In response to polar123's comment:

@polar  --

This is a piece to the pie, but it's not the whole pie.   

I was addressing more what the root causes might be for the bottoming out of the quality of current music.   You can only be judged and benchmarked against your competition.   This is true in any industry -- think about going on an interview and having the sense that you had the job in the bag because you could address every bullet point and aced the interview  --- not knowing that all of your competitors had similar high-quality resumes, and also aced their interviews, too.    You still might get the job, but the high quality competition speaks for the candidate pool, and if you get the job, it's an honor and an achievement.  

But what if, in another scenario, you and all the other candidates were thought to be fairly mediocre?   What if the employer invited you and the others in because they didn't want to pay for a higher priced, more experienced person, and they decided to lower the bar and take a less qualified person so they could also lower the salary?  

Your same resume would continue to take on a different value, depending on your competition, sometimes making it look golden, sometimes making it look merely gold-plated.  :)   

When competition is weak, is it as hard to be above the fray?    

This is why there may be validity to the notion that we've had a long stretch of mediocre artists, who are made to look strong, because their competition is weak.

In the cases where the cream really does rise to the top (Keys, Bastards, Williams, etc. (though I don't like Williams ... hahaha) , they will will rise to the top anyhow --- but as previously discussed, it will take a lot longer because they came on the scene when the competition was more stringent or because they were not using a formula.    Anyhow, just something to consider.   =)

Is it that hard to pick out the blatantly commercial music - made by artists who were obviously put together in a board room somewhere with the sole purpose of making money?

I don't think so, and I even prefer to give most people the benefit of the doubt.

And yet some folks are just fine with that stuff.  They like it en masse, just like some do for genre fiction or hollywood focus group cinema.

One article on a related topic brought up "The Avengers".  Not everyone's cup of tea to be sure, but it was very successful and yet still well-regarded among critics and audiences of all stripes.  The perception is that Joss Whedon and co. had elevated the form only slightly, but enough to be noticeable.  But in the end, it's still just a comic book flick.

I've been back and forth on this for a while, but I think it's a bit of a trap to try and fit popular culture into boxes better designed for 'higher' culture.  It just doesn't make sense to evaluate them by mutually defined terms.  

 

Matty, I was defining them on mutual ground -- even if it didn't come across that way.   That's why I said you're only as good as your competition.   In any market ... as long as the benchmarking is consistent.  

It's useless, as we recently discussed re: the Spike Lee / Q. Tarantino divide, to compare a case of apples and oranges; while you may *prefer* one to the other, their missions and purposes are very different, so comparing them doesn't really make sense, and is fair to neither of them.   

I hear you.   But I *was* suggesting that the competition that I mentioned, was across the same playing field.    Maybe my "resume" analogy wasn't that good, but I was attempting to show that not only does time and place matter, but you really are only as good as the competition against which you benchmark and are judged.   When many people on the forum speak of the wealth of talent in the 60's and 70's, are they benchmarking fairly?  I think they / we are.   When we speak of the dearth of talent over the aughts to the current day, we are also benchmarking fairly, IMO.   

Maybe my bad for having difficulty articulating ... but  this may be one of those discussions that needs to be discussed in person, and I'm having a hard time getting my points across, points that I feel have validity.   It's not a matter of evaluating, it's a matter of assessing why there is a *perceived* downfall in quality.    It may all be perception, but it would take miles and miles of research to figure that out.  :P

 

I do think that American culture as a whole is not producing entertainment as good as other time periods overall. I think each type of entertainment has had high and low periods, due to the general state of our culture at the time. There may be a relationship between standard of living and entertainment. Also, events like major wars have an impact. My view is that there has been kind of a smoothing out of our culture. Many major issues such as racial unrest, poverty, the Cold War, are no longer with us or are perceived as not as critical. As more people rise to a higher material comfort level and are less stressed about social issues, entertainment tends to reflect that. Our hotbed issues, such as universal healthcare and (recently) gun control, just don't seem to have the same powerful emotional impact as some of the issues of the past.

Also, as regional and ethnic differences diminish and blend together, it also effects entertainment. Call it the blanding of America. Everything is the same flavor , so to speak.  

But as far as what is perceived, it still depends on who you talk to. Those who did not grow up dureing the 60's and 70's are bound to have a different view of those years vs. "their" years. I'm not so sure there is a broad, general perception that the quality of music (or any entertainment) is of low quality, even if "we" tend to think so.

In response to yogafriend's comment:

I hear you, and I empathize, because it can be hard to grasp nuance in such a format.

The talent of the 60s and 70s has had 30-40+ years of these kinds of discussions, which gives it an innate advantage over the talent of today.  If we always judged talent fairly in its time, then Van Gogh might have lived longer and sold more than one measly painting.  The man was hated in his time but eventually came to be almost unanimously recognized as one of the fathers of modern art.

By the same token, we can assign too much emphasis on the here and now while we're still in the throes of emotional response.

Regardless, there are also 30-40+ years of culture shifts.  Back then, there were a handful of tv stations.  Now there are hundreds.  Today, there are many more media creations occupying our time and distracting us.  If this means that the field has been diluted, then I guess that's correct.  So many more bands and artists trying to emulate the myriad bands and artists who came before them with more coming every day.

It might be overwhelming...if we didn't try to break it down and see the forest for the trees.

 

 

In response to devildavid's comment:

Some really interesting and plausible observations about what makes our current state of entertainment what it is.