Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day (or Columbus Day, depending on where you're reading). This post about the triumph of poptimism originally ran this summer for paid subscribers.
And a congratulations to those involved in securing the release of the Israeli hostages taken two years ago. I hope they are received safely and can recover from their ordeal.
Matt deserves a day off, but the demos demands more content.
A perfect opportunity for a natural experiment. Every federal holiday, AI can write an article “in the style of Yglesias” on a seasonally appropriate theme — food security on Thanksgiving, immigration on Columbus Day, defense policy on Memorial Day.
Over time, we can watch the essays improve and joke about the withering of the Anthropocene Substack economy, when things like human seasonal rhythms still mattered.
On Tibet, I remember being at college - this was probably 1992 or 1993 - and I went to a talk with a visiting scholar who had recently returned from China who had spent some time - at some risk to himself as this wasn’t long after June 4- with Chinese pro-Democracy activists. He told us that when he brought up the issue of Tibet with them, their response was on the lines of “Tibet? That’s ours!” The implication being that even if the pro-democracy forces in China had triumphed (and of course they didn’t) that would not necessarily have been great news for the Tibetans.
It's sad to say but democracy would probably not be great news for anyone but the domestic Han Chinese citizen. From what little we know of public opinion polling and online sentiment, it seems like the CCP is, if anything, far less revanchist than the population as a whole. The government censorship machine actually works pretty hard to moderate social media posts demanding war with Taiwan, Japan, and their neighbors in the South China sea over territorial disputes.
I think this is not really true, or it may have been true a few decades ago but isn’t any more. You can’t take right-wing social media posts as representative of public opinion or you’d have to believe the average American wants to bomb the Three Gorges Dam. Based on this survey most Chinese people have positive views of most European countries (even though most Europeans have negative views of China) and while they have negative views of the US, CCP members are even more anti-US than the general public: https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/how-do-chinese-people-view-west-divergence-and-asymmetry-chinas-public-opinion-us-and.
Yes, my own studies of Republican-era Chinese history some years ago seriously dampened my level of outrage about the PRC's ethnic cleansing/"soft genocide" in Xinjiang and Tibet. The PRC's policies on the "Inner Asian Frontier" are really just a straight-line continuation of the last 250 or so years of Qing and Republican policies, implemented with more effectiveness due to technological improvements and increased wealth.
I think this is something folks routinely ignore about the world's autocracies: I would wager that both Xi and Putin are MORE liberal than the median member of their respective society. Everyone likes to pretend that the alternative to Putin was Navalny, but when Russia still has (somewhat) democratic elections, Navalny and his intellectual predecessors routinely finished fourth behind the old Communist Party and Zhirinovsky, neither of whom are even remotely more pro-NATO than old Vladdie.
Westerners have this idea that inside every foreigner there's a westerner trying to get out, but reality seems quite at odds with that premise. Sometimes, better the devil you know than...
I’d take the other side of that bet. For one thing even if Putin or the CCP were more liberal than the average member of their society when they came into power there have been decades of power corrupting in the interim. Putin was not regarded as particularly authoritarian when he was first elected and now he’s invading Ukraine which I don’t think the old Communist Party would have done. Meanwhile the average Chinese person longs to travel abroad—there’s a reason why the one big thing the CCP backed down hard on in the face of public pressure was getting rid of COVID travel restrictions once people saw other world travel resuming like the World Cup.
The pro-democracy forces are right; the best option is China becomes a democracy and Tibetans become equal citizens of China, like how every Western country treats its conquered indigenous people and how India treats Sikkim. Independent country in deeply landlocked inhospitable territory without large natural resources reserves would turn into an impoverished Bantustan.
I doubt it, not that many Tibetans have even left China (according to Wikipedia maybe only about 150,000 out of 7 million). Even the Dalai Lama doesn’t support independence and he was one of the ones who left.
Tibet *does* have a lot of natural resources. And Botswana does very well as an independent country in deeply landlocked, inhospitable territory. Institutions are what matter. And an independent Tibet would almost certainly have a lot of support from India.
What natural resources does Tibet have? Botswana is a country with few people and vast diamond resources; it’s not typical. The vast majority of wealthy countries are that way because they’re plugged into global trade—even in China itself the coastal areas are much wealthier than inland areas. All of the landlocked central Asian countries without large hydrocarbon deposits are doing quite poorly.
For small countries institutions are much less important than resources and how they are plugged into global trade. Look at how Guyana suddenly went from poor to richer than the USA in a few years. It wasn’t because their institutions changed.
>The implication being that even if the pro-democracy forces in China had triumphed (and of course they didn’t) that would not necessarily have been great news for the Tibetans.<
China's territorial claims on Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, though not indisputable*, aren't particularly weak compared to various claims of the many other states with similar assertions of sovereignty.
China happens to be run by an authoritarian government that engages in massive human rights abuses, and that creates the effect of undermining their (otherwise plausible) claims, at least in the eyes of people who live in rich democracies.
And yes, even in the wake of a transition to democratic governance, it seems overwhelmingly likely the Chinese people would violently oppose any relinquishing of their country's assertions of sovereignty.
*China's interpretation of who owns what in the South China Sea, of course, is entirely ludicrous.
A quick observation: I don't believe in the "Great Replacement Theory" B.S., and I'm fine with getting rid of Columbus Day as a holiday (like Bjorn, as an inland American, the only experience I have of Columbus Day is not getting mail delivery or being able to contact the clerk's office at the federal court), but progressives do themselves literally no favors on mobilizing the paranoid conspiracy front against them when they make a direct substitution of Progressive Thing™ for Conservative Thing™.
My solution to the Gordian knot: Get rid of Columbus day, make official Leif Erikson day as a rebranded Explorer's day, make the day after Thanksgiving officially Native Heritage day, and name a holiday after an Italian American in March, April, or August. My vote would be for Enrico Fermi but I think Colorado went with America's first Catholic saint.
As a Coloradoan, I can confirm that Mother Cabrini Day is indeed a thing and, as a lawyer, I can confirm that it makes keeping track of court holidays in October annoying, since the state courts are now closed on the first Monday of the month, while federal courts are closed on the second Monday of the month.
I think celebrating the arrival of Western people in our Western eventually-country is worthwhile - Columbus didn't set foot in the US I don't believe, but it is what it is...Jesus was also not born in December.
I'm not opposed to a separate day in remembrance of the indigenous cultures who were mostly wiped out by our arrival. Both of these things have value.
I too struggle to think of a debate more emblematic of the navel gazing our society seems to be stuck in. For me that includes both the seeming lack of awareness by conservatives standing up for a relic of yesterday's identity politics and the argument that it should be replaced by a celebration of the increasingly strange notions a certain type of progressive harbors about the peoples of the America's pre-European contact and their descendants over the next few centuries.
Which isn't to say I'm not open to the argument that it's a little weird in 2025 to have a holiday in honor of someone whose connection to the US is at best indirect. But you also have to be pretty high on your own supply to think it should be replaced with all these idiosyncratic performances of collective guilt and ahistorical understandings of the past.
On the flip side, the rightoids do their own “Indigenous Peoples Day” with things like “Intelligent Design,” the 1776 response to 1619 Project, Conservapedia, etc.
That's really straining. "Intelligent design" is the only one of those things that I can begin to plausibly imagine being described as a "direct substitute." The latter two are (1) expressly framed as rebuttals (even the most hardcore rightoids aren't going around claiming the 1619 Project and Wikipedia don't exist) and (2) treated with pure contempt by any form of mainstream discourse.
Wow, sorry, I didn't think that was harsh enough of a reply to merit being blocked (my first ever block by another SB user, to the best of my knowledge), but I wish you well!
I was probably more embarrassed to really like pop music in say 1999 than I was to be bisexual. Through most of the 00s the contents of my iPod was a deeply held secret.
