not fully committed to this idea; haven’t been thinking about it very long.

I would include urban African-American music in with what I’m describing, though at this point, that’s fairly indistinguishable from the Anglo-American popular music genre you describe (at least in terms of sales demographics). But even if you limit the analysis strictly to that area, the lack of original trends is evident. I’m not trying to debate whether anything new is any good or of value, just noting that we’re not seeing the same sorts of large movements we’ve seen in recent decades. Though it may speak more to a splintering of interests, narrowcasting, more than a lack of innovation.

And who says I don’t like punk rock? As a high schooler in the late 1970′s/early 1980′s, the movement was essentially dead before I came to it, but still had enough relevance to offer insight to a life outside of the cultural backwater of the suburban South. I do have little patience for the modern revivals of these old styles, as they strike me as empty aping of the form without the same meaningful motivations, the sorts of nostalgia for the past that punk rock was meant to tear down. Did punk take 10 years to invent? Some cite its invention to the first Velvet Underground album in 1967, others to the first Stooges album in 1969. I’d say those were more influences than actual occurences. And I’d peg it to the first Ramones appearance at CBGB’s in 1974, with the creation of a scene that was essentially over within a few short years. It was a very brief movement, that by its very nature ended as soon as it was discovered by the mainstream.

And as I said, there are good an bad things that come with this ready availability of media. The wider range of choice, and the ability to reach likeminded individuals is definitely a plus. But we have lost the sorts of defining cultural moments, things that allowed connection to a wider range of people.

This is highly subjective territory. As it was mentioned in other comment, people were saying that there is nothing new (e.g. in music) for, like, forever.

“The biggest trends I can see in music in recent years are a garage-rock revival and a re-hashing of “progressive rock“, a style so dreadful that punk rock was invented as an antidote to its overblown sense of self-worth.”

That only means that (1) when you say “music” you probably mean only Anglo-American “popular music” genres and (2) you like neither prog-rock nor punk. Which is by the way fair enough, but what here to debate? This is all matter of taste. (As a side comment: if punk was “invented” as an antidote to prog-rock, it took at least 10 years to invent…)

“The constant availability has taken away some of the special nature of that content (no matter how mediocre it actually was).”

I completely agree with that. And maybe this is not a bad thing. Now at least one has a choice and can watch or listen to things one really wants, and see that there was nothing really special in that content; rather it used to be sold (in a very broad sense of this word) as special.

But you’re right that it’s more pronounced in some fields, like music, where we’ve only had the ability to record for 120-odd years.

I’ve had a similar situation to what you describe when showing kids the great Peanuts Thanksgiving and Xmas specials of my youth. These are inevitably met with a yawn and a “so what”. So while you can at least provide access to the actual content, you can’t provide context.

The constant availability has taken away some of the special nature of that content (no matter how mediocre it actually was). Saturday mornings were something special, that’s when the cartoons were on. Now with 24 hour access, cartoons are perhaps devalued. The Wizard of Oz was only on once a year, it seemed like a bigger deal than it does now that you can pull out the DVD any time you’d like. In some ways this lets us make more objective judgments about whether Dastardly Dan’s cartoon was actually pretty crappy, but it seems like something has been lost as well.

Bloom essentially argues that every artist’s work is a result of grappling with the work of their predecessors – and he develops a concept of “misreading” (which really isn’t at all misreading but rather a critical and artistic re-interpretation).

Bloom is primarily concerned with poetry in this meditation, but his point applies to all creative (I use the term broadly to encompass all creation of intellectual or cultural artifacts) endeavors. The interesting thing here, I think, is that poetry has a long and relatively (for major poets going back more than 500 years) complete recorded history. A poet has to grapple with this history (which, if one is Chinese, is indeed even more of a challenge then if one is writing in English). The challenges faced by poets (and writers of prose, painters, scholars, etc.) is now faced by others in fields that previously had more ephemeral natures. Music is a great example. Ditto for film. But it is now a challenge for “critics” (meaning anyone writing, commenting, or discussing) popular culture. I don’t know that there is anything new going on but the Internet is creating challenges for a great many fields and people that were previously limited to those with well recorded and archived corpuses.

It isn’t us.

When previously, people we constantly saying the same things to a smaller audience (perhaps even in tandem), now it is possible for one to speak to many with a few mouse clicks. The logical conclusion of this argument is I suppose that we were always as creatively limited, we just didn’t know it.