http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/47/79
(....)
"3. Hostility to historical thinking, to narrativization and grand récits per se.
"Here I'm getting into a more speculative area, (((oh good))) but the impression I have is that for many of the younger generation, historical thinking has grown foreign to the way they relate to music.
The musical past has become spatialized: sounds from all the different eras of history are equally available to us, and, furthermore, they are just as available as the music of the present.
"In one sense the past is totally present, all of it, in a way that it's never been before.
"But historical depth drops out, the original context or meaning of the music becomes steadily more irrelevant; music is just material to redeploy.
"If you've grown up, as anyone under the age of 30 really has, with a relationship to music based around total access, superabundance, and the erosion of a sense of sounds having placement within an historical or temporal scheme, then thinking about music in terms of causal links and development through time becomes ever more alien to your consciousness. (((This also applies to graphics, texts, cinema, software, political manifestos, anything that can be digitized.)))
"The idea that jungle led to UK garage, or 2step evolved into grime (so crucial to those, like me, who lived through these transformations, thrilled to them and puzzled over them in real-time), becomes both irrecoverable and simply irrelevant to their practice as DJs, or producers or consumers.
"Leaps across the genrescape, through affinity of sound, seem more persuasive, even if there's no actual historical connection there...."