I feel really grateful for the poptimistic turn in culture. It’s probably gone too far and I wish we could have a mainstream rock music scene back. I have a deep affinity for the whole run of rock music before it became a niche genre that’s really hard to interpret. It’s sad to me that I do a huge project on music for black history month and almost no kids like rock music. Jimi Hendrix is never liked for instance. But compared to the insanely insular culture of the before times it’s so liberating.
I am fascinated by how what’s older does on streaming. On Spotify, Hendrix and The Who are listened to about 1/4 of the Rolling Stones. The Beatles are listened to about 25% more than the Stones. Queen has 50% more streams than the Beatles (!!). Nirvana is slightly more than the Beatles. Pearl Jam is less than half of the Beatles and Nirvana. Radiohead is between the Beatles and Queen. Prince is 1/3rd of the Beatles and 1/5th of Michael Jackson who is over 25% more than Radiohead .
Jay Z has more streams than the Beatles but less than Radiohead. 2Pac, Dr. Dre and Biggie have somewhat less than the Rolling Stones but 3x The Who and Hendrix.
But someone with new releases like Eminem has 50% more than Queen, as does Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter to use contemporary examples.
But how do you explain stuff like Creedence Clearwater Revival being 1/3rd more popular than the Eagles and with more streams than the Rolling Stones? Fleetwood Mac is more popular than all of them, the Beatles and Radiohead? Very interesting.
I don’t know all the dynamics on this. Queen was so elevated by the movie. Fleetwood Mac definitely got elevated somewhere on TikTok.
My basic experience with actual kids (6-10 year olds) is the kind of death knell is being really guitar forward. A total inversion from my youth. A lot of them love old music Jazz does really well, Duke Ellington and Scott Joplin both consistently get a lot of love, Motown, and early hip hop. But anything that has really guitar led music and unclear lyrics seem incomprehensible. I don’t know how well this tracks onto the streaming numbers.
I'm going to go out on a limb, maybe controversially, and say Queen is just better music. My take on the Beatles and the Stones are that they were pioneers but are over inflated musically by virtue of being early adopters. Way better stuff came after.
I don't disagree with anything you've said on the thread, but anecdotally, among my older son's peer group which is elementary school, there is a lot of burgeoning interest in Metallica. Maybe a rock contingent will come back. Though they also seem to like and respond to plenty of hip hop and pop type music. I suspect that the days of strongly identifying with a particular genre of music have passed.
People should like what they like but this is wrong.
The Beatles wrote an astounding number of great songs in a very short period. Two comments to demonstrate their towering greatness: 1) the guy who wrote Here Comes the Sun and Something was the third best songwriter in the band, and 2) I saw Colin and Brad (from Who’s Line) do a live show. One bit where they have an audience member onstage involves asking them to pick a Beatles song and they said they pick the Beatles because everybody knows a Beatles song.
PS I’m not a big fan of Queen and think they’re overrated so hey, to each their own. Carry on!
I think their reputation has definitely changed with the passage of time. I find a lot of their music cheesy but I’m not mad about people liking them. My other dirty secret is that I really don’t appreciate ABBA…
I'm used to being a minority on the Beatles and my musical taste generally. While corporate lawyer by day I'm still an unapologetic metal head by night. No one wants me in charge of the Playlist, save maybe a handful of close friends who I've helped bring to the dark side, and I accept that.
Yes! Thank you! There is at least one other person who agrees with me about the Beatles being overrated. Everyone else, feel free to pelt me with rotten produce.
I’m going to express an even crazier opinion on this topic in that I believe the Beatles are (now) underrated.
I’m a member of Gen Z and no one particularly cares about the Beatles — it took me until recently to really dive into their music, and I’ve been blown away. I think the stereotype for people my age is that they have a couple good songs (most people probably know Blackbird or Here Comes the Sun) but that the rest of their oeuvre is mostly silly stuff like Yellow Submarine.
Maybe certain things they've done have been surpassed (while I am a huge fan of them, I don't know how many of their songs I'd put in my personal Top 25 Favorite Songs) but the whole body of work (like Babe Ruth pitching and hitting) and most importantly, how much better they were than everyone else in the 60s was (like Babe Ruth once outhomering the whole league) are both underrated aspects.
Another weird thing about The Beatles to me is that many of their most popular songs, I don't actually like that much, even though they do have over 100 songs I like a lot.
In My Life is boring and super Seinfeld effected.
Let It Be is even worse.
Hey Jude is like a solid 7/10 but it's far from their best work.
EDIT: forgot to add Blackbird. I don't like basically anything about Blackbird.
It seems weird to me (a Beatles fan) that Blackbird and Here Comes the Sun are the Beatles songs that Gen Z knows. Both are pretty middling entries in their catalog IMO, and I'd have thought something like Hey Jude or Eleanor Rigby or even Yellow Submarine would be more famous.
My dad didn’t like the Beatles so I grew up not much liking them either (too cheesy). I’ve mellowed in my old age and I know I’m probably wrong, but I don much like them either.
I have seen some Metallica interest among musicians but not so much just ordinary kids. Like people who play the guitar really like them.
I have a deep obsession with pop songwriting which keeps the Beatles very high on my personal list but I can see it if you’re more interested in the sonic part of music which is most people.
Yea Metallica was also an entry level for musicians when I was a kid. They were part of what got me into guitar, a hobby that sadly hasn't really survived me becoming a dad, beyond the occasional nursery rhyme when they were babies. Maybe when they're older I'll have a life again and be able to get back into it.
My son's group seems to be the athletes and they are open to rock. But again, they'll also listen to rap and pop. I'll hear them do Master of Puppets or Enter Sandman or something but then go to Thick of It by KSI.
Our kids are 10 and 8. Everybody has to learn to play the piano. My daughter (10) is also working on guitar, and my son 8 on the drums. I will probably be ordering a bass guitar for Christmas.
>My take on the Beatles and the Stones are that they were pioneers but are over inflated musically by virtue of being early adopters<
The Beatles were fantastic, but nonetheless overrated.
The proof of this assertion flows from the reaction to it. For many people, the band is literally without fault: you can't make a criticism. In my view that proves the point. Very few things couldn't be improved upon—even the oeuvre of the Beatles.
"Well, what can you possibly criticize the Beatles about?" you ask. There's this: the average or typical level of complexity and melodic/harmonic richness of a Beatles song doesn't match the same of, say, John/Taupin, Eagles, Dylan, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Bowie or Bacharach/David.
Now, the counter to this is: that may be so, but you're comparing a band with well over 100 hits (or extremely catchy songs even casual music fans easily recognize) with acts that maybe produced 20-25. And no argument from me! The Lennon-McCartney (and occasionally Harrison) machine was unequaled in the sheer *volume* of hummable, catchy, commercially successful (and occasionally quite beautiful and interesting) songs it was able to create. Popular music will never see their like again.
But that doesn't obviate the critique. The Beatles *on average* weren't producing songs that were quite as polished, sophisticated and richly complex (while still maintaining a high level of accessibility) as say, Tiny Dancer or Dreams or Like a Rolling Stone. At least not in my humble opinion.
To make a TV analog if you watch Seinfeld or Arrested Development today without nostalgia goggles they aren't that funny. But they were very funny at the time! You can only be ripped off so many times before you seem stale, and everything new and fun about those shows have been done to death since then.
By nostalgia goggles do you mean context of the time? I’ve never come across someone my age who didn’t still find Arrested Development funny, even if they first watched it recently…
You're correct and I think that helps prove my point. Friends wasn't particularly innovative but was the ultimate, most polished version of the multi-camera sitcom.
I mean Fleetwood Mac is the best of all you mentioned, and CCR is way better than the Eagles (Jeff Lebowski is the supreme arbiter of taste). This just tracks.
