Accent softening II

[Rocky McDougall]

Related to Davids post on Accents, Music certainly has it's accents also. Rock & Roll differs from Californias Beach Boys to New Jerseys Bruce Springsteen. The Blues music of the Mississippi Delta, differs from Texas Road House and Chicago styles.

 

In the US, prior to television, the speech accents of the different sections of the country were quite dramatic. However; television was responsible, IMHO for the Blending of the area's accents into a Midwestern style of speech. Nashvilles Country music has done well at retaining its individuality, and Classical will always be classical.

 

That said, I wonder if we are seeing a melting together of the many styles into one Midwestern sound. It was good for speech and communication in the US but I dont think it will be good for music. Rock now has many, many different sub-styles as does Jazz. Can we keep it from happening? Do we want to?

Rocky

 

[rizzo9247]

Music is a blur, so many cross genres, etc. Just for amusement I found this, a chart of all the different Metal genres:

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Metal_Genealogy.jpg

 

I am sure there are hierarchial diagrams for the blues, jazz, rock, pop, country, etc. Mind boggling.

[Tom Capasso]

Rocky - interesting question.

 

For my IT analytical mind, it sounds nice to have specific genres that can be distinctly identified. It's never really been like that, but there have been times when we either didn't draw so many lines, or we actually had more distinct separate forms. Invariably when you have that separation, someone borrows while another band bridges and the lines start to go away.

 

To have separate forms sometimes breeds a lack of acceptance for anything outside your own world. To have the blur that we have now can leave us with the mediocre of various forms (and I think we see lots of that today), but it can help people discover and move around a bit.

 

I think the flow of this happens and it's outside of what most of us can do. Marketing of music can help draw or erase the lines, and we see that the marketing of music is in flux today without any rules. I think we're just going to ride it out for a while.

 

Interesting question.

 

Tom

[Kramer Ferrington III.]

I was talking to my drummer a couple of days ago and we were wondering about where rock was going.

 

And she said that maybe it doesn't need to go anywhere, seeing as nobody expects folk music to be changing constantly. In folk, playing a song like your great grandfather would have played it is a bit of a badge of honour, not a curse. In classical music, nobody would dream of changing a single note.

 

In fact, this need for rock to go somewhere, to "evolve", is IMHO, driven by purely commercial considerations. Commercial interests dictate that music should always be new and different (improved, even!) just so the industry can sell a new bunch of records every year. With cars, it's easier because new features can demonstrably improve performance or safety or whatever, but musical taste is subjective so all the recording industry can do is invent new pigeonholes.

 

So I don't think we'll get to the stage where we have a "generic midwestern rock" simply because that doesn't sell. The industry needs to define bands as thrashcore-emo-house-funk or whatever so that a certain chunk of the market will feel they are discovering something and joining some new movement.

[Rocky McDougall]

I am sure the record/CD retailers have in their stores, a guide as to where the music should be displayed. Jazz, Blues, Country, Rock, etc. I see many albums in the Rock section, that in my opinion, should be placed somewhere else. I am thinking, ten times as many shoppers brouse the Rock section, therefore this album has a better chance of being seen by the majority of buyers eventhough it really is not a Rock album.

Rocky