There was a thread for this years ago that I reckon got lost in the great pruning. Either way the theme was that an era in music had ended without really anyone noticing or marking the occasion.

Next year records like Oh, Inverted World and Mass Romantic are going to turn twenty years old. So too will Amnesiac and Is This It, but there is just something shocking about The Shins being that old that doesn't hit the same with Radiohead.

If there's one thing I miss about this era in music (its the fact that it didnt suck) its that it was always pleasantly surprising when you met people who recognized the likes of Wolf Parade or Broken Social Scene, but really these acts were immensely popular. People forget how much social currency there was in the obscure band nobody had heard of, and how quickly that become a self-mocking trope. But the fact is that it took time to bulldoze through these huge catalouges of new music that got released and still keep up with all you hadn't already heard. In 2006 there wasn't the kind of suffocating internet consciousness to hammer you for not being totally aware of every Spoon song ever recorded.

Either way, Inside the Human Body is one of the better debut albums of that era. The Shins were not overrated at all (and I was crazy for saying so like ten years ago). Animal Collective is still as divisive as ever. The Hold Steady were the TRUE of an era in music and we we all crazy for not immediately recognizing that.

Don't you think this dynamic is still taking place, only with new and different bands?

I miss a different scene that came into existence around the same time, the garage rock revival. Bands like the White Stripes, the Strokes, and Mooney Suzuki got me interested in new music again and led me to appreciate a lot of the music from the first garage rock revival of the late 70's, like Johnny Thunders and the New York Dolls.

I dont think its still the case. People just throw on Spotify playlists and expect to have new music that is algorithmically certain to be at least somewhat enjoyable. Nobody goes scouring through the depths of OiNK (RIP) or giant directories of mediafire/megaupload links anymore. And the forum culture that surrounded sharing those links is dead. There was something to finding things for yourself.

That said, Spotify sometimes puts me in touch with music that couldn't be more spot on and when I go digging for more I'm at a loss for how they made the connection. Forgive me for missing U.N.P.O.C.'s moment in the sun two decades ago, but Spotify somehow found that and put me in touch with something that I surely wouldn't have ever encountered otherwise.

The problem is that Spotify is so good and so ubiquitous that its crushing any other way of finding new music.

I know which thread you're talking about and I can't find it either. Something about the Beyoncefication of Pitchfork and how it stopped meaning anything to discover good new music because anything worth hearing was already on Kiss FM, that's why it's there. The best I could do was a thread I did about 2000s music: viewtopic.php?f=84&t=107488 , where we talked a little about some of that.

I had to find it by searching for "Sebastian," as in "Belle and," and then sifting through two pages of Sebastian as in "Gorka."

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wonder how many Something Awful alumni have had "Bellend Sebastian" as a Twitter display name

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Absolutely not. The best album of 2020 will probably be by Fiona Apple. The best album of 2019 was by David Berman. No one's stepping up, it's the same people hanging on. Except Berman, because he killed himself.

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Every piece of "new" music I enjoy is just something from ten or so years ago that I missed.

How Belle and Sebastian didn't pull an Arcade Fire popularity-wise I'll never understand. Glad they didn't though, keep James fucking Murphy and the disco-homo's away from my Scottish songs about queer fantasies!

I didn't really get into the Shins. I think for me their "yep, that's a 2000s indie band, all right" lane is occupied by Spoon. I loved "So Now What," but I think that was really more the Shins impersonating the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev. And "New Slang," but everyone loves that one, it's in a classic Sopranos scene and everything.

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Gimme Fiction is better than any record in fucking forever. It was great back then, too. But it was not plausible then to think you could put on the first notes of "The Beast and the Dragon, Adored" and lament the entire state of modern music

Wasn't the garage rock scene in 2002 kind of the beginning of the end for rock in general? I loved that period. The Strokes, The Vines, The Hives, White Stripes, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the Thrills etc... Too much music sounds the same these days. Is it the record labels or are kids too addicted to their smartphones to bother with guitars?

I really dont know what happened. You can figure out pretty easily why film suffered a similar fate, but music's rapid demise is really incredible and to me inexplicable.

Well, the death of film was that we lost the middle market: everything became either mega-budget blockbusters designed for the Chinese to understand, or shoestring-budget arthouse fare, with nothing in between. Maybe a similar thing happened to music.

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Yeah, the movie business sucks. I must be the only dude who can't stand these fucking superhero films. Enough already! I liked Joker and I liked the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy, but everything else you can throw in a big dumpster as far as I'm concerned. We need more 50-80 million dollar budget movies.

I would so far as to say most people think they are stupid. But the problem is the people who like them are feverish in their devotion to the point where releasing some dumb movie with Tony Stark in it is guaranteed to print at least a billion dollars.

There's no similar business argument for music. At least that I can tell.

Fair enough, but I have to think that among teenagers and people in their early 20's there is still some cache in finding some obscure band that no one is into yet. I'm too old to be plugged into any music scene, but I would be shocked if that's no longer going on.

Rock has been in a steady state of decline for the past 40 years, everything has just become a copy of a copy of a copy. Give it another 40 years and it's going to be like the blues or jazz, people will still listen to it, but it's going to be very much a fringe cultural phenomenon.

I think when someone looks back on 2020 ten years from now, Fiona Apple's album will not be considered to be the best album of the year. There's some new band out there that is going to release a dynamic album that' s going to prove to be more important and have more staying power than an album put out by an artist that's been releasing albums for over 20 years.

The biggest rock band to come up in the last few years is a glorified Led Zeppelin cover band. Now I like Greta Van Fleet's first album, but let's get real...

Greta was probably the biggest new rock band in a while and they are pretty much old news already. LOL I don't even think they played on an awards show. No staying power for any of these bands.

Indie Rock will be dead because all the venues that cater to them will no longer exist.

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Yea the last way they had to make money is pretty much gone. They are basically down to just merchandise.

Chutes Too Narrow is a remarkable album.

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I thought "Mines Not a High Horse" was about Socrates.

So should I try to listen to The Glow Pt. 2 again? Last time I tried was like 2008. Feels kinda like now or never eh.

That’s a great fucking album.

I miss that era of music too and that is all I still listen to. I am just too lazy to spend the time looking for new music. Bill Simmons has a guest on his podcast that presents half-baked ideas. One of the ideas I always liked was a pop arts consultant for people in their 30s and 40s who just doesn’t have the time or energy to sample things. You tell him your favorite musicians and the consultants give you a list of albums to listen to.

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Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.

I wore my Oink t-shirt yesterday.

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Rick Hahn is the best GM in baseball.

Beulah's When Your Heartstring's Break is maybe THE record I forgot existed. Why did I let that happen!?

I was never a big Elephant 6 guy. I'm checking it out now. It reminds me of Imperial Bedroom in how it feels like it's firmly of its genre but then there are little chord changes, flourishes, and interludes that you don't see coming.

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I was listening to Yoko a few days ago.

Curious Hair: you ever spend any time with The Kooks? I could see you liking this band.

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Sex isn't dirty, sex isn't a crime. It's a loving act between two or more consenting adults.

-Hank Kingsley