> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: 21 April 2004 09:50 > > even techno isn't futuristic any more... > > so why? is it too scary to contemplate any more?
For a lot of people, definitely. Arguably, any form of truly "futuristic" music being made today would need to be fairly terrifying, while ever since the 1950s future-gazing has been characterised by optimism, by these ideas of a bright and shiny high-tech future. People like Kraftwerk first appeared with music that evoked that idea of the future, and from then on a lot of electronic music right up until the early or mid-1990s conjured up similar sorts of images. The idea of the future as an "evolved" version of the present was fairly fundamental up until the point when we started to realise that a lot of things future-minded electronic music was predicting had actually come to light. I reckon that it was around the late 1990s, when the year 2000 was suddenly looming in front of us, when Kraftwerk's "Computer World" had pretty much become like a factual description of reality rather than wild early-80s speculation of a future world, that it started to look as though "the future was here". And what difference had it really made? It was still raining when you got on the bus to work on Monday morning; Meatloaf was still at number one in the charts; and when the millennium came and went, none of this changed. So now we're in a position where the things that used to characterise our concepts of the future have come into reality, and no new idea of "the future" has come in to take their place. We get into retro- futurism, finding past concepts of the future (our present) to be a lot more pleasant that current concepts of *our* future. But at some point something has to give - this "no future" thing can't last forever. The question is, when people start trying to make genuinely futuristic music again, what will it sound like? It will possibly be to modern techno what punk was to prog rock; it might in fact sound terrifying... Brendan
