The Pursuit of New

New is always better, right? Every new generation of musicians make better music than the previous. Every old style of music that's displaced by a new one deserves to be junk-piled; the new style is clearly better. Technology always facilitates improvement, so clearly, as technology changes music, then music simply gets better. Right?

Honestly, I don't believe any of that. Newness does often make things interesting. New technology brings about good changes (e.g. search engines and widespread information access) but also presents new dangers (e.g. texting and driving). In subjective areas, where the assessments are qualitative (e.g. music), technology introduces variety but makes no guarantee of improvement. Just because you can play more notes, or play them faster, doesn't imply "better".

Can we expect that music will continually generate sea change after sea change of stylistic shifts, each one a completely new sound and an absolute improvement on what came before? I don't see how that can happen. On the flip side, then, perhaps older is better? Is Baroque better than Classical, which is in turn better than music from the Romantic period? Hard to imagine winning that argument either.

So then, what's the deal? If neither "Newer is Better!" nor "Older is Better!" are reliable slogans. If we can't count on either one, then what's the reality? First of all, the whole concept of "better" in qualitative measurement is a matter of opinion. So, some of us can happily live life believing one slogan and the other half can believe the opposite slogan. Or, more likely, this is more of a normal distribution with a few people on the fringe believing the absolutes and the rest of us sitting closer to the middle, enjoying a mixture of new and old and appreciating both.

I also imagine that there's a big dose of human nature mixed in here. We often enjoy the magic of discovery, seeing a movie for the first time, reading a new book, etc. And really, the magic of discovery works for us regardless of whether the thing we discover is truly new, or just new to us. There is still a huge sense of discovery and excitement associated with cooking up a meal from a recipe found in an old chest in the attic from a century before. Similarly, finding an old 78rpm record at a garage sale can generate the same sense of discovery as receiving a prerelease digital download of a new album due out in two weeks.

The other side of human nature also factors in, however. We often take comfort in the familiar, whether it's hiking a trail for the 100th time, eating at your favorite restaurant that's been in business since you were a kid or just hanging out with friends from grade school. And that sense of comfort can come both from re-experiencing the original, like listening to Van Halen's first album or from discovering Sister Sin, a present-day Swedish band that would have been a great double bill with Skid Row.

Then it seems that music, and many other enjoyable parts of life, bring us pleasure on multiple axes. It comforts us, reminds us of earlier days, makes us excited and look forward to something new. And each performer achieves a different mixture of those qualities as well as many others. Music does not have to be completely new and unrelated to what came before to be enjoyable. Music can borrow from earlier styles and performers. It can be simple, complicated or somewhere in between. It is unlikely that music can constantly undergo massive upheavals, where Punk comes along to combat Pop, and Grunge comes along to kill Hair Metal. In many ways, the real excitement in this world of information sharing and widespread knowledge is the intermingling of many styles and how each performer uniquely combines their own influences to generate music.

I challenge each of you to listen, both the the music you already know and to styles and performers you've rarely (or never) heard. Turn off the music critic in your head; set aside the heuristics you follow to decide what's good and what's not. Just close your eyes and listen. Then think about how it makes you feel, the impact on your mood. Are you calmed by it, energized by it? What do you think about as you listen? Do you hear some Simon and Garfunkel, a little Bob Marley or maybe some ABBA? Let the music be what it is and spend more time experiencing it, less time criticizing. In the process, I suspect you'll discover a few things about yourself.