....except country.....
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism, in another book called "Exiting the Vampire Castle", argued that in the history of recorded music, every 20 - 30 years or so there were new genres of music that wouldn't be recognizable as music to the previous generation. But around the early 2000s this process stopped, and musical categories hardened due to capitalist logic. Record companies just wanted to churn out the same things that they already knew how to market, rather than invest in artists who were cutting edge. He called it "the slow cancellation of the future".
Granted I think Fisher is kind of overrated as a practical theorist, all those CCRU research people went crazy, and Fisher is a particularly sad example. His vampire castle book is okay, and that generation was like preoccupied with marketing manipulation (a perspective that arguably was being marketed to them/us).
But through that perspective this meme is interesting, because the reason younger generations can connect about musical tastes, is because popular music has stopped being subversive. Chances are the band the younger boy is listening to has a sound that was copped from an older group, which is why the young man recognizes it as good. But to the older generations, music was still subversive, the young rejected the older, already explored categories of music, which were themselves subversive in their own time.
To play the devil's advocate here: "music used to be subversive but now it's all the same, nothing original" sounds just like a grumpy old man yelling at a cloud. Old people will find reasons to hate new stuff.
This isn't to disagree. I read Capitalist Realism and think the argument works. And personally, I remember how shocked I was to find out that Behind Blue Eyes wasn't originally by Limp Bizkit but much older and that my mom listened to the punk rock band I liked as a teenager when she was young. My question might be if there ever was anything "new under the sun" but first and foremost, I like the idea as a devil's advocate.
Are you fucking kidding me
What is going on here
You listened to that and went "Yup, Fred Durst wrote this"?
In my defense, I was like 12 or something. I knew the song from my older brother and liked it. My English wasn't good enough to understand it completely but it spoke to me on an emotional level.
So the shock wasn't that I was a huge Limp Biskit fan. I can't name another song and had to look up the spelling writing the comment. The shock was how much older the song was than, well, than me. It spoke to how I felt towards my parent generation but it was basically written by my parent generation.
Yeah totally agree with you there. The book is actually pretty funny in that regard, he spends most of what I read talking about Tricky and 90's Jungle, and really, really hating the arctic monkeys. He spent his last years talking about how leftists were too mean on twitter, so he's like a spiritual influence on the right's war against "woke". In response, the twitter left was really mean to him about it. Like there was something to it but he also missed the mark, even though he early on recognized the trend.
But like I said those CCRU people like broke their own brains. Very sad. Except maybe Sadie Plant but she hasn't published anything in a very long time to my knowledge
That seems like nonsense, given how genres slimed together by the late 90s. Everybody was stealing from everybody else and the best we could do was throw around labels like "alternative." ClearChannel made every genre pull toward country while country became R&B for hwhite people. Meanwhile the electronica scene had discovered computers - a development that took longer than you'd think - and a bunch of dorks styling themselves as DJ [noun] had MP3s all over piracy services. This is right before Youtube, SoundCloud, and MySpace let truly independent artists reach arbitrarily large audiences.
If we really want to start an argument - there's people who say anything generated literally is not music. Kids these days are growing up with the ability to drop a diss track on their friend for a faux pas that happened five minutes ago. Formulaic, yes, but immediately distinct from everyone listening to the same ten conventionally-attractive pop artists.
Actually he wrote a lot about 90s music in this theory, his main example of a subversive musical genre from the 90s was Jungle/D&B.
I mean I don't think its complete nonsense, this is definitely something that has always happened regarding the capitalization of popular music, Gramsci wrote about some of the tendencies, in his analysis of italian theatre and how monopolized capital exploited artists and small venues, back in the 1920s. I think the pressures certainly exist, especially because of the examples you mention, like clear channel, but also live nation and ticketmaster. Those pressures to homogenize and commodify music are objectively the result of monopolization of the music industry. Culture and economy are intrinsically bound up in one another.
But also I feel that he sort of over stated his point, like his analysis is sort of warped by chronic depression and like fiercely hating the Arctic Monkeys.