The Eagles certainly were (and are) more popular than CCR, but CCR’s work is on another level. Effigy, for example, is better than anything the Eagles created.
Even more than a policy/politics nerd I'm a music/music history nerd, and I've been gradually working on a project of the most streamed older albums (based on a monthly rolling average). If it's something you're interested in I can share my details. I've only made it to the late 70s, though.
You can email me (I think emails are in my profile) for more info but here is the Top 50. Very dominated at the top by a few artists.
Methodology:
1. Look at the least streamed song on Spotify over the last 28 days from each album (to approximate "full album" listens as best as I can)
2. Remove any songs under 2 minutes, which are often intros/interludes
3. Remove instrumental albums
Dark Side of the Moon
Wish You Were Here
Animals
Rumours
Abbey Road
Dire Straits
Led Zeppelin II
Kaya
Master of Reality
Led Zeppelin IV
Paranoid
Exodus
Rubber Soul
Boston
Magical Mystery Tour
Revolver
Ziggy Stardust
The Doors
Led Zeppelin
Let It Be
Sgt. Pepper
Bayou Country
Second Helping
Houses of the Holy
Hotel California
Bat Out of Hell
White Album
Pet Sounds
Please Please Me
What's Going On?
Help!
Aja
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
Black Sabbath
Born To Run
The Stranger
Even In The Quietest Moments
Meddle
Pink Moon
Grease (Soundtrack)
Tapestry
LA Woman
Van Halen
A Hard Day's Night
Strange Days
Moondance
High Voltage
Blue
Highway 61 Revisited
Deja Vu
So a whole lot of Pink Floyd,at the very top, followed by most of The Beatles/Zeppelin/peak Black Sabbath albums interspersed with the career peaks of some other big artists. No Rolling Stones, no Elton John, big numbers for Bob Marley.
There is exactly 1 album by a Black American (What's Going On?) - I was personally surprised that Stevie Wonder's legacy isn't stronger. Only 2 albums by women.
That’s interesting and has some discontinuity with the monthly listener numbers, because Zeppelin looks to have 25-30% fewer listeners than the Stones.
Oh and Pink Floyd has fewer monthly listeners than the Stones as well (but a little more than Zeppelin). Very interesting.
The thing that is funny to me about this is that many of those rankings make sense to me personally (e.g., I definitely prefer Michael Jackson or the Beatles over Prince, CCR over the Eagles, etc.).
The interesting thing is that CCR was over almost as fast as Hendrix was and ended up dwarfed by the Eagles ongoing success, I think CCR are viewed as something of a footnote critically, but now seem to be outdoing bands that were more successful or have had more critical cred.
Anecdotally I grew up after each and every one of these artists, and I would agree with srynerson in that CCR, MJ and the Beatles are much more fun to listen to than the Eagles or Prince.
I think Prince’s mixes are just too busy, my kids love MJ but every time I play a Prince song they are like “this is boooring” and listening to how it sounds on the car stereo (not enough space between notes, too many different synths all the same volume) I kind of understand why. I think maybe the influence of Quincy Jones is pretty important for the enduring importance of albums like Thriller (did Prince do all his own production? It would certainly be on brand for him).
Things that are just "classic rock" haven't aged well to young people.
The stuff that branched out to be more than rock like Queen, Fleetwood Mac, and The Beatles is generally doing better. CCR also sounds less like classic rock but I might be reaching to explain that one.
"CCR also sounds less like classic rock but I might be reaching to explain that one"
Yeah, I can sort of see it - they're more on the country side of classic rock compared to more traditional 1970s guitar intensive shredding classic rock. Even with southern style rock there's a difference between CCR and what stuff like the Allman Brothers and Skynyrd sounded like.
I also wonder to what extent the fact that The Rolling Stones (for example) are an actual band of geriatrics you can go pay $500 to see is a negative in earning them young fans.
CCR has more streams than the Eagles because they're better than the Eagles. While there are some Eagles songs I can tolerate, The Dude's assessment of them was directionally correct.
I wonder if there's a slight generational thing going on here. I don't think Boomers generally use streaming, so acts that appealed primarily to them but haven't had as much staying power (I think the Eagles fall into this category, maybe also the Who) or weren't in movies or TV shows very much underperform somewhat.
Queen has three of the best songs ever written and then a lot of flotsam and jetsam after that, in my opinion anyway. My guess is the Beatles would win in terms of breadth of streams across their catalog.
I just find it odd that very few other people seem to be able to see that grunge was the height of popular music achievement. Never before have so many obviously authentic heroin users found crossover mainstream appeal.
I feel like this underexplains some things. Indie rock and pop weren't the only two contestants. There used to be plenty of very popular poppy commercial rock out there (Duran Duran, Guns n Roses, The Scorpions, The Go Gos, The Bangles, you name it) and now there isn't. Commercial music has won out over gritty music in lots of eras. That doesn't explain why rock as a form has disappeared.
My sense is the Phones/video games have totally eliminated interest in playing instruments and forming bands among young people, and this has led to a demise in rock music. It had a guaranteed audience for people who were bored and learned to play guitar in their free time, and still does, but that's basically nobody under 35 at this point.
I'll repost my reply to this piece from when it originally went out:
It's always wild to me to read Matt's recounting of music history because, despite me being only a few years older than him, it's like reading about mid-19th Century debates about anti-Masonic politics -- I've never even heard of most of the people/institutions involved and the nature of the supposed "debate" begins as being completely unintelligible to me and then, after further study to understand it, I'm left thinking, "You're utterly *****ing me that this is a thing anyone cared about to begin with, let alone developed intense opinions about it." And I say that as someone who would describe himself as enjoying music! (I have 24,630 songs on my iPod and that's not including a bunch of classical, ambient, and other softer instrumental pieces in my collection that I don't bother to put on it because of either their length or being too quiet to listen to while walking or riding public transportation.)
A lot of Matt’s examples are very niche and even though I was very into music at the time, there’s a lot of them I didn’t know about (based on my recollection of the original article).
Columbus Day has always felt like a coastal-only holiday in my experience. I don’t think I’ve gone to a school or held a job that gave the day off as a holiday.
I've lived most of my life on the East Coast and have never had it off in a private-sector job, but always had it off from school and banks are usually closed.
Have we just run out of new ideas for music genres? Growing up in the 60s-80s we had the 60s with all its genres, then progressive, metal, disco, classic, and early punk in the 70s. The 80s with new wave, punk, surf thrash, et al was a blast along with continued new stuff from 60s,70s bands. Then the 90s came along with grunge, which seemed short-lived, and rap/hip hop. And there it has remained stuck, not that there isn't always new music in the back alleys but as a cultural wave rap/hip hop is still what I hear blasting out of kids cars these days. And tattoos (one writer thought the tribal-esque music and tattoos were a subconscious rebellion to the technology age). So maybe poptimism has taken up the slack in the musical void? But I could just be cynical and aging---music is still wonderful but it shares the spotlight with more NPR and other talk radio, well, just silence and birds singing.
No, I feel bad for my teenage kids. Every genre they listen to is totally comfortable to me, and I would have listened to it with my friends back in the early 90s. Even the rap (which scandalized my parents’ generation with how different it was) is totally familiar and comfortable to me, if a bit more interesting and less gangster.
This generation hasn’t had a musical break from its parents generation. In some ways I’m happy about that (I can go to music festivals with my teenage daughter and enjoy myself) but in other more profound ways it’s very sad.
Dubstep, emo pop-punk, chamber pop (Vampire Weekend), neo-folk pop (Mumford, Lumineers) and increasingly fragmented forms of EDM (house, dnb, etc) are all popular musical styles that have defined the 2000s or 2010s. I personally love brass house, an insane crossover musical styling defined by instrumentality somewhere between jazz, funk, and EDM (Too Many Zooz, Moon Hooch, Galactic, etc).
