Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Getting Worse

One usually hears that there’s no mon­ey to be made in music any­extra. However then, there was no mon­ey to be made in music when Bob Dylan begin­ed his profession both—a minimum of accord­ing to Bob Dylan. “For those who might simply sup­port your­self, you had been doin’ good,” he says in an inter­view clip includ­ed in the brief com­pi­la­tion above. “There was­n’t this massive bil­lion-dol­lar indus­strive that it’s at the moment, and peo­ple do go into it simply to make mon­ey.” He seems to have made that comment within the late 9­teen-eight­ies (to evaluate by his Hearts of Hearth look), by which period each the indus­try to nature of pop­u­lar music had developed into very dif­fer­ent beasts than they had been within the ear­ly six­ties, when he made his document­ing debut.

“Machines are mak­ing a lot of the music now,” Dylan provides. “Have you ever seen that each one songs sound the identical?” It’s a com­plaint peo­ple had 4 many years in the past, suppose­ing of syn­the­siz­ers and sequencers, and it’s one they’ve at the moment, with stream­ing algo­rithms and arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence engines in thoughts.

Not that Dylan could possibly be accused of fail­ing to alter up his sound, and even of refus­ing to acknowl­edge what advan­tages they supplied to the indi­vid­ual musi­cian: “You’ll be able to have your individual lit­tle band, like a one-man band, with these machines,” he admit­ted, how­ev­er obvi­ous the lim­i­ta­tions of these machines on the time. However he below­stood that this new con­ve­nience, like that intro­duced by so many oth­er tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments, got here at a cul­tur­al worth.

Even within the sev­en­ties, document­ing was becom­ing per­ilous­ly simple. Within the six­ties, no mat­ter if you happen to had been the Bea­t­les, the Rolling Stones, or certainly Bob Dylan, “you performed round, you paid sufficient dues to make a document.” However bands of the fol­low­ing gen­er­a­tion “count on to make a document instantly, with­out any­physique even hear­ing them.” As for the solo acts, “if you happen to’re a good-look­ing child, otherwise you’ve acquired a great voice, they count on you to have the ability to do all of it,” however “if you happen to don’t have expe­ri­ence to go together with it, you’re simply going to be dis­pos­ready,” a mere instru­ment of professional­duc­ers who took autho­r­i­al cost over the data they over­noticed. All these many years lat­er, when it’s turn out to be eas­i­er than ever to seek out any sort of music we might pos­si­bly need, no one have to be much less sur­prised than Bob Dylan to listen to “a lot medi­oc­rity happening.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bob Dylan’s Well-known Tele­vised Press Con­fer­ence After He Went Elec­tric (1965)

Bri­an Eno on the Lack of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

The Actual Rea­son Why Music Is Get­ting Worse: Rick Beato Explains

How Com­put­ers Ruined Rock Music

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Brief Movie on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

How Bob Dylan Cre­at­ed a Musi­cal & Lit­er­ary World All His Personal: 4 Video Essays

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the guide The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly referred to as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.