Mainstream music of the 2010s fixated on recreating past sounds rather than innovating

Evidence

As the 2010s continued, artists kept proving Simon Reynolds correct in their fixation on the past. In 2001, the French house group Daft Punk released their landmark album, Discovery, layering vocoders, arpeggiating analog synthesizers, and digitally degraded seventies samples into a unique and futuristic sound. But by 2013, the duo could only look backward. Their final album, Random Access Memories, meticulously re-created the lush, live-instrument disco of their childhoods. Pitchfork initially awarded the album an 8.8, only to later revise the score to 6.8, arguing that it failed to “push pop music forward.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 389

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Direct evidence for Marx’s retromania period within his four-period structure; links to the broader argument about the ‘omnivore monoculture’ the reader is tracking.
• SEED: Pitchfork’s score reversal on Random Access Memories is a concrete case of taste critics being slow to reward backward-looking work — angle: how retro craft fails critical tests because it doesn’t ‘push forward’.

Related

• Artists who once innovated turned to re-creating past sounds by the 2010s (similarity 0.94)
• Late-2000s electronic pop continues a mode of synthpop curtailed in the mid-1980s (similarity 0.90)
• Electronic dance music moved from formal innovation to production refinement across the 2000s (similarity 0.83)
• Contemporary pop lacks forward momentum because the present is crowded out by the past (similarity 0.81)
• Twenty-first-century pop culture stagnated as artists mined the past rather than the future (similarity 0.80)