Music only gets heavier

If anyone has seen any particular trend in music over the past... well, ever since music's inception into popular culture... they'll have noticed a prevailing trend in all the popular music of the decades, from way back when, to the current day.

In short, that trend is that music tends to get heavier, harsher, and more agressive as time goes on. Within genres, least wise - though pop music will all be pop music, and so on with everything else, new genres will continue to exist, and they will continue to get heavier and heavier. This is starkly noticeable in the rock music kind of thing. There are of course fringe groups - in the same way that rock music breeds metal, and metal breeds death metal, and death metal breeds power metal, and so on, rock music will breed things like pop-rock, and indie rock, and everything else in that aisle of musical taste.

When you look at the heaviest music on popular music channels three or so years ago being Linkin Park, it's easy to see how things have changed. I think I may remember seeing some punkish bands, but that's when everyone was sure pop-punk was a real genre. In any case... what things are looking like now... well, there's still a lot of soft, alternative stuff, and their probably always will be, but I think everything is definitely sloping in one direction. In a couple years, stuff like Mudvayne and Alex Is On Fire (not a great example) will be lighter, and we'll have bands like Opeth and Arch Enemy... not them per say, but bands like them... well, they'll be on MTV. And everyone who listened to those older bands will be calling the music of the generations younger than them crap. It's a vicious cycle.

I was thinking about this in relation to noise music, and I realized something... that all music, is polarized into a set of kind of three spectrums, and that every set of music follows a certain subset of rules. If you have your popular music - that's the most treacherous field of any kind of music, because while one day might herald unbridled success, the very next day could bring anonymity and nothingness. When you have popular music concerts, even fans who have only heard the one song will come out to watch the band or artist perform - and a week later, may possibly not even admit they've ever listened to them in the first place. All fans are die-hards within popular music, but can revert to their normal states within days. There are no true hardcore fans.

Then there's your 'popular within unpopularity' scene. Any group in here inevitably has a huge yet underground following... they seem like they would be so popular, and yet your average MTV listener will never have heard of them. This is usually 'progressive', 'post', and 'indie' bands, as far as I can tell. Dream Theater, Rush... those are my two notable examples. Anyone who's heard of those two bands and is a real fan probably holds their idolized band members to God-like status, and yet it is probably true that three out of four people have never heard of the group or the members. I think there are some pretty wicked followings after groups like this. Mostly a metal thing, now that I think about it. Conventional metal is a whole different deal, but that's a sub-set...

Then there's your 'no one has ever heard of this music before, ever' sub-set. Which I think basically consists of a group or artist, and the 100-1000 fans who think they are the greatest thing that has ever hit the planet. Noise music and obsure electronica are really good for this - more often than not, in electronic music, you have a chance to associate with the person, not just the sound, and thusly, stuff like this is bred. Indie works too, I would assume.

So, then there are a bunch of rule benders... I'm not 'punk', so I can't speak largely there, but I don't think punk fans general care what they're listening to as long as it's... well... punk. And even if two people love all the same bands for all the same reasons, there can be one band they're completely opposite on for the stupidest notion. It's just weird.

Then there's your metal, where fans of bands that don't like each other or are slightly different can get into blood feuds and horrible brawls with each other. That's also a bit over the top... I blame this on the fact that metal artists like to propogate this thing on occasion... the notion of a lead singer proclaiming that a band is the best thing out there generally leads to other bands making the same claims getting angry, and then it's just trouble.

As for electronic music - in a popular circle, even one hit wonders never get any fans. The songs are known, not the artists, and that's just sad. Then the artist tries to capitalize, comes out with ten songs that sound exactly the same as the hit, and fade out of existence. Anyone trying to listen to them seriously gets stuck with recursive rip-offs.

That's a bit of a seperate thing from the whole 'future of music', but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. Maybe more thoughts on this kind of thing later.