I'm a composer/musician who was born and raised in lower Manhattan. I remember during the seventiesand eighties that every few years there was an emphasis on a different kind of music. There was always a big rock scene in New York just as there was always a big jazz scene. There was always a healthy scene of contemporary music coming out of a classical tradition, too. While it's true that all this music was going on at the same time, there usually seemed to be a different focus every few years on one particular genre of music (as opposed to another).
For example, at the start of the seventies there was a tremendous period of excitement on the jazz scene with a different concert happening almost every night over at Sam River's basement studio on Bond Street. A few years later, there was a focus on contemporary music coming out of a classical tradition with Philip Glass playing every week to select audiences at his rehearsal loft in Soho, culminating with the final version of Music in 12 Parts and Einstein on the Beach. Then the punk thing happened. Everyone had been bored to death with rock up to that point, having been saturated with it by the end of the sixties. It had become so, well, technical! But when Patti Smith started playing in a band, a lot of people living in downtown Manhattan figured if Patti could do it, maybe they could do it, too. There was an incredible amount of good energy in that area at the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, which started to fizzle out (the focal point of energy) by the time groups like Sonic Youth and Swans were just starting to peak 'round about 1983, which was also about the time when the AKAI S-900 sampler was first marketed and radio station WBLS starting playing a lot of rap over the air. Rap and the promise of the sampler made for a new musical focus. It was an exciting time.
So the question I'm asking is where's the energy now? While people in all genres of music are continuing to do great work (I'm really not attacking anyone here, promise!), it seems that the most interesting new forms to recently evolve have been coming out of dance music (of all things!), at least as far as new formal permutations occurring within a given musical context is concerned. I was exhilarated when I first heard the "house" music from Detroit in 1988. My friend Vivian Dick (the filmmaker) played it for me. I was really into rap at the time, and when Vivian played this house music at a New Year's Eve party I was having at my place in Paris, I asked her to turn it off. I didn't like the sound sources, which seemed to consist of unbelievably cheap electronics and drum machines, it just sounded too primitive to my ears. Vivian told me to shut up and give it a chance, which I did and I ended up liking it. A lot. After that I was back in New York and tried to get this house music from the record stores, but by hat time the people in the rap world (which by then had become big business and big money) had appropriated the term "house", so all I could find was rap music "disguised" as house. I didn't like it as much as the Detroit stuff.
What I liked about "real" house music was that it was instrumental music with no bloody voice going over the top of it all the time the way rap does. I've always been an instrumental composer myself (as opposed to writing songs), so naturally I was intrigued by the voiceless Detroit house music.
Anyway, after the rap people hijacked the term "house", I think the energy might have shifted over to Europe (the UK, Belgium, Germany, and even France!). I've been living in Paris for the past few years. We have these two great radio stations here called Radio FG and Radio Nova. All I know is that at the start of the nineties, I started hearing this amazing instrumental electronic music over the airwaves which eventually turned into the genres called techno, ambient music, jungle, drum & bass and more! It seems that the large majority of people who make this music are in their late teens to mid-twenties. It's so touching what I'm hearing on the radio, they're pouring their hearts out, it's the most exciting music I've heard in years. The prediction made by Pierre Boulez in the 1950s that the future would see the masses making and appreciating advanced forms of electronic music has now been fulfilled (although perhaps not in quite the way he expected... roll over, Monsieur Boulez!)
So does this mean that Rock is dead and techno (and its many sub-genres) rules?
Nah. Rock isn't dead, it just grew up. Now it knows how classical music feels!