I posed a question in my previous article: Is new music really new? The answer, it seems, is no. Now let’s try to figure out why this is the case.

The easy answer to “why?” is to attribute the dearth of new forms of music to the advent of the internet. Let’s explore this idea. To start, let’s examine some of the most recent, and I use that term lightly, new styles of music.

Hip hop is a prime example of this. Hip hop has its roots in the 1970s, and most historians agree that it began in the Bronx. Many assign a very specific date to its inception: August 11, 1973. That is the date of DJ Kool Herc’s first public DJ performance, and while it does mark a seminal event in the birth of hip hop, it isn’t necessarily the beginning of the artform. Hip hop has its roots in the early Manhattan disco scene of the late 1960s, and it drew heavily from the tradition of DJs in Brooklyn who brought turntables out to the park for spontaneous dance sessions. After Herc began playing, other DJs, most notably Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, began imitating his method of focusing on drum breaks, which he would often repeat in a loop rather than playing the entire song through from start to finish. Eventually MCs joined the fray, first making announcements or giving quick shout outs, but soon adding short rhymes a la Frankie Crocker or Wolfman Jack, and other radio DJs of the day. But if you were at that party in 1973, you would not hear anything you recognize as what we call hip hop. You’d have heard a DJ playing funk and soul records from the late ’60s and early ’70s. In other words, you’d have heard what people then called disco.

By about 1978, hip hop had evolved from being no different than a disco DJ set to an entirely unique artform. Although what you would have heard in a park in the Bronx in 1979 had grown organically from what you’d have heard in a park in Brooklyn in 1969, hip hop had become its own sound, and was by then unrecognizable as a variant of its source. Like countless styles of music before it, it had become something new.

The same story can be told about reggae, and its evolution through rock steady from ska, or about house, and later techno, music, and its evolution from the polished disco sounds we associate with Studio 54 to the electronic sounds we now hear in clubs and at festivals. Go back further, and you can trace similar lines from the hot jazz of the 1920s to jump blues in the 1940s that became rock & roll in the ‘50s. In every case, you start with music A and end up with music B, which sounds nothing like music A, even though that’s where it began.

Now let’s jump forward to the 1990s. Let’s say hello to the internet.

A music style needs time, and a lot of it, to grow into something new. it has to marinate in isolation for about a decade before all the gradual changes it undergoes over time are enough to make it so different from where it started that it no longer sounds like that original style of music. What Kool Herc played in 1973 was almost the same as what other DJs were playing elsewhere. He made it just a little bit different. And the next time he played, it was a little bit different from before. And then other DJs did it a little more different, and so on, and so on. Eventually it became different enough that it became a unique style of music, but that took time. And it took isolation. Those are the two ingredients that I think every musical style needs in order to come into being. No style of music comes out of nowhere; every style has its roots in another, older tradition, Only with time and isolation does it have the chance to grow and change until it is no longer recognizable as where it began. Think of it like a caterpillar entering its cocoon, only to emerge as a butterfly some time later. No one would ever look at a caterpillar and a butterfly side by side and guess they were the same creature. But no caterpillar instantly becomes a butterfly. It must stay isolated within its cocoon for a period of time for that transformation to occur.

The internet, for better or worse, has made the world a smaller place, and made nearly everything more immediate. Nothing can exist in a vacuum anymore. A party in the South Bronx can be livestreamed to a house in a suburb of Tokyo, and everyone everywhere can find out what’s going on with anyone anywhere. The result, at least when music is concerned, is that while we still have tiny changes in music, we don’t see the cumulative effect of many tiny changes over a decade’s time. That’s why pop music in 2022 is pretty much identical to pop music in 1992. Sure, things sound a little bit different, but if you plucked someone from 1992 and deposited them in 2022, they could identify today’s music as hip hop, or edm, or rock. As I wrote last time, try doing that with someone in, say, 1949. They would hear the music of 1979 and have no frame of reference whatsoever for what they heard.

Maybe I’m wrong, and the internet isn’t to blame. If you think so, please say so. I’d love to hear your thoughts as to why it seems that drastically new styles of music ceased to surface at around the same time that the internet became commonplace.