Editor's Note

Do you perceive a relative lack of quality among today’s artists when measuring them against the Eagles, or even Chuck Berry? Have the sense that you’re part of a generation robbed of the chance to see some of the the “best of all time” by a greedy, monolithic music industry myopic enough to actually discourage innovation? Am I deliberately setting up a straw man right now?

Hopefully, the answers to these questions are, in order: “No,” “Huh?”, and “No, I think I’ve read this somewhere.” If this discussion isn’t remotely familiar, you can stop reading here. What follows is an impassioned defense of today’s musical climate as measured against luminaries of the past.

I have never “sniffed” musical royalty (yes, there is a Watch the Throne joke here; no, I won’t bother to make it). I wouldn’t know musical royalty if I saw it, and especially if I read about it in Rolling Stone, a publication as woefully out of touch with music criticism as it is with music itself. But I have heard some incredibly adventurous music, even in this calendar year, evidence of the enormous and satisfying progress of popular culture in the last 40 years.

Is Jay-Z really the 83rd best artist of all time? Is he objectively “worse” than say, an Irish arena rock band called U2? And how could we ever begin to make an argument either way? But aside from the fact that there’s something inherently absurd about trying to make comparisons across the broad spectrum of popular music, I’ve got a particular bone to pick with what James Murphy once called “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ‘80s.”

James Murphy, by the way, was until recently in a band called LCD Soundsystem, an outfit that wore their influences on their sleeves with true reverence. But they also transcended those influences, by blending them together and adding new little pieces along the way, and I’ll mourn their breakup far more than I would that of, say, Can. Likewise the Weeknd, a twenty-one year old who is taking the archetypal personalities and sonic templates of R&B and rearranging them in undeniably compelling ways, aided by studio effects of which Michael Jackson circa Thriller could hardly dream. Pop music’s progress, while less concrete than that of the academic community, is nonetheless similar: new contributions to the literature build on the foundations established by older ones, and we march inexorably forward.