I think the point isn't that categories hardened in the sense that they stay distinct but that there are no more experiments, nothing subversive. Stealing and mixing things you know work, is exactly that. Your kid's diss track will be totally generic with no original idea. That's the whole point of the comment above, not that it's exact covers.
That really ignores the subgenres so bizarre they were considered jokes. Nightcore, dubstep, vaporwave, witch house, et cetera. All of those influenced popular culture and popular music. In terms of mainstream experimentation - Radiohead alone, come on. The Flaming Lips careened through popularity and back into weird shit like a hyperbolic comet. A Deftones fan in the 90s would listen to "Spell Of Mathematics" and ask if it sounds like that on purpose. Chappel Roan's "Good Luck, Babe" would not have been made the same, a decade prior; what she'd be guide toward is more like Adele's "Your New Love."
Rick Rubin is still alive and working. Artists give him their latest tracks for a vibe check and he consistently steers them toward success. And he tells says, he doesn't give a shit what's popular, because people have no idea what they want next.
I might be wrong but I feel that today's mainstream music is quite generic. Of cause there are bubbles for everything and more than before due to the internet.
I don't know where to draw the line tho. The top level comment says it's the early 00's (or rather quotes Mark Fisher who said that), maybe it's later. Maybe kids these days don't listen to what I think is mainstream. Maybe I'm just old and "this is generic and no art" is the new "this is noise and no music", I donno.
My perspective's always skewed when people say 'you just hate new stuff,' because I hated plenty of the old stuff at the time. We can say pop is generic, and I mean, as opposed to when?
Relying on the radio for music just plain suuucks. There's a cycle of alternating decades where the most popular stuff tends to be worth keeping, versus the big hits being unfortunate relics, but even the highest highs are rarely experimental or subversive. The idea of a cultural phenomenon being countercultural feels self-contradictory.
So yes, The Beatles were a big fucking deal for a variety of reasons, but their early career was all teeny-bopper relationship fluff. As late as Revolver they were writing two-minute AM-friendly hits like "And Your Bird Can Sing." Meanwhile the Silver Apples were using homemade synths to sound years ahead of their time. If you went by radio play you'd think very little was happening.
Conversely, Depeche Mode blew everybody's dicks off with Violator, but it's just stripping back all the spacey industrial shit they'd been doing for a decade. "Personal Jesus" is a minimalist and twangy version of Martin Gore being horny on main. Their raucous live album 101 came out right before that and to my ears is the better experience. Was any of that on the Billboard 100? Was it fuck. Women crooning about love outsold them ten to one. (Okay, shout out to Phil Collins getting "Another Day In Paradise" to #7, because talk about atypical confrontational subject matter.)
Some of my favorite albums are from around 2000. Stuff from Kingston Wall, Meshuggah, Neutral Milk Hotel, ~Dragonforce~, Blind Guardian, Slayer - was that what I listened to, most days, at the time? Nope. I was subjected to "Last Kiss" for the thousandth time, having hated it since the first. I heard so much country that I developed opinions about it. At the lowest point, I could tell boy bands apart. Admittedly: this deluge of crud was sprinkled with Third Eye Blind's love letter to meth, Filter tricking people into buying Title Of Record, Chumbwamba making anarchist agitprop dancy as a complicated joke, and quite a lot of genuinely good pop. But sometimes you'd spin the dial for a solid minute and prefer to leave it on static. When I finally found out how to pirate shit, I just grabbed stuff they'd already played, because I didn't know what I didn't know.
Nowadays - is there a mainstream? I only heard "Your New Love" when I was in a dentist's office. I found "Good Luck, Babe" on Youtube after some screenshots of tweeted jokes. For two decades, it has been dead easy to filter and cultivate your own tastes. You don't have to hear about a band, visit a store, and plunk down negotiable currency to receive a physical album, unheard. You can go from "Who?" to an informed opinion in like twenty minutes. Elsewhere in this thread someone linked Igorrr, so there must be some newly-minted industrial polka fans, and you can readily say 'don't miss Gogol Bordello.'