You could probably throw in multiple subgenres of rap, including drill and internet/ironic/shitpost rap (Yung Gravy, bbno$).
I’m not saying I love all of these genres, and perhaps the rate at which music discovers new ideas has slowed down, but there have certainly been plenty of original and interesting new musical development since 2000.
I will listen to more of this. It's always possible I'm just blessed with kids who like my style of music. But I have listened to half of it, and I will say that (1) it's original! I'm not saying it's unoriginal! but (2) much of it Is also totally comfortable to me. Like eating New American cuisine that's basically the same ingredients as I grew up eating, but prepared in better ways. (Specifically, listening to Mumford and Lumineers feels like eating brussel sprouts that are fried with bacon, so they actually taste good.)
It's not like the transition from rock to rap, or rock to punk or rock to metal, which is more like trying a new kind of cuisine based on different protein and spices.
Very interesting — I think there’s a lot of merit to your cuisine analogy, but I still wonder if you’d feel the same way listening to something by Subtronics (dubstep) or bbno$ (meta-ironic rap) or Too Many Zooz (brass house). Try Subway Gawdz?
Don't have any kids or grandkids, but I did used to work in special ed and I don't assume I'd be totally at ease with overhearing 10-year-olds listening to the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" (1967) or Tekashi 6ix9ine's "Billy" (2018) even though I listen to them myself.
This suggests to me that your kids aren't into death metal or heavier duty forms of dubstep. (Which is fine -- both genres are literally unlistenable to me -- but they definitely don't resemble anything I can remember hearing in the early 1990s.)
As someone on the younger side of the SB commentariat, my parents cannot stand drum n bass, which is probably my favorite genre of music. Because the median SB reader is an old millennial, they don’t have Zoomer kids or siblings and aren’t really in a position to know that much about people in that age group.
Yeah, there's lots of music I don't care for, but I can still understand how it has some appeal. The stuff that genuinely sounds like nothing more than an electric guitar turned to maximum gain, along with the guitarist holding it, being dropped into an industrial shredder, I can't even picture how one enjoys it ironically.
Holy shit that is not a reference I expected to ever read here. Been a while! That also reminded me of Abstürzende Brieftauben which has the same name concept (inspired by the above I believe) but is totally different musically.
It's not a "new" genre, but my sense is that various forms of Latin music have become mainstream among Gen-Z in a way that it wasn't in America 20 years ago. Of course I live in California so maybe that's less common in whiter areas.
I'm guessing you don't listen to a lot of funk ostentação, brega funk, and ilk, all of which are at least as different from the Miami bass and freestyle that they evolved from as grunge was from progressive rock (for instance). Also guessing you don't listen to a lot of gqom, amapiano, 3-step, all South African variations on "house" but again at a far distance from early '80s electro and Chicago house.
Am I the only person who finds the juxtaposition of Tibetan freedom activists and indie rock fans under the heading "Wrong Side of History" to be a category error?
Tibetan freedom is a question of morality/ethics. It's about an ethnic group that is suffering oppression and destruction of its traditional culture. Obviously it didn't work out that way, but I can't blame activists in the early 2000s for believing that this was the equivalent of apartheid in South Africa: once the world awakens to the injustice, rich countries will boycott and put diplomatic pressure on China, and then there will be, if not independence, then at least more freedom from oppression for Tibetans!
In contrast, indie rock vs. pop is a question of taste, and as such, it is morally neutral. Preferring Arcade Fire does not make you either morally superior or morally inferior to a die-hard Taylor Swift fan.
Signed, a weirdo who had very little interest in either indie rock or pop in high school, and instead listened to a bunch of "world music" her parents favored (I had an extensive collection of Putumayo CDs that I loved. Anyone else here a fan of Deep Forest? Anyone?).
ETA: Ok, ok, I'll admit to having a nostalgia-driven soft spot for Backstreet Boys and Savage Garden. "I wanna staaaand with you on a mountain, I wanna baaathe with you in the sea... I wanna liiiive like this foreveeeeer, until the sky falls down on meeeeee..." That was almost 30 years ago! God, I'm getting old.
I listened to Putamayo CDs too. Matthew Yglesias has very little sympathy for ethnic groups who don’t have their own state. It’s part of the reason he wrote One Billion Americans, doesn’t care about the Crimean Tatars and is relatively pro-Russian. On this I think he is relatively consistent. There are a lot of people who care about one ethnic group getting its own state and cultural autonomy but turn into rabid imperialists for other ethnic groups. Try bringing up Assyrians or Kurds or Armenians with Turks who will go on forever about their support for Palestine.
As somebody a bit older who was into Alt Rock it seemed like the writing was on the wall by the early aughts. Alt rock only made sense as a slightly edgier and more expermental off shoot of a popular rock genre.
By the aughts more or less popular rock music had collapsed, with Indie/Alt as a last vestige. There's now as much indie pop as indie rock, if not more.
On the NYC public school calendar today Italian American Heritage Day/Indigenous People's Day, but on the NYC Alternate Side Parking Suspension Calendar it's Columbus Day.
The major music trend of this century is the rise of female artists on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. This has moved music toward pop and away from rock. Does this mean that any rock revival will be driven by female? Keep an eye on Wet Leg, The Warning, and Olivia Rodrigo.
A link to the comments when this post ran back in August. https://www.slowboring.com/p/postcards-from-the-wrong-side-of/comments
And a congratulations to those involved in securing the release of the Israeli hostages taken two years ago. I hope they are received safely and can recover from their ordeal.
Matt deserves a day off, but the demos demands more content.
A perfect opportunity for a natural experiment. Every federal holiday, AI can write an article “in the style of Yglesias” on a seasonally appropriate theme — food security on Thanksgiving, immigration on Columbus Day, defense policy on Memorial Day.
Over time, we can watch the essays improve and joke about the withering of the Anthropocene Substack economy, when things like human seasonal rhythms still mattered.
On Tibet, I remember being at college - this was probably 1992 or 1993 - and I went to a talk with a visiting scholar who had recently returned from China who had spent some time - at some risk to himself as this wasn’t long after June 4- with Chinese pro-Democracy activists. He told us that when he brought up the issue of Tibet with them, their response was on the lines of “Tibet? That’s ours!” The implication being that even if the pro-democracy forces in China had triumphed (and of course they didn’t) that would not necessarily have been great news for the Tibetans.
It's sad to say but democracy would probably not be great news for anyone but the domestic Han Chinese citizen. From what little we know of public opinion polling and online sentiment, it seems like the CCP is, if anything, far less revanchist than the population as a whole. The government censorship machine actually works pretty hard to moderate social media posts demanding war with Taiwan, Japan, and their neighbors in the South China sea over territorial disputes.
I think this is not really true, or it may have been true a few decades ago but isn’t any more. You can’t take right-wing social media posts as representative of public opinion or you’d have to believe the average American wants to bomb the Three Gorges Dam. Based on this survey most Chinese people have positive views of most European countries (even though most Europeans have negative views of China) and while they have negative views of the US, CCP members are even more anti-US than the general public: https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/how-do-chinese-people-view-west-divergence-and-asymmetry-chinas-public-opinion-us-and.
Yes, my own studies of Republican-era Chinese history some years ago seriously dampened my level of outrage about the PRC's ethnic cleansing/"soft genocide" in Xinjiang and Tibet. The PRC's policies on the "Inner Asian Frontier" are really just a straight-line continuation of the last 250 or so years of Qing and Republican policies, implemented with more effectiveness due to technological improvements and increased wealth.
