Oh, I didn’t mean you, sorry if that’s the impression I gave, I was just pondering on things the way I’m remembering them.
Now that you mention “tapes out of a car”, before the internet there was another way that music spread in those days, for those of us who lived in smaller cities. Somebody would go to the cool city and take along his portable stereo, record tapes of the cool radio station, then back in town those tapes would circulate and get copied like bootlegs.
From LA in the 80s, it was KROQ with Punk, Post-Punk (The Stranglers, Joy Division) and Technopop (Depeche Mode, Human League, etc.).
In the 90s it was MARS FM with Techno and House.
I can only imagine the Hip-Hop that was being played in low-power radio stations in places like NYC or Philly.
A friend used to go to San Francisco every summer, brought back a bunch of tapes from the LIVE 105 graveyard shift, all carefully catalogued with dates, DJs and playlists. It was like KROQ but more subtle and varied, listening to those tapes felt exotic and meaningful.
One time he brought back a tape of KFJC, one where I first heard things like Liquid Liquid and Pharoah Sanders; that one felt like my mind got a firmware upgrade. Extraordinary.
Since the internet and starting with Real Player, now the entire world is at our fingertips (and ears), and I’m glad about this, but I will forever be grateful for those tapes from back when we weren’t directly plugged into “the action”.
Compounding the problem, this environment rewards charlatans and sociopaths. There will always be some that will exploit a weak spot in the system, in bad faith, no matter what the system is.
So strange that everyone looks back at hip-hop in the 90s and 90% of the time it’s about stuff like Tupac and NWA, while another parallel current with bands such as De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and Arrested Development gets overlooked.
Those bands were extraordinary, like Hip Hop in a tradition of Stevie Wonder, and kept putting out excellent albums that sound just as fresh today and are just as influential as anything from that era, but mid-decade the music industry swept them aside swiftly and unceremoniously, to make way for West Coast and Gangsta Rap.
The best radio stations to me today, the ones that keep me compelled, are ones that mix freely from all eras (including this one) and genres. Try BBC Radio 6 Music, or WPRB (from Princeton University), Soho Radio.
From what I hear on these stations, where DJs are expected to fearlessly put on whatever they like, it seems, the music of today sounds just as good as from any other era, but for me it’s always been about discovery, and sometimes that includes being a little uncomfortable, I like to teach my mind a new groove every once in a while and it has been known to resist. It happens to all of us, I’m afraid, more and more as we get older.
That said, I can comfortably be against some music industry tendencies, there is no “pop utopia” in the past.
Last decade it’s been software tools like autotune; in the 90s the “volume wars” began and frankly, most USA rock sounds too similar, all trying to channel Led Zep and Black Sabbath through a punkish filter; in the 80s many bands were overproduced half to death, submerged in sonic synthetic fluff, all the new studio toys abused, layer upon layer upon layer.
In the proper hands, these technologies can help a piece of music shine brighter, but in the hands of producers following the bandwagon - and that’s always been the majority of 'em - everything ends up sounding the same, like neon ads all around you.
Mom made me wash the dishes AND clean the cat box!
Math is hard, and I can’t concentrate on homework 'cause I wanna play Fortnite!
I went to McDonald’s and their soft serve ice cream machine was not working!
The Wifi was slow!
I didn’t like the latest Aquaman movie!