Ok, this has been troubling me for a while now. Looking through the ages, music has always gone through this cycle of bloating, and then being stripped back to a raw, straight to the point form. Be it Miles Davis deliberatly stripping back jazz to raw melody on Kind Of Blue, Elvis blowing everything away with his (reasonably) aggressive and noisy stance, The Sex Pistols blowing wanky prog by going raping old Chuck Berry tunes, or Nirvana sweeping away Hair Metal by mixing Sonic Youth with a decent melody ... I'm not too up on my classical, but I'm pretty sure the same could be said for Romantic/Baroque periods (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Ok, so it's been a while since a 3 CD concept album about the life and time of a mythical fairy from the 12th century has hit the billboard top 10, but surely there's a lot of dross about in Pop these days. Where do you reckon the next thing is going to come from to level the playing field?

Personally, I doubt it's going to come from the Rock camp. The usual style has been to pare things back and make it more aggressive. However, if Bloc Party and Modest Mouse can do this well for themselves, on a reasonably aggressive sound, then I can't really see things getting much heavier.

My money is on something big happening to Rap/Hip-Hop sometime soon, it's gotten fairly silly of late (Trapped In The Closet anyone?), with people being signed for a pretty face and a catchy song. I reckon there's going to be some major shift back to the old school beats and 4 elements side of things. The underground scene seems to be swelling recently, and has been pretty much ignored for the past 10 years or so, which is usually where these things start from. Thats where my money lies.

And no, this isn't a Rap/Prog/Hair Metal/Be-Bop is shit thread, it's a legitimate concept ... honest ...

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"Loops are good to dance to…" - Richard D. James