Music in 2025

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Seeing it like that means: we live in truly golden times! Much to rebel against here too :slight_smile:

It feels like yesterday, when Marlon Brando uttered some eternal wisdom about rebellion:

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Oh yeah! Just saw that. Sorry man :rofl:

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For who? Not me., I hadn’t even heard it until 5 minutes ago. I listened to it and thought, “well that 3 minutes of my life wasted!” QED, it’s not an instant classic.

Who says “Love will tears us apart” was a defining moment? For you, maybe. For me, no. It’s a good song, but there are many better, more seminal songs in the tapestry of my life.

So who says that song is a classic, or an “instant” classic (which remains an oxymoron)? The whole topic is way too subjective. Stuff that you think is classic, others will think is cr@p. Things that they think are classic, you might think is cr@p. Back to the young if today, they will make stuff, hear stuff that means something for them. Give it 40 years and they will be arguing over the “instant classic” status of stuff that is now. Where they have an advantage over us that were born in the 50s, 60s and 70s etc. is they have easy access to all music, from any era. We simply didn’t. Well, certainly I didn’t. Buying singles and albums was prohibitively expensive when I was 13, 14, 15
and through university. So in those days, I think most of us partly stayed in our “tribe” ‘cos it was too expensive not to!

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You might know only this version, done by Rick Astley’s brother:

But it was originally done by that little band called Joy Division earlier - and it really was a game changer.

:slight_smile:

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I think the old concepts of genre being what defines music and how music is marketed and artists are pushed to create music are largely things of the past.

I think this is largely a good thing. Artists are drawing from more diverse influences to create the art they want, and kids these days are liking music because it’s catch and speaks to them, not because “You like new wave music. Here is a new wave band. You like them now.”

Teenage girls these days are listening to Laufey, Chappell Roan, and Billie Eilish and they are completely sonically different musicians drawing on hugely diverse influences.

I would argue that the greatest pop-rock acts of the past didn’t belong to “scenes” as you describe them, and couldn’t really be pinned down by genre. Prince, The Police, The Beatles, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Elton John. You could label them “rock” or “pop”, but those are nearly meaningless. Heck The Clash’s greatest album, ‘London Calling’ largely did not fit the genre mold of “punk”. How the heck would you categorize Radiohead?

There absolutely are scenes where there are groups of artists sharing ideas and coming up with new things that all feed into each other. They just look different from the past.

I’d say that’s another big zeitgeist change from the past. The “band” that stays together for an extended period is less important. It has been replaced with the “project” model where different collections of artists come together to make one album, then split up and all work on new albums with totally different groups of artists.

You get clouds of artists that include like
 Bruno Mars, Anderson Paak, Kendrick Lamar, D’Angelo, Pino Palladino, Bootsy Collins, and a bunch more than I could name.

I’d argue this is a scene that created: Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’, Anderson Paak’s ‘Malibu’, D’Angelo’s ‘Black Messiah’, and ‘An Evening with Silk Sonic’. Which all sound MASSIVELY different from each other.

It often requires hindsight to recognize that ONE ALBUM that really changed the game and shifted culture. I can point to a couple though that all follow this same trend of a group based in hip-hop and/or EDM completely breaking those conventions and stealing ideas from 60’s-80’s around jazz, mid-century modern pop, soul, R&B, and funk and then incorporating heavy doses of live instrumentation but mixed with modern hip-hop/EDM conventions.

Daft Punk - ‘Random Access Memories’ (2013)
Kendrick Lamar - ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ (2015) and ‘DAMN.’ (2017)
Billie Eilish - ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ (2019)

I think other artists like Tyler the Creator, Chappell Roan, and Laufey also fall into this general trend, but have not produced watershed albums like the ones above, which I would argue are as culturally significant albums as the likes of ‘Paranoid’, ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, ‘The Downward Spiral’, and ‘Nevermind’.

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Here is your Revolution (‘To Pimp a Butterfly’):

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I’d say even most Zeitgeist albums of the past were not really revolutionary. The only truly revolutionary POPULAR album I can think of is ‘Sgt. Pepper’. The biggest Zeitgeist album of my lifetime, ‘Nevermind’
 I don’t think was really musically revolutionary.

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Folk Metal is absolutely a growing genre with acts coming out of Eastern Europe, but also bands like The Hu out of Mongolia.

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Coming from the house/techno scene of the late 80s/early 80s myself: Daft Punk was “only” the first globally known act from a very active and cool french house movement.
They rose to fame cause of great videos like “Around the World” by Michel Gondry.
I would argue, that “Homework” was light years better than “Random Access Memories” 
 and much earlier too


But if you delve into the topic, you’ll find other great acts, like MotorBass, St. Germain, Étienne de CrĂ©cy and Pan Soul.

I remember many stoned nights, listening to St. Germain’s “Boulevard” album on repeat :slight_smile:

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“Homework” was solidly within the EDM genre.

I’m saying RAM was arguably the watershed album that launched what I see as the current trend of artists/producers coming out of hip-hop or EDM, looking back to the roots of those genres in the 60’s and 70’s and creating works using that older style of live-played instrumentation but recorded and mixed on modern equipment with post Hip-Hop/EDM production sensibilities.

