The Decline of Musical Hipness

For half a century, music was the badge of hipness. What you listened to determined if you were a cool, enlightened person or not. Clothing, hair styles, taste in movies, political opinions — these all had a role, but ultimately music trumped everything. You could be the coolest kid in high school with all the right accessories, but some parka-wearing geek could undermine it all in a second by saying "You listen to that?"

The age of Music Hipness began with the shift from music as something people did to something they consumed — the rise of radio and cheap record players meant that anyone could have music whenever they wanted. Instead of spending ten years learning to play an instrument, and devoting hours to practicing a piece, you could simply turn a switch.

For a couple of generations after the rise of consumer music the hipness gradient ran downhill from high to low culture, just as it had for most of human history. Boobs and lowbrows listened to pop music, just as their grandparents had gone to music halls and sung the popular tunes. The cultured people listened to "serious" music on records and tuned in to orchestra programs on the radio, just as their grandparents had gone to concert halls or played on the piano in the parlor.

The big shift in Music Hipness came with the rise of youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Suddenly the goal was not to be cultured but to be cutting-edge. Music made a great way for teens to one-up each other on the hipness status hierarchy, and popularity elbowed high culture off the top of the pyramid.

There are good structural reasons for this. Pop songs are short, so one can listen to a lot of them and become an "expert" relatively quickly. They're cheap — radio is free and singles (later tapes and CDs) aren't expensive. Popular music is also universal. One can hear the same tracks in Boston and San Diego. You don't have to go to a particular museum or theater to experience them.

Radio DJs and record companies weren't slow to notice and exploit this, of course. Kids looking for role models were not-very-subtly encouraged to emulate the voices from the ether and the paragons of hipness who actually worked in record shops. But music consumers rapidly outflanked the producers, especially once cassette players made it possible to assemble mix tapes. Obscureness and authenticity became the mark of hipness, because of course anyone could listen to the radio hits but only the cognoscenti could dig up the really cool stuff.

However, over the past couple of decades there's been a huge shift in how we consume music, and I think it has destroyed music as the badge of hipness. Two technologies did the job: earbuds and (of course) the Internet.

Earbuds may seem like a trivial technology, but beginning with the Sony Walkman back in the 1980s, they have turned music from something ambient to something personal. Before that, if your friend was listening to a cool song, you (and everyone within earshot) had to listen as well. In fact, having a set of powerful speakers to make everyone around you listen to your choice of tunes was a major part of 1980s adolescence.

But ever since the Walkman, music has become more and more a private affair. In the cafe where I'm writing this, I can see three people listening to music — I'm listening to iTunes on my laptop, there's a young woman at the next table listening to something from her phone, and a young man just left with an iPod clipped to his running shorts. And nobody knows what we're listening to. It could be jazz, classical music, some obscure indy band, a podcast, an audiobook . . . only the listener knows.

The second technological change is the shift from buying physical records or discs to downloading specific songs. Just as earphones have made listening more private, downloading makes buying music a solitary activity. No hipper-than-thou record store clerk will make fun of your choices, but nobody will be impressed by them, either.

One effect of these two technologies is that everybody's musical tastes have become more eclectic. I am not a "music person" and have never tried to be, but my own iTunes archive includes Vivaldi, Frank Sinatra, movie soundtracks, pop music from my high school days, and a whole bunch of random stuff. And from what I've seen, everyone's music collection nowadays is just as diverse.

There are still Top 40 hit songs — there are still radio stations — but it's surprising how fragmented the radio market is nowadays. And radio is a much smaller part of what people are listening to. The days of albums selling tens of millions of copies are past. All music is "niche music" now.

The result is that there's no longer much status in being obscure. Everybody has some tracks on their music device which their friends haven't heard. The endless churn of "rediscovery" means that everything unhip has been made hip again, and there's no more priesthood to distinguish between the two.

I wonder if the increase in displays of political allegiance and status-signalling via having the "correct" opinions is an effect of the downfall of musical hipness. Primates always engage in some form of status competition, and if you can't demonstrate your superiority by showing off your taste in music, you can do it by joining a Twitter mob to demonstrate your ability to detect and be outraged by things others have failed to notice.

            

Comments

[Gregory Benford]

YES, quite true. Now can explain why pop music has generally declined in quality? & sales ditto?

[jic]

"Just as earphones have made listening more private, downloading makes buying music a solitary activity. No hipper-than-thou record store clerk will make fun of your choices, but nobody will be impressed by them, either."

I think the cleverest thing Bandcamp did was add a social media aspect that only shows albums you actually paid for. It means that when faced with the option to "name your price", you have an incentive to pay at least a token amount so that other people can see what you bought. It feels good when you start being "followed" to be able to have at least some influence on what other people are buying, despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact that most of them are complete strangers.