August 27, 2016 — That’s what consumes my thoughts right now, everything from what I want this chapter of my life to be, to the future of music. I have this view of what has come before that seems to color my view of the future; I think, starting around 1998 or so to now, nothing has changed, everything is the same, save for the fact that I keep getting bigger and bigger hard drives in my computers. Before, there were definitive styles to the decades. Every decade had a look, a feel.

I was once very into fashion. I even wrote one of those high school research papers on the reasons for the changes in fashion. I don’t know if it’s that paper, or my having lived some of this, but I have a very distinct mental picture of what fashion looked like in the very distinct fashion eras I see, starting from the 1920s through the 1980s. I realize this is so much more true for women because a man can wear the same basic stuff year in and year out and look good, but for us, we really do change our fashion, and what people think of a woman’s attractiveness changes based on those changes in fashion. Think about what we would have thought was attractive fashion on a woman in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s. I know you’ll have a thought about that. Mind you, I’m not going back before those time-periods, but it applies all the way back to the 1920s. As for the ‘20s, thank you Gabrielle Chanel, aka Coco Chanel, for making it so we women aren’t still wearing petticoats.

Then come the 1990s. I think most of what is fashion of today started in the 1990s and is a homogeneous existence of sameness. I can tell you many reasons why it became so the same, but you’d sleep through it. There is one huge reason though, and indulge me this one. The biggest reason was the onset of the retailers controlling the markets. The stores got away from buying things for fashion sake and started buying literally the same outfits per “rounder” or “rack” in each of their stores across the country. The stores dictated to the garment companies what they wanted, all based on market research, allegedly… this color is what will sell … literally there are color codes, and the stores would give those to the manufacturers. Therefore, we were literally fed, by the stores, what we should want. Eventually, that sameness made it so delivery times could be months out (allowing all the goods to be made overseas, then shipped) as opposed to the fashion time-frame of weeks (where the goods could only be made locally), and then many of our smaller manufacturers faded away. Sure, there is still some fashion, but most of it is just expensive, garments created solely for the sake of the price tag creating desirability, and most of that is just a variation of what came before.

What does this view I have sound like? It sounds like the video our very own Rev espouses about how modern popular music is being dumbed down, how the masses are being convinced to like it. Credit to Rev, and thank you for giving a reason for my thoughts regarding my disappointment in my once great-love of fashion.

Basically we’re all wearing the mass-market clothes the retailers want us to wear, just as we are all listening to the music the radio stations (or whoever it is) want us to listen to. Okay, the video didn’t have the fashion part in there, but if the video is true, then it really is one big answer to me because what struck me was the video’s focus was on the same time period I’m talking about as far as fashion is concerned – the  time post the year 2000. What the video doesn’t conclude, however, and a fact that I can’t ignore, is that it has been one huge decade since 2000 (1998, but I’m rounding), a decade marked by sameness.

Still I can’t just wear what came before, well except my mom’s Halston dress from the late 70s, and I have to tell you, that thing is a French-seamed, unbelievable work of art. Oh and yes, even the venerable Halston name is now attached to mass-marketed garments for the mass-market sameness. Likewise, I can’t listen to same older good music forever. Mind you, I’m not sure about pop music being dumbed down as I can think of many pop songs I loved for the requisite month they played in high rotation all the way from my young days until now, and I really don’t think those were smart either. I think they are meant to be like that. But what about music that makes an impact? Is that dead? Never to return? Are we doomed to even more decades of sameness?

I have a friend who is heavily involved in the world of EDM. I had lunch with him last weekend. We went to several places in the area just outside of downtown L.A. As for that area, and tying to my fashion points, before the onset of mass marketed China long-turn-time clothes, they used to make garments there, some still do, the holdouts before the sameness of the retailers, but what that place has become in the recent times is mind-boggling. It’s a mass of building, of conversions, of tree planting, of park making, of bridge rebuilding, with plans to renovate even the scar of Los Angeles that is its name-sake river, the neighbor of this once very scary neighborhood. The hardest-to-get-into restaurant in town is there, not that I was up on that, but of course my friend is.

