First of all, let me be perfectly clear about one thing - in any given year, there was great music being made, jaw-droppingly amazing music, music you would give your life for and that redefined what music meant to you.  You just had to know where to look - it's not always on the air or at the top of the charts (in fact, it very rarely ever is).  

The problem is that during many years, sometimes for spells lasting the better part of a decade, there was other music that dominated the popular imagination and that defined the times, the "other" here denoting music other than the great, jaw-droppingly amazing music identified above.  Popular music at times becomes formulaic and repetitive, with either record labels or the artists themselves all trying to produce sounds that resemble other, best-selling artists, and everything becoming blander and more commodified with each imitative iteration.  Even during these times, the great artists, the true artists, were still toiling somewhere in obscurity, blowing minds and expanding boundaries, but most people didn't notice. 

A second thing before getting to my point.  When discussing the history of popular music over the last 60 years or so, it's more useful to consider decades starting mid-cycle.  The music of the mid-1960s had far less to do with music of the early 60's than it did to the music of the early to mid-70s.  Ditto the 80s and most subsequent decades.  So if we're going to look at the long arc of popular music, we need to think of the periods 1965-1975, 1975-1985, and so on, which puts us in 2020 right smack dab in the middle of the current musical decade.

Finally, we should note that each of these decades represents an evolution, often a revolution, of sound, style, and artistry.   They weren't static periods where all music from, say, 1965 to 1975 all sounded the same.  In the case of that decade, music underwent an amazing transformation from British Invasion rock 'n' roll to San Francisco psychedelia and finally splintered into a near-infinite number of genres and subgenres, from the birth of English glam rock and krautrock to jazz fusion, prog rock and even early proto-punk. During this split decade, the innovators and the avant-garde were largely in the limelight, as each new permutation of popular music rose to the forefront.

I was 21 years old at the end of that first split decade and had grown up and came of age during the iconoclastic, innovative period of 1965-1975.  My personal problem occurred at the start of the next decade, when rock 'n' roll started to stagnate.  Funk and soul gave way to boring and repetitive disco, the new national obsession, and in rock, "mellow" and "laid-back" became the twin mantras that informed a lot of bland and lifeless folk-rock and pop.  Prog rock had become hopelessly bombastic and pretentious ("Did you hear the latest prog record?  It's a 4-disc set with each side dedicated to one of the wives of Henry VIII, each containing a 20-minute solo on a different instrument!").  There was little that interested me on the radio, less yet being played in the bars and clubs to which I was finally old enough to enter.

My approach in 1975 was to go underground and discover a whole new genre.  In the mid 70s, free jazz was still near its artistic and creative apex, and while jazz fusion was getting almost as bombastic and confused as prog rock, real, honest-to-god jazz - post-bop and hard bop, free jazz, and world jazz - were all alive and very much kicking.  And a deep dive soon revealed the rich tapestry of jazz history - the classic Miles and Trane quartets, Mingus, Monk, and Ellington, etc.  All this at a time when I lived just outside New York City and could catch a set by Sun Ra, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Herbie Hancock, or any member of the downtown loft scene (Sam Rivers, Anthony Braxton, David Murray) on any given weekend.

The point here is that even during a time when popular music was dominated by Olivia Newton-John and Donna Summer, the Bee Gees and Abba, there was mind-blowing and timeless music being performed, albeit far from the spotlight of mass consumption.  

Not to reconstruct the entire history of popular music here, but during that 1975-1985 split decade, music evolved from a bland and vanilla start and gave birth to punk and new wave, and eventually post-punk and no wave.  Once again, the innovators and the adventurous took the center musical stage.  By 1985, though, even that once again became formulaic and derivative, leading to the "alternative" music revolution of 1985-1995.  And so it went and so it goes.

For what it's worth, in my opinion, the "best" decades in music were the "indie rock" years of 2005-2015 and the initial, inventive decade of 1965-1975.  As I said right at the very beginning of all this, that doesn't mean the other decades sucked, it just means that to me, those decades produced the greatest volume of the greatest music.  Mathematically, someone has to be first and someone has to be last..

So here, finally, is my point.  During this covid-begotten year of the plague 2020, in the middle of split decade 2015-2025, we are at another one of those musical low-water marks.

Once beloved genres of electro-pop, dream pop, baroque folk rock, and power pop all sound predictable and formulaic by now.  Few if any bands or musicians are breaking new ground and showing new directions.  No one's touring for obvious reasons not related to the music itself, which seems to be stifling creativity to some degree (how innovative can a solo artist recording in her living room really be?).  

Again, there's always great music being performed or recorded somewhere, and I've been taking refuge in the few rock-music exceptions to the general rule, and in the work of modern-day minimalist composers and the remaining free-jazz auteurs and new generation of jazz innovators.  You can label all this "Big Ears music" for Knoxville's Big Ears festival.  But all that's but a fringe movement, a blip on the radar screen of the popular imagination.  

We're in one of the musical lulls right now that precede the next big wave of innovation and creativity. Right now, it's the 1970s just before The Sex Pistols and The Clash.  It's the late 80s/early 90s before Nirvana.  It's the early 00s just before the explosion of a hundred little indie bands no one had heard of before.

The Next Big Thing is coming - nature abhors a vacuum just as Art abhors the derivative and formulaic.  It's right around the corner, and I'll even go so far as to say that someone somewhere is probably already playing it and right now there's a group of hip young people somewhere already creating a whole scene around it. It may take a while before it reaches a 66-year-old white man here in Atlanta, Georgia - I may not be the first to pick up on it but I guarantee you, I won't be the third, either. 

Shhhh!  Can you hear it?