Is it just me, or does most new music suck ass?

I have tried to listen to Tool and Radiohead, and I know a lot about Pearl Jam and other decent new bands, but they all pale in comparison to the bands of the 60's and 70's. NONE of them have covered a range of music like The Beatles and Floyd did, and none of them do it with any depth. NONE of them have the screaming guitars of Jimi Hendrix or the badass blues rock of Led Zeppelin, none of them have the stoned out latin groove of Santana, none of them have anything on these guys. It's not even a comparison. I know Phish gets plenty of crap and has a huge following of loser groupie types, but they almost covered a decent range of music and had some good moments (You Enjoy Myself is badass, come on). They still have nothing on the 60's and 70's though.

I have spent a good deal of my time in search of the bands that were supposed to be the hard-to-find underground ones, going to 3-day music festivals in Tennessee with 100,000 people, going to lots of shows at small venues, and there are some good bands around, with some hidden talent. There are not, however, any of the earth-shaking revolutionary mega bands like those of the 60's. It's a bleak horizon indeed.

How much Radiohead have you heard? It doesn't seem fair to listen to them a bit and then claim that they don't have the musical diversity of someone else.

Not enough to make that claim, really. Any recommendations?

I guess this may be a matter of taste, but I have just not been impressed by their music, because it tends to just sort of bitch. "I want a perfect body. I want blah blah....". That is just one example. I presented my little theory in the Fletcher Memorial Home thread, but I believe that music only gets worse when it starts talking about everyday life, and better music is always talking about fantasy, etc... I think that bitching about some life experiences is sort of an artistic fraud, and shows an inability to be creative enough to invent a new theme for a song.

I was not impressed by much newer music until I heard Karma Police by Radiohead. I ended up buying Kid A, and have been hooked ever since. I just don't think much newer music has as much raw emotion that seems to have been put into the older stuff. Unless it's just me. Maybe I'm just not getting it? And that whole manufactured pop of the last few years.... enough to kill my spirit.

Well first of all, I think it would be nice to mention that that song you mentioned ('Creep') is widely known to be the band's least favorite song of theirs. It was also extremely early in their career-- shall we start talking about the musical diversity present in the early career of the Beatles? No, I don't think we shall. Recommendations would include OK Computer or Kid A, as both have quite a bit of diversity, if that's what you're looking for.

Secondly, as regarding your belief that whining about personal experience is less valid art than fantasy, I would like to point out that the purpose of art is widely held to be a sharing of (and often interpreting of) human experience. A huge amount of art is about lost love, or a broken home, or racism. None of these are fantastical ideas at all. Shakespeare's characters are renowned because of the audience's ability to connect with them-- in other words, the audience can identify with the character because of some similarity of experience. Art is fundamentally about an expression of one's own experiences, and an attempt to find a commonality with an audience.

"A huge amount of art is about lost love, or a broken home, or racism."

My reply, a lot of art sucks. Art should be about the beautiful, the ideal, not the everyday, mundane, horrific, ugly, pornographic, etc. This is one of many debates about the purpose of art that has been going on since art was first created, but this is my view anyway.

I am taking Art History right now, and when you look at Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece (two of the most visible, continued art traditions in two long-lived, deep civilizations), their art only moved away from the ideal and towards realism when the societies began to decline. Undoubtedly, some of the most beautiful works of art of these civilizations were created in these periods (Amarna Age, Late Classical Period), but all of their artistic traditions began and shined with a pursuit of the ideal. Artistic traditions that begin to largely pursue realism almost invariably self-destruct, and are often a sign of civilization in decline (not to imply that is happening now in Western Civiliation, although many people think it is).

Although Shakespeare's plays were largely successful due to their ability to grab the audience, I do not think that is why they continued to be so studied in literary circles. I would attribute this more to his fantastic use of irony; creating complex situations that created a 'perfect tragedy'. He was also the master of poetry and structure, and the audience heard the plays but did not read them, so he gave his plays a certain melody and harmony when read out loud. I disagree that the purpose of art is to find commonality with an audience. Shakespeare worked so hard to find commonality with the audience in order to sell tickets, to make a living. His works are respected as high art because of their literary structure, etc.

We are debating the classic Ivory Tower (the artist is refined out of existence, work is pulled from the ideal) versus the Sacred Fount (art is drawn from the 'fountain' of the artists's experience). Summed up in an essay by Maurice Beebe, Tradition and the New Novel, "...the Divided Self of the artist-man wavering between the Ivory Tower and the Sacred Fount, between the "holy" or esthetic demands of his mission as artist and his natural desire as a human being to participate in the life around him." This, easily applied to art as a whole, is what we are debating.

Even if art is about expressing beauty, the only way we know beauty is through human experience. Human experience is all anyone ever has.

To a certain extent yes. But we pursue the ideal, we try to get as close as possible. We don't settle for things the way the are, and glorify them in their imperfect state. Not in art, anyway.

We don't know what the ideal is other than through our perception. If you think that art is only about idealization, you seem to have missed out on the last 600 years of human achievement.

I don't. It wavers between the ideal and experience. I just lean towards the ideal, particularly when it comes to someone with the artistic achievements of Roger Waters resorting to bitching about Ronald Reagan.

At any rate, I will check out Radiohead, but I think I can safely say there is nowhere near the artistic talent nowadays that there was 25-35 yrs ago.

I highly doubt that subject matter is what most art is judged upon.

Depends what the person doing the judging's beliefs about the principles of art are. Those who have any appreciation for the philosophies that have driven Western Art for the vast majority of its existence can easily dismiss crap that claims to be art, simply by looking at its subject matter. Plenty of nihilistic, relativist losers (who have done their best to put a stranglehold on the entire Western Art Community) like to say that there are no standards. Then art is s***, and s*** is art, so what seperates art from anything else? Nothing, everything is art, so art is nothing, and the word loses its very meaning. S***, I tell you.

Who determines what subject matter is artistic and what is not? It's not that art is nothing, but that everything can be given artistic meaning if considered in the right light. Existence is beautiful, and the human struggle is beautiful.