someone Call the Wambulance

For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music. In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop. Is it that people just don’t want to hear anything new? Or is it that composers and musicians have simply swallowed the pomo line that nothing else new can be done, which ironically is really just the “old, old story.”

Glenn Branca, in his New York Times blog, writes that apparently all music has not improved hand-in-hand with technology over the past 50 years. The irony that his own music has all been written in the past 50 years seems lost on him. (Although maybe he’s self-hating as well?)

I don’t know whether I have more of a problem with the idea that music is supposed to “improve” alongside technology or with the idea that there have been no worthwhile developments in music for over 50 years.

Or maybe he’s embracing the technological strategy of linkbaiting by being a curmudgeon.

(via NYTimes)