I was there to see a club. The club sells what it sells – DJs, EDM style. They have different names for EDM, but for me it has a sameness; to me it’s all EDM. EDM has become pop music, a fact the Rev video doesn’t address. I’m too lazy to look to quote you songs from this week’s pop charts, but I guaranty you, as I write this article, there are pop songs on the charts that are EDM-based right now. What I find determinative though is the origin of this. EDM came from clubs.

It was the year 2000 when I first got involved with one particular club. There were lines a mile long to get into this place, truly unbelievable. The other day, while cleaning, I came across a binder of the flyers I had made from that year through about 2003; current huge-name legends were playing in the club, just regular club dates. Then it was underground, a thing for young people, having its birth in the 80s dance electronic tracts. But it grew. Now it’s the cornerstone of mainstream. I asked my friend, what’s next… will it last? He refused to say it wouldn’t, after-all, it is pop music now. Still I got him to describe to me what is new. I haven’t heard it, the new of the clubs, but apparently it has hip hop mixed with the EDM.

As my tour continued, I looked around at all of the cool of the warehouses, of the redone streets, of the redone Los Angeles in the making, and I thought how cool it would be to hear something with words; how cool it would be to hear instruments? I could see it, or hear it, rather, in my mind as I walked through the emptiness of the warehouse I was there to see, with explanations of what the upcoming construction will bring. I could hear the possibility of someone sneaking the good into that club, into those neighborhood places.

Mind you, all of this was on the heels of watching Rev’s video – the video that music is now really … bad. Personally, I think there’s good music out there, music that moves me just as much as what came before. I remember hearing Adele’s song Rolling in the Deep and having to stop the car from surprise that the radio played anything with such good vocals. I love the poetry of Lana Del Rey. I love The Pretty Reckless. Neither of those are really radio music, but somehow I found them. I remember my love of Ellie Goulding before everyone found her; she certainly wasn’t the same, but she did have traces of EDM thrown in, for sure, and live certainly much more rock to all of it. Country is almost entirely rock-based now. So it made me think. My friend’s statement that the future will see hip hop thrown in, the blending of EDM with vocals to make pop music, the blends that are in Ellie Goulding’s music, the guitar sounds that exist in the live shows even though not on the radio tracks, the rock in country… those are clues. As for how rock will get in, I think as music continues to blend, that’s where we will get chord progressions that are complicated, lyrics that are complicated, the rebirth of poetry. And I think it will start in the clubs, places where people go to see new. Then it will spread.

Those were the thoughts that have been in the back of my mind all week – the possibilities of these new places, the possibilities that something that hasn’t come before will finally come along, the possibility that some year in the near future will mark the start of the first new decade since the ‘90s, an actual new decade of new in fashion and new in music, something other than 16 years of EDM. I had tiny thoughts of the possibility of getting in into one of these ventures that could make a change. I was driving with the thoughts that nobody I know would actually listen to me, and they won’t, when I turned on my altie station. The radio was about half-way into a song I’d never heard… a song blending a rock beat with sort of a hip hop vocal line and strong guitar-like sound (not really sure the instrument though). I turned it up. The song was really good loud. I loved the words. I loved the fact that the sound went up and down, loud, then soft.

They said the name afterwards, calling it new music, K. Flay, Blood in the Cut. I didn’t know the artist, but I went home to find it. I played it, and have since heard the song every time I’ve been in the car. It’s as if the radio is happy to have a song that sounds somewhat new. Or perhaps it’s people calling with requests… what’s that song I just heard? Mind you I might hate it in a week because it’s going to get overplayed, but right now, it is fresh.

This song was further proof my thoughts — the future sound will come from a current blend. Oh and like I said, I think it will come from clubs. It will start small. But it will come. We will get out of this decade. And oh please… can we have some real fashion too while we’re at it? Pretty please?

Oh wait… I do know how to do these things. There is always …what we do, what we bring. Perhaps it’s time I stop watching, stop being on the coattails of others and actually assist the change I want to see. I believe in the person I want to become. Lana del Rey. I think I’ll write that on the wall. That’s the first step in deciding how to … start the next future decade.