RE: Daily Telegraph interview with Pete 02.06.01

[thewho rocks <leb905@yahoo.com>]

> I've been reluctant to come to this conclusion, but the more I look
at rock music, the more I think Pete's right. The giants of the 60's
and early 70's did pretty much run through every new idea possible and
all that's left now is rehashes and "tributes."  This isn't uncommon
with popular arts. Jazz ran through everything by the early 60's and
film did by the late '60's. As did painting now that I think of it.
What the hell happened then that sealed up advancement in the arts? I
could be just an old fart, but really, I'd love to be wrong about this.
I just don't think I am.

This is the way things always work.  I haven't run across much on it in
regard to the arts, but there are some works from the scientific
community that are easily applicable.  

One is Stephen J. Gould's theory that evolution progresses through
phases of "punctuated equilibrium."  He's talking about physical
evolution, of course, meaning that the dinosaurs rule until something
comes along to disturb their equilibrium, such as a comet crashing into
the earth, and once the dinosaurs go down, then mammals experience a
period of rich evolution and subsequent ascendency.  The theory fits
very well when applied to cultural evolution, as well.  

Another is a theory by Thomas Kuhn, explored in the very elegant text
THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION. It was NOT well received by the
scientific community, and might have disappeared into obscurity if the
business community hadn't picked it up.  The way this theory goes is
that genius happens on the finges, generally where two cultures
collide, and that everything else is pretty much exploration and
development of that genius.  He provided a number of examples, the most
notable being the young patent clerk that everyone thought was retarded
who replaced Newton's theories (or paradigm) with the General Theory of
Relativity.  Note how the scientific community is still working on that
one.

This same thing happens in the arts, of course.  Modernism has been
replaced by Post-Modernism, but it's not much of a change.  Where music
is concerned, in the late 1950s there was a straggle of geniuses who
heard a form American music generally ignored and combined this with
new elements from their own background to produce a movement called
"rock music."  Everything after that has pretty much been an
exploration of the rock music paradigm.  There are opportunities for
creativity within it, of course, where artists combine it with jazz or
classical orchestras, or give it a latin beat, or whatever.  But the
fact remains that they're only exploring withing a framework that
someone else created.   

The paradigm shift was rap, I think, but compared to the last big burst
of creativity, it seems limited to me.  We await a new genius.


LB

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