What will be the next cultural phenomenon?

barry2tone

My ears hear the 50's 60's and 70's coming around again. Maybe we run on a 50-70 yr. loop?

In a return to the sixties,  early indications from the the discovery method indicate adding mint tea to tobacco show the return of a Consulate experience.

Sporky

Bridgehouse said:

Our propensity for retro means it’s about time there was a youth movement that decried all things digital and decide to live in communes and commit to the “analogue” lifestyle

Nah - it'll all be nanotech Difference Engines. 

thecolourbox

Bridgehouse said:

Our propensity for retro means it’s about time there was a youth movement that decried all things digital and decide to live in communes and commit to the “analogue” lifestyle

Faux retro though, so to go full PoMo they'd use digital simulations of analog instead.

Oh hang on though that could work in the guitar world

SteveRobinson

The new thing is going to be "adequate food" 

Deadman

VR. Only Red dwarf style. Full on sitting in your own piss and poo for weeks on end whilst 'living' the high life.

Bridgehouse

Deadman said:

VR. Only Red dwarf style. Full on sitting in your own piss and poo for weeks on end whilst 'living' the high life.

Nah. Tubes and suction will see us through ok a la matrix

Bellycaster

Woke-a-Billy

Bands of Hipster SJW's with Quiffs singing songs like "Blue Suede Man-Bag"

Stevepage

"Gender-fluidity" 

usedtobe

Mad max.

rossyamaha

I predict one of two things. The fashion will be futuristic dirtbag. Think Zoolander Dereliqued. No bathing allowed and you must have your own custom designed light sabre while wearing clothing made from nasa off cuts and an old tyre found in the local scrap yard. 

Along with this, all religions will fall and Bucks Fizz will rise as the new messiah as we realise the youth of today simply can’t make their bloody mind up and that despite a never ending selection of beautifying filters, the camera never lies. 

Fretwired

Philly_Q said:

I don't think popular music will ever again have the same cultural significance it had for the last 40 years of the 20th century.

Not bourne out by the facts. People prefer experiences and spending time with others - whilst they are too busy to sit and listen to an album live music has never been healthier - whether it's in a stadium, a pub or live DJs in a club . That's where the money is earned these days.

Musicman20

I've yet to hear a big movement in music (in the guitar scene) that seems to sweep the nation since the early 2000s Stokes/Razorlight/Libertines did. Sure, there are huge newish bands around, but they seem to fade much faster.

Meanwhile, the underground punk/hardcore scene is pretty healthy. I took a break from it and now I'm back trying to get to see bands I used to love in my late teens, and every gig has been brilliant. 

It would be great to see a HUGE band develop, like how Nirvana did, from a few small scruffy clubs, making genuinely interesting loud and original guitar music, without the polish. 

I suppose we have bands like the Foo Fighters, but it seems like they have always been there. We need something NEW.

I do realise there are hundreds of new bands coming out, but as yet I haven't heard one and thought 'these are gonna be huge.'

One band that will really bring back indie? If Oasis reform. I know people on here might not rate them, but just listen to Gas Panic...I have a lot of time for Oasis.

Philly_Q

Fretwired said:

Philly_Q said:

I don't think popular music will ever again have the same cultural significance it had for the last 40 years of the 20th century.

Not bourne out by the facts. People prefer experiences and spending time with others - whilst they are too busy to sit and listen to an album live music has never been healthier - whether it's in a stadium, a pub or live DJs in a club . That's where the money is earned these days.

Never healthier, nor more expensive!  But I'm sticking with my comment, I agree that people clearly enjoy live music as "an event", music itself, in general, is still big but it seems almost not to matter which artist it is.  I know people who'll go to see Beyonce one week, Adele another and Foo Fighters the next.  They love the experience but the actual music doesn't loom large in their everyday lives.  The selfies matter more than what's happening on the stage.

Of course there are loads of bands still out there, I probably hear more new bands every year now - through Spotify etc - than I did in the days when I was buying LPs, CDs and music mags every week.  But only a handful make it to the point of being genuine "household names" nowadays, and how many of them will be remembered in 30 or 40 years like we remember even relatively minor artists from the 60s, 70s and 80s?

vale

RandallFlagg said:

The eradication of Hipsters

but humanely obviously. let's not be barbarians.

so i vote gas, cast ashes in concrete, drop in atlantic, single sentence telegram to next of kin.