I think this is something folks routinely ignore about the world's autocracies: I would wager that both Xi and Putin are MORE liberal than the median member of their respective society. Everyone likes to pretend that the alternative to Putin was Navalny, but when Russia still has (somewhat) democratic elections, Navalny and his intellectual predecessors routinely finished fourth behind the old Communist Party and Zhirinovsky, neither of whom are even remotely more pro-NATO than old Vladdie.
Westerners have this idea that inside every foreigner there's a westerner trying to get out, but reality seems quite at odds with that premise. Sometimes, better the devil you know than...
I’d take the other side of that bet. For one thing even if Putin or the CCP were more liberal than the average member of their society when they came into power there have been decades of power corrupting in the interim. Putin was not regarded as particularly authoritarian when he was first elected and now he’s invading Ukraine which I don’t think the old Communist Party would have done. Meanwhile the average Chinese person longs to travel abroad—there’s a reason why the one big thing the CCP backed down hard on in the face of public pressure was getting rid of COVID travel restrictions once people saw other world travel resuming like the World Cup.
The pro-democracy forces are right; the best option is China becomes a democracy and Tibetans become equal citizens of China, like how every Western country treats its conquered indigenous people and how India treats Sikkim. Independent country in deeply landlocked inhospitable territory without large natural resources reserves would turn into an impoverished Bantustan.
Maybe, but that certainly wasn’t what the Tibetans wanted.
I doubt it, not that many Tibetans have even left China (according to Wikipedia maybe only about 150,000 out of 7 million). Even the Dalai Lama doesn’t support independence and he was one of the ones who left.
Democracy and equal citizens don't always go together. There are plenty of instances of democracies repressing minorities.
Tibet *does* have a lot of natural resources. And Botswana does very well as an independent country in deeply landlocked, inhospitable territory. Institutions are what matter. And an independent Tibet would almost certainly have a lot of support from India.
Not least solar power: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/world/china-clean-energy-solar-israel-gaza-hostage-madagascar-coup.html
What natural resources does Tibet have? Botswana is a country with few people and vast diamond resources; it’s not typical. The vast majority of wealthy countries are that way because they’re plugged into global trade—even in China itself the coastal areas are much wealthier than inland areas. All of the landlocked central Asian countries without large hydrocarbon deposits are doing quite poorly.
For small countries institutions are much less important than resources and how they are plugged into global trade. Look at how Guyana suddenly went from poor to richer than the USA in a few years. It wasn’t because their institutions changed.
Yeah, looking at the history of China doesn’t lend very much hope to the idea that they’re going to be ok with spinning off various conquered regions.
>The implication being that even if the pro-democracy forces in China had triumphed (and of course they didn’t) that would not necessarily have been great news for the Tibetans.<
China's territorial claims on Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, though not indisputable*, aren't particularly weak compared to various claims of the many other states with similar assertions of sovereignty.
China happens to be run by an authoritarian government that engages in massive human rights abuses, and that creates the effect of undermining their (otherwise plausible) claims, at least in the eyes of people who live in rich democracies.
And yes, even in the wake of a transition to democratic governance, it seems overwhelmingly likely the Chinese people would violently oppose any relinquishing of their country's assertions of sovereignty.
*China's interpretation of who owns what in the South China Sea, of course, is entirely ludicrous.
A quick observation: I don't believe in the "Great Replacement Theory" B.S., and I'm fine with getting rid of Columbus Day as a holiday (like Bjorn, as an inland American, the only experience I have of Columbus Day is not getting mail delivery or being able to contact the clerk's office at the federal court), but progressives do themselves literally no favors on mobilizing the paranoid conspiracy front against them when they make a direct substitution of Progressive Thing™ for Conservative Thing™.
My solution to the Gordian knot: Get rid of Columbus day, make official Leif Erikson day as a rebranded Explorer's day, make the day after Thanksgiving officially Native Heritage day, and name a holiday after an Italian American in March, April, or August. My vote would be for Enrico Fermi but I think Colorado went with America's first Catholic saint.
As a Coloradoan, I can confirm that Mother Cabrini Day is indeed a thing and, as a lawyer, I can confirm that it makes keeping track of court holidays in October annoying, since the state courts are now closed on the first Monday of the month, while federal courts are closed on the second Monday of the month.
Day after Thanksgiving as Native Heritage Day is a great idea but we're too capitalist to get rid of Black Friday.
Friday before Memorial or Labor Day would create a nice 4 day weekend.
Also Garibaldi, who lived in New York.
Garibaldi Day has a slight conflict on the calendar for American holidays . . . .
Make it another day then. Doesn’t have to be his birthday
Enrico Fermi, Ugo Fano, there are so many.
And while we’re rearranging holidays - can we finally move to “Independence Day - Observed” for years when the 4th of July falls on a Wednesday?
I think celebrating the arrival of Western people in our Western eventually-country is worthwhile - Columbus didn't set foot in the US I don't believe, but it is what it is...Jesus was also not born in December.
I'm not opposed to a separate day in remembrance of the indigenous cultures who were mostly wiped out by our arrival. Both of these things have value.
I too struggle to think of a debate more emblematic of the navel gazing our society seems to be stuck in. For me that includes both the seeming lack of awareness by conservatives standing up for a relic of yesterday's identity politics and the argument that it should be replaced by a celebration of the increasingly strange notions a certain type of progressive harbors about the peoples of the America's pre-European contact and their descendants over the next few centuries.
Which isn't to say I'm not open to the argument that it's a little weird in 2025 to have a holiday in honor of someone whose connection to the US is at best indirect. But you also have to be pretty high on your own supply to think it should be replaced with all these idiosyncratic performances of collective guilt and ahistorical understandings of the past.
On the flip side, the rightoids do their own “Indigenous Peoples Day” with things like “Intelligent Design,” the 1776 response to 1619 Project, Conservapedia, etc.
That's really straining. "Intelligent design" is the only one of those things that I can begin to plausibly imagine being described as a "direct substitute." The latter two are (1) expressly framed as rebuttals (even the most hardcore rightoids aren't going around claiming the 1619 Project and Wikipedia don't exist) and (2) treated with pure contempt by any form of mainstream discourse.
What a rude reply. I’ll never make the mistake of writing to you again.
Wow, sorry, I didn't think that was harsh enough of a reply to merit being blocked (my first ever block by another SB user, to the best of my knowledge), but I wish you well!
“my first ever block by another SB user”
Hold your head high.
The canonical example here is Alabama and Mississippi observing the Robert E Lee state holiday on MLK Day.
It's a "well actually..." In the form of a federal holiday. That never goes down well.
I was probably more embarrassed to really like pop music in say 1999 than I was to be bisexual. Through most of the 00s the contents of my iPod was a deeply held secret.
I feel really grateful for the poptimistic turn in culture. It’s probably gone too far and I wish we could have a mainstream rock music scene back. I have a deep affinity for the whole run of rock music before it became a niche genre that’s really hard to interpret. It’s sad to me that I do a huge project on music for black history month and almost no kids like rock music. Jimi Hendrix is never liked for instance. But compared to the insanely insular culture of the before times it’s so liberating.
I am fascinated by how what’s older does on streaming. On Spotify, Hendrix and The Who are listened to about 1/4 of the Rolling Stones. The Beatles are listened to about 25% more than the Stones. Queen has 50% more streams than the Beatles (!!). Nirvana is slightly more than the Beatles. Pearl Jam is less than half of the Beatles and Nirvana. Radiohead is between the Beatles and Queen. Prince is 1/3rd of the Beatles and 1/5th of Michael Jackson who is over 25% more than Radiohead .
Jay Z has more streams than the Beatles but less than Radiohead. 2Pac, Dr. Dre and Biggie have somewhat less than the Rolling Stones but 3x The Who and Hendrix.
But someone with new releases like Eminem has 50% more than Queen, as does Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter to use contemporary examples.
