The 50 Year Lifecycle of Music Genres

There’s endless creativity and flow available in making music. I am amazed at how near-infinite the possibilities seem when I sit down in front of my laptop to create new sounds.

This isn't always the case. I am lucky to be at the perfect spot in the creative curve of my genre. There is a lot of popularity around hip-hop and electronic music but it's also the first wave of super popular, super acclaimed music that heavily combines modern electronic techniques with rapping.

Even without the vocals, that kind of modern electro underpinning is the backdrop of most musical developments in the last five years. It's like being a jazz musician in the 1940s when the genre was first heating up and with decades of exploration in the future.

Here's a rough sketch of the 50 year genre lifecycle, and I'm looking largely at jazz from 1920-1970 and rock from 1950-2000 as my source material:

From the 1910s to the 1960s, culture saw jazz music blossom out of the tradition of ragtime and blues music. It went from solo piano rags (10s and 20s) to big band orchestras (30s and 40s), then shrunk back down to the hip quartets and etc of the bebop era (50s and 60s).

By 1960, jazz tapped out and rock tapped in, moving forward into the golden era of classic rock (60s), into hard rock and early metal (70s), arena rock (80s), and a brief yet glorious grunge moment (90s).

By the 1990’s we entered the world of serious electronics. Electronic sounds have existed and been a part of pop culture since the 1960s with the Beatles and many others. But after the internet, and with Moore’s law in full swing, the world saw Aphex Twin and others move beyond mere drum mimickery and into the insane chops of Drum n Bass, Breakcore, IDM, Garage, and many many other things.

You could use hip-hop as another way to break it down - it feels like electronic music and hip-hop are co-evolving in parallel (from a non-lyrical standpoint), sometimes merging into one genre, sometimes diverging into completely different things.

If we’re in the 1970s of hip-hop and electronic music, who will be the Nirvana of the genre in another 10-20 years? Is Trap the first of several big waves of electro-rap cultural domination, or is it the final wave that kills the whole cultural fascination with rapping and huge beats? It's hard to say, nobody knows.

IDK but I am feeling grateful to be a participant in this upcoming decade of music. Its gonna be a lot of new sounds to enjoy and explore.