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So, funny association - cause of this discussion, I thought about the music my mother listened too.
Her favourite song was “All the way lover” by Millie Jackson. A largely forgotten song, unfortunately 
 and since a few days I started practicing it, so thank you everybody for reminding me:


(By the way, my mother got me into soul, funk and disco - so there was no generation gap in our family, at least for this topic.).

Cause of the french house reference, I thought about “Am I wrong” by Étienne de CrĂ©cy, one of my favourites from that time:

And yes, the sample they use is from 
 Millie Jackson!
I like how things go round :slight_smile:

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This is true though I don’t think it’s universal (i.e. there definitely still are bands as a concept). But still, the example I gave earlier - The Armed - is a punk collective. Kurt Ballou and Mark Lanegan are both on Ultrapop. And I heard of them initially because they were recommended by Bob Mould, to tie back to the original hardcore and post-hardcore scene.

Another one people post a lot here is AmenRa.

Then again, these have always existed, probably the best example I remember being This Mortal Coil as 4AD’s house band.

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If it is a new sub-culture or a new genre, then you can’t have a classic like Love Will Tear Us Apart. Yet. The thing that makes that a classic is that is has been around for more years than I want to depress myself with by doing the math.

But at the time it came out, no one knew it would still be with us in such a way in 2025. Yeah, it was a good song and people liked it, but I bet there were any number of songs from the same era that you listened to a lot and thought “I’m gonna love this song forever” that you don’t even remember now.

And with the way you keep referring to the song, you make it sound like it was some massive global hit but I don’t think it was. Hell these days Joy Division is probably most known for being “that band with the t-shirt” of the Unknown Pleasures album cover. The average person on the street wouldn’t be able to name a single Joy Division song. They might recognize “Love
” if you played it for them, but only in a “oh yeah, I guess I’ve heard that” way.

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Don’t wanna ride too much the Joy Division wave, as they are NOT my favourite band. And I blame them for conceiving the endlessly boring New Order, so there’s that!
But: arguably the band (and possibly that song) have made a diference in music history.

If you were not “there”: to understand the impact you could watch the very boring movie “Control” (shamefully done by a dutch director, Anton Corbijn, who should have stayed a photographer) 
 or you could watch “24 hour party people” 
 which is also fun!

Let’s dicuss after you have viewed that movie. It’s great. And funny!

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If you pick up on it quick
You can say you were there
Again and again and again
You’re jumping someone else’s train

:rofl:

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Oh hell yeah!

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Agreed. I believe this is a general trend but not a rule. I also don’t think it is really new either. Steely Dan fits that mold too.

I just think it has become a more dominant trend than it was in the past.

And even among those artists that work on lots of “projects” they often have standard bands they are a part of. Like Questlove with The Roots, or Anderson Paak with the Free Nationals.

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I like your attitude :slight_smile:

My best memory of that album was: sitting in my parked car, very high, with a good friend one night, listening to “Boulevard” through my custom made stereo system (= best sound you can imagine) 
 and watching the colourful and blinking lights of a road construction site, which was quite magical cause of the fog (in- and outside of the car)


I have given up smoking weed since then, but I fondly remember the feeling!

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I would argue that point. Babymetal is a new take on metal. When they debuted at Sonisphere in 2014, many of those interviewed were astonished at re reactions of the crowd, that old gnarled metalheads were smiling. Which you never saw. They bring a new aesthetic to the stage, and fought really hard for their right (and others) to have a more feminine style in the metal scene.

They are one of the more impactful bands in metal in the last 20 years. In the metal cocoon that is.

Also we would not see acts like Le Sserrefim, Kyary, and Blackpink play Coachella without Babymetal.

When Poppy launched she was hailed in the media as the next Babymetal. Which she was of course her own thing, but I saw her in 2017 and most of the crowd had Babymetal shirts.

Finally while we have long had women in metal, they have been aggressive. We’ve never had metal from a girls perspective before, and that is completely new.

I do agree with you on many things - Lovebites is a wonderfully talented band but is basically just power metal - but their fresh take on things, like Ado on vocals, are really innovative.

Rock in general in the west, is in a slump in general. A few shining spots, but Beato isn’t wrong, the solo is gone, and there’s little innovation overall. Asia is keeping that alive, and I don’t mean just Japan.

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the concept of genre is neither out dated or primarily a marketing tool it is a system of classification across the arts
Artists and teens have always drawn from diverse influences so thats not a ‘these days’ only thing
Most of the acts you mentioned that are single artists are not bands let alone rock bands, and the Beatles led the British invasion and are the definitive song writing pop band, and while the Police had multi genre influences that made them sound different to others that doesn’t mean they can’t be part of a genre

“the projects model”: this will struggle to create a genre if as you say the projects these artists co-lab on “all sound MASSIVELY different from each other.”

The ONE ALBUM stuff is not really the level I’m worried about its genre specifically for me i.e. will there ever be another new rock band genre that sweeps the world e.g. even if you a person didn’t know much of the specific bands or music, people knew grunge or punk was happening when those scenes burst out and took a new type of music to the world

Maybe the system of music distribution and consumption has changed so much that the continuation of new sprouts of genres coming directly from rock are over
There are still teens listening to music and trying to find a ‘tribe’ and artists making great music so it all goes on in general, but maybe the sub culture groupings won’t be so tightly based around music genres anymore (or at least rock ones)

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