But how do you explain stuff like Creedence Clearwater Revival being 1/3rd more popular than the Eagles and with more streams than the Rolling Stones? Fleetwood Mac is more popular than all of them, the Beatles and Radiohead? Very interesting.
I don’t know all the dynamics on this. Queen was so elevated by the movie. Fleetwood Mac definitely got elevated somewhere on TikTok.
My basic experience with actual kids (6-10 year olds) is the kind of death knell is being really guitar forward. A total inversion from my youth. A lot of them love old music Jazz does really well, Duke Ellington and Scott Joplin both consistently get a lot of love, Motown, and early hip hop. But anything that has really guitar led music and unclear lyrics seem incomprehensible. I don’t know how well this tracks onto the streaming numbers.
I'm going to go out on a limb, maybe controversially, and say Queen is just better music. My take on the Beatles and the Stones are that they were pioneers but are over inflated musically by virtue of being early adopters. Way better stuff came after.
I don't disagree with anything you've said on the thread, but anecdotally, among my older son's peer group which is elementary school, there is a lot of burgeoning interest in Metallica. Maybe a rock contingent will come back. Though they also seem to like and respond to plenty of hip hop and pop type music. I suspect that the days of strongly identifying with a particular genre of music have passed.
People should like what they like but this is wrong.
The Beatles wrote an astounding number of great songs in a very short period. Two comments to demonstrate their towering greatness: 1) the guy who wrote Here Comes the Sun and Something was the third best songwriter in the band, and 2) I saw Colin and Brad (from Who’s Line) do a live show. One bit where they have an audience member onstage involves asking them to pick a Beatles song and they said they pick the Beatles because everybody knows a Beatles song.
PS I’m not a big fan of Queen and think they’re overrated so hey, to each their own. Carry on!
“PS I’m not a big fan of Queen and think they’re overrated so hey, to each their own. Carry on!”
Wasn’t Queen considered super cheesy, even at the time?
I think their reputation has definitely changed with the passage of time. I find a lot of their music cheesy but I’m not mad about people liking them. My other dirty secret is that I really don’t appreciate ABBA…
I'm used to being a minority on the Beatles and my musical taste generally. While corporate lawyer by day I'm still an unapologetic metal head by night. No one wants me in charge of the Playlist, save maybe a handful of close friends who I've helped bring to the dark side, and I accept that.
Metal and Queen would be quite the dance mix!
I'll second that the beatles are way overrated
I would much rather listen to the hair bands of the eighties
Insert side eye emoji
Yes! Thank you! There is at least one other person who agrees with me about the Beatles being overrated. Everyone else, feel free to pelt me with rotten produce.
I’m going to express an even crazier opinion on this topic in that I believe the Beatles are (now) underrated.
I’m a member of Gen Z and no one particularly cares about the Beatles — it took me until recently to really dive into their music, and I’ve been blown away. I think the stereotype for people my age is that they have a couple good songs (most people probably know Blackbird or Here Comes the Sun) but that the rest of their oeuvre is mostly silly stuff like Yellow Submarine.
The Beatles are the Babe Ruth of music.
Maybe certain things they've done have been surpassed (while I am a huge fan of them, I don't know how many of their songs I'd put in my personal Top 25 Favorite Songs) but the whole body of work (like Babe Ruth pitching and hitting) and most importantly, how much better they were than everyone else in the 60s was (like Babe Ruth once outhomering the whole league) are both underrated aspects.
Another weird thing about The Beatles to me is that many of their most popular songs, I don't actually like that much, even though they do have over 100 songs I like a lot.
In My Life is boring and super Seinfeld effected.
Let It Be is even worse.
Hey Jude is like a solid 7/10 but it's far from their best work.
EDIT: forgot to add Blackbird. I don't like basically anything about Blackbird.
It seems weird to me (a Beatles fan) that Blackbird and Here Comes the Sun are the Beatles songs that Gen Z knows. Both are pretty middling entries in their catalog IMO, and I'd have thought something like Hey Jude or Eleanor Rigby or even Yellow Submarine would be more famous.
Glad I'm not the only one that's spent decades taking heat about this.
Make that two. See above.
My dad didn’t like the Beatles so I grew up not much liking them either (too cheesy). I’ve mellowed in my old age and I know I’m probably wrong, but I don much like them either.
I have seen some Metallica interest among musicians but not so much just ordinary kids. Like people who play the guitar really like them.
I have a deep obsession with pop songwriting which keeps the Beatles very high on my personal list but I can see it if you’re more interested in the sonic part of music which is most people.
Yea Metallica was also an entry level for musicians when I was a kid. They were part of what got me into guitar, a hobby that sadly hasn't really survived me becoming a dad, beyond the occasional nursery rhyme when they were babies. Maybe when they're older I'll have a life again and be able to get back into it.
My son's group seems to be the athletes and they are open to rock. But again, they'll also listen to rap and pop. I'll hear them do Master of Puppets or Enter Sandman or something but then go to Thick of It by KSI.
Our kids are 10 and 8. Everybody has to learn to play the piano. My daughter (10) is also working on guitar, and my son 8 on the drums. I will probably be ordering a bass guitar for Christmas.
Operation family band is in progress!
Omg I cannot stand The Rolling Stones! I get that they were pioneers blah blah blah. But now, ugh, spare my ears their tired sounds.
>My take on the Beatles and the Stones are that they were pioneers but are over inflated musically by virtue of being early adopters<
The Beatles were fantastic, but nonetheless overrated.
The proof of this assertion flows from the reaction to it. For many people, the band is literally without fault: you can't make a criticism. In my view that proves the point. Very few things couldn't be improved upon—even the oeuvre of the Beatles.
"Well, what can you possibly criticize the Beatles about?" you ask. There's this: the average or typical level of complexity and melodic/harmonic richness of a Beatles song doesn't match the same of, say, John/Taupin, Eagles, Dylan, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Bowie or Bacharach/David.
Now, the counter to this is: that may be so, but you're comparing a band with well over 100 hits (or extremely catchy songs even casual music fans easily recognize) with acts that maybe produced 20-25. And no argument from me! The Lennon-McCartney (and occasionally Harrison) machine was unequaled in the sheer *volume* of hummable, catchy, commercially successful (and occasionally quite beautiful and interesting) songs it was able to create. Popular music will never see their like again.
But that doesn't obviate the critique. The Beatles *on average* weren't producing songs that were quite as polished, sophisticated and richly complex (while still maintaining a high level of accessibility) as say, Tiny Dancer or Dreams or Like a Rolling Stone. At least not in my humble opinion.
To make a TV analog if you watch Seinfeld or Arrested Development today without nostalgia goggles they aren't that funny. But they were very funny at the time! You can only be ripped off so many times before you seem stale, and everything new and fun about those shows have been done to death since then.
By nostalgia goggles do you mean context of the time? I’ve never come across someone my age who didn’t still find Arrested Development funny, even if they first watched it recently…
Friends is still funny.
You're correct and I think that helps prove my point. Friends wasn't particularly innovative but was the ultimate, most polished version of the multi-camera sitcom.
I mean Fleetwood Mac is the best of all you mentioned, and CCR is way better than the Eagles (Jeff Lebowski is the supreme arbiter of taste). This just tracks.
On the rubric of quality, influence, and cultural cache, is Rumours the best album ever?
Eagles are so much better than CCR I'm literally embarrassed for you. They're neck and neck with Fleetwood Mac.
Pshaw
FM and Eagles each have at least 20 bangers. CCR? Like 6-7. Mind you those 6-7 are good! I'm not a disliker of CCR, but I can count.
The Eagles certainly were (and are) more popular than CCR, but CCR’s work is on another level. Effigy, for example, is better than anything the Eagles created.
Ew.
Is there an easy place to view all this in chart form?
