2024 Was the Greatest Year of Music Yet, and 2025 Will Be Even Greater
During these last weeks of 2024 I have found myself spending hours upon hours trying to catch up on all of the albums that I missed this year, and I have found myself consistently blown away by just about everything I have listened to. As a musician and songwriter myself, I often am troubled by the thought that there might be no more sounds to discover, that all the songs in the world have already been written; this year's albums have proved that idea to be embarrasingly wrong, not only is musical innovation still possible, but it seems that we have only scratched the surface at what is possible in music.
I hear this argument quite a bit in jazz circles, and anyone who has seen La La Land can recite Ryan Gosling's iconic argument, "[Jazz is] dying. It's dying, Mia. It's dying on the vine. And the world says, 'Let it die. It had it's time." Culturally that seems to be true. The first names that come to my mind when I think about jazz music are the legends of the past, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Chet Baker, et cetera. When I ask the average person about contemporary jazz, often I get the shallow reply of Laufey's vocal pop revival. It's easy for many to find themselves thinking that jazz is a dying or even already dead medium; even in serious music circles, rarely do I hear anyone talking about jazz records released after 1980. And yet, it only takes one listen of Nubya Garcia's 2024 jazz record "Odyssey" to shift that idea entirely. This medium seemingly lost to time has persevered and is only continuing to innovate upon itself, and Odyssey got me to think that maybe, just maybe, jazz as a medium is only just beginning to take form. That concept is not limited to jazz, but reaches out to every single genre of music there is.
To me, the album that truly presents this perseverence to innovate the art form that is music is Jacob Collier's Djesse Vol. 4. Though Collier's work is criticized for being inhuman, lacking emotion and being simply an exercise of his own music theory genius, I find it delivers a strong message as to the direction that this art form is heading. From the opener 100,000 voices, which sees Collier playing his audiences like an instrument, later dropping into a sudden and quite jarring metal section, the less-than-faithful cover of Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, to the highly complex Box of Stars. What Djesse is delivering to audiences is that musicians today are more creative than ever before, more skilled than ever before. Musicians have become focused on building massive genre-bending experiences, the concept album is everywhere, and production and mixing is getting better and easier. Even broke musicians who are working out of their bedroom have access to their own digital studios and budget production workspaces that if utilized well can make serious professional-sounding works.
Earlier this year I watched a video by YouTuber samuraiguitarist titled "Hendrix is underwhelming... until you understand this". Towards the beginning of the video, he describes his own experience trying to get into Jimi Hendrix, the supposed "greatest guitar player of all time"; but initially, Hendrix doesn't sound too different from most other guitar players today; and it's true, Jimi Hendrix was at one point the greatest guitar player alive, but since then his successors have only built upon what he did, and those successors built upon those successors. It's this natural evolution of the way the instrument is played, taking what those have learned in the past, and either building upon the direction they were moving in, or rerouting towards a new destination. (And those new destinations have been plentiful, anyone who has looked at their Spotify Wrappeds this year should know that there are more ways to describe genre than ever before.)
Throughout 2024 I have also been chronologically working through the list of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, about 322 albums in as I am writing this now, or about halfway through the 70s. I have certainly fallen in love with so many bands and musicians of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and many of such albums have greatly influenced the direction of my own music. (Who knew that I would go from ripping off Animal Collective to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young?) But even working through these "greatest albums of all time", which is true that they are, I believe it is undeniable that the music that is releasing today far surpasses what was being released back then, and music is only going to continue to grow and get better from here. The greatest albums ever written and recorded were released in 2024, and one year from now they'll be from 2025, a decade from now from 2034, and so on.