Flutterby™! : music as technology indicator

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music as technology indicator

2000-12-31 19:50:43+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

I hit a rarely used button on my radio and tuned in to a station playing ZZ Top[Wiki] and Led Zeppelin[Wiki], a genre I hadn't listened to in a while, and it struck me how music follows technology. The late '60s, through the early '80s technology was transforming from a tool to the shaper, and the music reflects that push to take amplifiers to the edge of breakdown, the struggle as the humans took the technology to its limit and played along the fringes. As the later '80s came in the technology outstripped the reflexes of the humans, to here in the late '90s and early aughts the physical skills of the humans, like voices and reflexes and such, really don't matter any more, all of that can be fixed and changed in post-processing, to where we haven't heard a real unaugmented human voice or drummer in popular music for years.

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#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:30:51+00 by: baylink

I believe you mispelt "naughties". :-)