Nitefly

vale said:

RandallFlagg said:

The eradication of Hipsters

but humanely obviously. let's not be barbarians.

so i vote gas, cast ashes in concrete, drop in atlantic, single sentence telegram to next of kin.

LOL yeah, but what would that do to the sea levels?  How many concretised hipsters to raise the sea-level by one metre?

guitargeek62

Dominic said:

  ^ The whole Gangsta / Grime / Drill Rap is a fairly acute microcosm of Social Unrest and culture ........it's just passing you by because you are probably too old to listen to the stations/ playlists that pump it out .

Quite possibly - I’m 31, not a yoof, but not an old git just yet either. I’m not a big fan of Grime but can appreciate some/most of what I do hear, though I can’t really say I’m aware of Drill or Gangsta enough to recognise the styles and comment.

What I mean though is that there doesn’t seem to be the same common interest in a theme that crosses genres, and that’s likely a by-product of mass media and dilution as suggested by @thecolourbox ; 

schrodinger1612

Self generating music performed by robot “bands”. 

vale

jonnyburgo said:

50s rock n roll and beatniks 60s psychedelia 70s Punk, 80s acid house, 90s grunge and britpop, 00s - erm.. Tony Wilson once said that cultural shifts happen every ten years, surely we are due a shake up? Or maybe I’m just not young enough to be feeling it and it’s happening right in front of me. Opinions please.

can recommend simon reynolds 'retromania' on the theme.

makes a good case for something he calls 'super-hyperbridity' (iirc) which is a system within which developments and progress evolve within a 'timeless' network plane, rather than a single linear past-to-future track, as used to to be the case.
moving from a couple of radio & tv channels and a core common media culture, to the infinite delocalised poly-cultures of the internet, has shattered the idea of culture as a monolothic thing as it used to be. the old days of everyone watching totp or ogwt in the 1970s.

so if any 'ism' can be truly considered to be the new thing now, it's probably 'niche-ism'.

now that anyone with an internet connection can access the entire history of all music at the click of a mouse, that sudden overhwelming glut has trapped creators into a universe of retrospectivity and endlessly recycling that past to ever-diminishing returns.
they now strive less to create a new things, than merely a new combination of old things.

hence you get so-called 'new' bands that actually only sound like compilations of your favourite old bands condensed down into one. so new 'dinosaur rock bands' like qotsa, etc.
always smaller and less significant than the sum total of their influences.

and a lot of what you consider a scene will depend on your age. usually people remember fine details of scenes covering their youth from 13 to age 30. then lose interest as family and job take time away from that.
so the scene goes on evolving as quickly, and in as much detail as always, but you are no longer on the inside, so don't see it and assume everything has stopped.

anyway, going on from britpop...

there was that big 'garage punk' revival thing around the 00s with white stripes, strokes, yyys, libertines. that was huge for a few years.

then mid 2000s there was a split scene between a new wave of 80s electro and hipster folk. and a lot of regional bands like arctic monkeys busy on the fringes of that metrocentric scene.

2010+ i don't know. maybe that's the dinosaur rock revival thing. qotsa, black keys, tame impala. and grime/drill and all that dj-ing business that i don't understand at all (but makes lots of people happy).

right now i think some kind of rave and acid house culture revival, perhaps mixed with grime, is in the air; urban, heavy, synths and samples (with political edges, as fits the time).
not my thing really, but i get a feeling that youth culture is moving in that direction.

rock has been overexposed over the last decade or two, so won't be cool again for a while.

TTBZ

It seems like the crap parts of the 90s are coming back in again and have been for a while - the shit hair cuts, loud shirts, bowling shirts, dungarees and for some reason cassette tapes. They sounded crap the first time round!

stickyfiddle

TTBZ said:

It seems like the crap parts of the 90s are coming back in again and have been for a while - the shit hair cuts, loud shirts, bowling shirts, dungarees and for some reason cassette tapes. They sounded crap the first time round!

I'm 100% in for mid/late-90s music to be cool again, because the focus was all about decent songwriting above anything else. 

But cassette tapes were and are shite. They were "better" than vinyl purely because they were portable and could be edited (ie mixtapes). There is literally nothing about an mp3 player that isn't better than a cassette.