Even more than a policy/politics nerd I'm a music/music history nerd, and I've been gradually working on a project of the most streamed older albums (based on a monthly rolling average). If it's something you're interested in I can share my details. I've only made it to the late 70s, though.
Yeah I would definitely be interested.
You can email me (I think emails are in my profile) for more info but here is the Top 50. Very dominated at the top by a few artists.
Methodology:
1. Look at the least streamed song on Spotify over the last 28 days from each album (to approximate "full album" listens as best as I can)
2. Remove any songs under 2 minutes, which are often intros/interludes
3. Remove instrumental albums
Dark Side of the Moon
Wish You Were Here
Animals
Rumours
Abbey Road
Dire Straits
Led Zeppelin II
Kaya
Master of Reality
Led Zeppelin IV
Paranoid
Exodus
Rubber Soul
Boston
Magical Mystery Tour
Revolver
Ziggy Stardust
The Doors
Led Zeppelin
Let It Be
Sgt. Pepper
Bayou Country
Second Helping
Houses of the Holy
Hotel California
Bat Out of Hell
White Album
Pet Sounds
Please Please Me
What's Going On?
Help!
Aja
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
Black Sabbath
Born To Run
The Stranger
Even In The Quietest Moments
Meddle
Pink Moon
Grease (Soundtrack)
Tapestry
LA Woman
Van Halen
A Hard Day's Night
Strange Days
Moondance
High Voltage
Blue
Highway 61 Revisited
Deja Vu
So a whole lot of Pink Floyd,at the very top, followed by most of The Beatles/Zeppelin/peak Black Sabbath albums interspersed with the career peaks of some other big artists. No Rolling Stones, no Elton John, big numbers for Bob Marley.
There is exactly 1 album by a Black American (What's Going On?) - I was personally surprised that Stevie Wonder's legacy isn't stronger. Only 2 albums by women.
That’s interesting and has some discontinuity with the monthly listener numbers, because Zeppelin looks to have 25-30% fewer listeners than the Stones.
Oh and Pink Floyd has fewer monthly listeners than the Stones as well (but a little more than Zeppelin). Very interesting.
That's an idea. I've just been looking at various Spotify artists.
The thing that is funny to me about this is that many of those rankings make sense to me personally (e.g., I definitely prefer Michael Jackson or the Beatles over Prince, CCR over the Eagles, etc.).
The interesting thing is that CCR was over almost as fast as Hendrix was and ended up dwarfed by the Eagles ongoing success, I think CCR are viewed as something of a footnote critically, but now seem to be outdoing bands that were more successful or have had more critical cred.
Anecdotally I grew up after each and every one of these artists, and I would agree with srynerson in that CCR, MJ and the Beatles are much more fun to listen to than the Eagles or Prince.
I think Prince’s mixes are just too busy, my kids love MJ but every time I play a Prince song they are like “this is boooring” and listening to how it sounds on the car stereo (not enough space between notes, too many different synths all the same volume) I kind of understand why. I think maybe the influence of Quincy Jones is pretty important for the enduring importance of albums like Thriller (did Prince do all his own production? It would certainly be on brand for him).
A lot of Prince songs are just not very catchy to me. Possibly too complex.
We are steadily working to build the family band
We've been listening to a lot of the following.And want to play the songs and are working on at least some of
AC/DC
Guns n' roses
Bon Jovi
Heart alone
Scorpions hurricane
Etc
But we are also rocking out to k pop demon, hunter
And working on a piano version
https://youtu.be/Wq3Y-C9IkSU?si=MflcDBGbJJ3MW6YU
Also orchestra
https://youtu.be/YNyILzQ5_lQ?si=Rg4IbfFtdOMkF-A5
Things that are just "classic rock" haven't aged well to young people.
The stuff that branched out to be more than rock like Queen, Fleetwood Mac, and The Beatles is generally doing better. CCR also sounds less like classic rock but I might be reaching to explain that one.
"CCR also sounds less like classic rock but I might be reaching to explain that one"
Yeah, I can sort of see it - they're more on the country side of classic rock compared to more traditional 1970s guitar intensive shredding classic rock. Even with southern style rock there's a difference between CCR and what stuff like the Allman Brothers and Skynyrd sounded like.
I also wonder to what extent the fact that The Rolling Stones (for example) are an actual band of geriatrics you can go pay $500 to see is a negative in earning them young fans.
CCR has more streams than the Eagles because they're better than the Eagles. While there are some Eagles songs I can tolerate, The Dude's assessment of them was directionally correct.
I wonder if there's a slight generational thing going on here. I don't think Boomers generally use streaming, so acts that appealed primarily to them but haven't had as much staying power (I think the Eagles fall into this category, maybe also the Who) or weren't in movies or TV shows very much underperform somewhat.
Fleetwood Mac is weird one, though.
Queen has three of the best songs ever written and then a lot of flotsam and jetsam after that, in my opinion anyway. My guess is the Beatles would win in terms of breadth of streams across their catalog.
That would explain @California Josh’s results.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/postcards-from-the-wrong-side-of-d6f/comment/165980594?r=17ki6&utm_medium=ios
https://www.slowboring.com/p/postcards-from-the-wrong-side-of-d6f/comment/165983071?r=17ki6&utm_medium=ios
I just find it odd that very few other people seem to be able to see that grunge was the height of popular music achievement. Never before have so many obviously authentic heroin users found crossover mainstream appeal.
"The logic of the ad-supported web inverted this."
So what you're saying is you sold out and decided to frame the article around Taylor Swift.
I feel like this underexplains some things. Indie rock and pop weren't the only two contestants. There used to be plenty of very popular poppy commercial rock out there (Duran Duran, Guns n Roses, The Scorpions, The Go Gos, The Bangles, you name it) and now there isn't. Commercial music has won out over gritty music in lots of eras. That doesn't explain why rock as a form has disappeared.
My sense is the Phones/video games have totally eliminated interest in playing instruments and forming bands among young people, and this has led to a demise in rock music. It had a guaranteed audience for people who were bored and learned to play guitar in their free time, and still does, but that's basically nobody under 35 at this point.
There's an easy solution for that. One kids shouldn't have phones.
Two, my rule is that however many minutes of music practice you do is your total video game time (which still has a cap, and doesn't start till 5)
So I really push for 30 mins to an hour of music practice each day
Yes…essentially, it’s hard and definitely inconvenient to make rock music, most certainly as a band.
I'll repost my reply to this piece from when it originally went out:
It's always wild to me to read Matt's recounting of music history because, despite me being only a few years older than him, it's like reading about mid-19th Century debates about anti-Masonic politics -- I've never even heard of most of the people/institutions involved and the nature of the supposed "debate" begins as being completely unintelligible to me and then, after further study to understand it, I'm left thinking, "You're utterly *****ing me that this is a thing anyone cared about to begin with, let alone developed intense opinions about it." And I say that as someone who would describe himself as enjoying music! (I have 24,630 songs on my iPod and that's not including a bunch of classical, ambient, and other softer instrumental pieces in my collection that I don't bother to put on it because of either their length or being too quiet to listen to while walking or riding public transportation.)
A lot of Matt’s examples are very niche and even though I was very into music at the time, there’s a lot of them I didn’t know about (based on my recollection of the original article).
There absolutely still is, it's just called country now.
Luke Combs makes poppy commercial rock.
Columbus Day has always felt like a coastal-only holiday in my experience. I don’t think I’ve gone to a school or held a job that gave the day off as a holiday.
Gotta get a bank and/or federal government job
East Coast only - it's never been a day I have gotten off for school or work.
I've lived most of my life on the East Coast and have never had it off in a private-sector job, but always had it off from school and banks are usually closed.
