When was the last time you heard music that was really new? I don’t mean a new song, or even a new sound or trend, but I mean an entirely new kind of music? That was once the norm, when new musical styles surfaced every decade or so, but now? Not so much.

I started thinking about this the other day, when I was thinking about my father. I was wondering what he made of the world around him when he was my age, and I started to think deeply about the way music changed over the course of his life in comparison to how it has changed over mine.

My father was born in 1917. I know– ancient history! Woodrow Wilson was president, World War I, then known only as the Great War, was raging through Europe, and gas was 15 cents a gallon. The hot music of the day was opera, though ragtime was also popular, and Irving Berlin was the hot artist of the day. By the ’20s, jazz had surfaced, the Charleston was all the rage, and crooners were supplanting opera singers as the stars of the day. That was the music of my father’s boyhood, and it evolved into hot jazz, and some early big band sounds, as he reached his teens. The big bands became the dominant sound in the ’40s, with crooners like Bing Crosby fading and pop vocalists like Perry Como taking over in the ’50s. At the same time, you had jazz sounds morphing into blues songs, and artists like Louis Jordan creating a blueprint for what would become rock & roll later in the decade.

Listen to Louis Jordan’s “Aint That Just Like a Woman” and tell me you don’t hear the roots of “Johnny B. Goode.”

That history lesson aside, in 1970, when my father was as old as I am now, music had changed. Drastically. If he turned on the radio, he heard psych rock, early heavy metal and hard rock, proto-punk, soul, funk, and r&b, and maybe even reggae. Music was unrecognizable to him. Even the softer sounds, like Bob Dylan, and other folk singers, were foreign to his ear. He had no frame of reference to prepare him for what he was hearing, because music had evolved and branched out, and entirely new styles of music existed that didn’t 40 to 50 years earlier.

What about me? When I was in my early teens, that is, in the mid-’80s, if I turned on the radio I heard rock, hip hop, some synth-pop new wave sounds, and some electronic dance music. Now, in my fifties, what do I hear when I turn on pop radio? Rock, hip hop, some synth-pop new wave sounds, and some electronic dance music. Nothing has changed! Sure, the styles of those sounds are a little different– Drake doesn’t sound much like Run-D.M.C.– but the form is familiar. I completely understand what I hear, because it’s the same basic style of music.

When was the last time a completely new style of music surfaced? Hip hop, punk, and disco all came about in the ’70s. House, techno, and electronic music has its roots in disco, but evolved into a unique art form in the ’80s. Post-punk, new wave, and indie rock all branched out of punk in about 1978. But since then? Nothing new. The same styles of music have dominated the charts and airwaves, and now the internet, ever since.

Why do you think this is? I have my own suspicions, and I will offer those theories in the next blog, but in the meantime I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject. If you think I’m wrong, and I’m forgetting some great new styles of music, let me know. If you agree with me, why do you think this is the case?