Have we just run out of new ideas for music genres? Growing up in the 60s-80s we had the 60s with all its genres, then progressive, metal, disco, classic, and early punk in the 70s. The 80s with new wave, punk, surf thrash, et al was a blast along with continued new stuff from 60s,70s bands. Then the 90s came along with grunge, which seemed short-lived, and rap/hip hop. And there it has remained stuck, not that there isn't always new music in the back alleys but as a cultural wave rap/hip hop is still what I hear blasting out of kids cars these days. And tattoos (one writer thought the tribal-esque music and tattoos were a subconscious rebellion to the technology age). So maybe poptimism has taken up the slack in the musical void? But I could just be cynical and aging---music is still wonderful but it shares the spotlight with more NPR and other talk radio, well, just silence and birds singing.
No, I feel bad for my teenage kids. Every genre they listen to is totally comfortable to me, and I would have listened to it with my friends back in the early 90s. Even the rap (which scandalized my parents’ generation with how different it was) is totally familiar and comfortable to me, if a bit more interesting and less gangster.
This generation hasn’t had a musical break from its parents generation. In some ways I’m happy about that (I can go to music festivals with my teenage daughter and enjoy myself) but in other more profound ways it’s very sad.
Dubstep, emo pop-punk, chamber pop (Vampire Weekend), neo-folk pop (Mumford, Lumineers) and increasingly fragmented forms of EDM (house, dnb, etc) are all popular musical styles that have defined the 2000s or 2010s. I personally love brass house, an insane crossover musical styling defined by instrumentality somewhere between jazz, funk, and EDM (Too Many Zooz, Moon Hooch, Galactic, etc).
You could probably throw in multiple subgenres of rap, including drill and internet/ironic/shitpost rap (Yung Gravy, bbno$).
I’m not saying I love all of these genres, and perhaps the rate at which music discovers new ideas has slowed down, but there have certainly been plenty of original and interesting new musical development since 2000.
I will listen to more of this. It's always possible I'm just blessed with kids who like my style of music. But I have listened to half of it, and I will say that (1) it's original! I'm not saying it's unoriginal! but (2) much of it Is also totally comfortable to me. Like eating New American cuisine that's basically the same ingredients as I grew up eating, but prepared in better ways. (Specifically, listening to Mumford and Lumineers feels like eating brussel sprouts that are fried with bacon, so they actually taste good.)
It's not like the transition from rock to rap, or rock to punk or rock to metal, which is more like trying a new kind of cuisine based on different protein and spices.
Very interesting — I think there’s a lot of merit to your cuisine analogy, but I still wonder if you’d feel the same way listening to something by Subtronics (dubstep) or bbno$ (meta-ironic rap) or Too Many Zooz (brass house). Try Subway Gawdz?
I will.
Don't have any kids or grandkids, but I did used to work in special ed and I don't assume I'd be totally at ease with overhearing 10-year-olds listening to the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" (1967) or Tekashi 6ix9ine's "Billy" (2018) even though I listen to them myself.
This suggests to me that your kids aren't into death metal or heavier duty forms of dubstep. (Which is fine -- both genres are literally unlistenable to me -- but they definitely don't resemble anything I can remember hearing in the early 1990s.)
As someone on the younger side of the SB commentariat, my parents cannot stand drum n bass, which is probably my favorite genre of music. Because the median SB reader is an old millennial, they don’t have Zoomer kids or siblings and aren’t really in a position to know that much about people in that age group.
I don’t get how anyone could enjoy listening to death metal at all
Yeah, there's lots of music I don't care for, but I can still understand how it has some appeal. The stuff that genuinely sounds like nothing more than an electric guitar turned to maximum gain, along with the guitarist holding it, being dropped into an industrial shredder, I can't even picture how one enjoys it ironically.
For unlistenable music I recommend Einstürzende Neubauten
Holy shit that is not a reference I expected to ever read here. Been a while! That also reminded me of Abstürzende Brieftauben which has the same name concept (inspired by the above I believe) but is totally different musically.
I think the appeal is probably more that there’s a subculture than the “music” itself.
See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/f2ks8u/on_the_hypocrisy_of_the_metal_music_industry/
It's not a "new" genre, but my sense is that various forms of Latin music have become mainstream among Gen-Z in a way that it wasn't in America 20 years ago. Of course I live in California so maybe that's less common in whiter areas.
The Super Bowl halftime show is going to be reggaeton. That’s pretty mainstream.
Interesting. Its a pretty multicultural mix, lots of blending of Latin/whites so makes sense.
As a college-aged person, my understanding is that the gap that you are imagining has largely been filled by various subgenres of electronic music.
I can't remember who said it, but I LOL'ed years ago at the statement, "Electronic music has more sub-genres than it has performers."
https://x.com/DDDrewDaniel/status/1817910903557570569?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
Rap/hip hop is not one genre but many.
I'm guessing you don't listen to a lot of funk ostentação, brega funk, and ilk, all of which are at least as different from the Miami bass and freestyle that they evolved from as grunge was from progressive rock (for instance). Also guessing you don't listen to a lot of gqom, amapiano, 3-step, all South African variations on "house" but again at a far distance from early '80s electro and Chicago house.
You hear that, Ton? I said: “In this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero - end of story!” Heh heh
Am I the only person who finds the juxtaposition of Tibetan freedom activists and indie rock fans under the heading "Wrong Side of History" to be a category error?
Tibetan freedom is a question of morality/ethics. It's about an ethnic group that is suffering oppression and destruction of its traditional culture. Obviously it didn't work out that way, but I can't blame activists in the early 2000s for believing that this was the equivalent of apartheid in South Africa: once the world awakens to the injustice, rich countries will boycott and put diplomatic pressure on China, and then there will be, if not independence, then at least more freedom from oppression for Tibetans!
In contrast, indie rock vs. pop is a question of taste, and as such, it is morally neutral. Preferring Arcade Fire does not make you either morally superior or morally inferior to a die-hard Taylor Swift fan.
Signed, a weirdo who had very little interest in either indie rock or pop in high school, and instead listened to a bunch of "world music" her parents favored (I had an extensive collection of Putumayo CDs that I loved. Anyone else here a fan of Deep Forest? Anyone?).
ETA: Ok, ok, I'll admit to having a nostalgia-driven soft spot for Backstreet Boys and Savage Garden. "I wanna staaaand with you on a mountain, I wanna baaathe with you in the sea... I wanna liiiive like this foreveeeeer, until the sky falls down on meeeeee..." That was almost 30 years ago! God, I'm getting old.
I listened to Putamayo CDs too. Matthew Yglesias has very little sympathy for ethnic groups who don’t have their own state. It’s part of the reason he wrote One Billion Americans, doesn’t care about the Crimean Tatars and is relatively pro-Russian. On this I think he is relatively consistent. There are a lot of people who care about one ethnic group getting its own state and cultural autonomy but turn into rabid imperialists for other ethnic groups. Try bringing up Assyrians or Kurds or Armenians with Turks who will go on forever about their support for Palestine.
As somebody a bit older who was into Alt Rock it seemed like the writing was on the wall by the early aughts. Alt rock only made sense as a slightly edgier and more expermental off shoot of a popular rock genre.
By the aughts more or less popular rock music had collapsed, with Indie/Alt as a last vestige. There's now as much indie pop as indie rock, if not more.
Happy Italian American Heritage Day from New Haven!
Was surprising to me that New Haven County east to Providence is the most Italian place in the US.
Providence is like Boston except moreso.
On the NYC public school calendar today Italian American Heritage Day/Indigenous People's Day, but on the NYC Alternate Side Parking Suspension Calendar it's Columbus Day.
>Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day (or Columbus Day, depending on where you're reading).
Canadian Thanksgiving: what am I, chopped liver?
The major music trend of this century is the rise of female artists on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. This has moved music toward pop and away from rock. Does this mean that any rock revival will be driven by female? Keep an eye on Wet Leg, The Warning, and Olivia Rodrigo.
“May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one.”