Dancers at the Skolbeat Festival, Sao Paolo. Photograph: Paolo Whitaker/Reuters
There's a certain stripe of person - let's call them the "heard it all before" brigade - who are fond of writing off modern music as moribund and who long for the next grand musical shake-up: another punk, another acid house. For some years it's been indie guitar music that has stood accused of the most abject feats of graverobbery: the 60s worship of Oasis and Britpop, the CBGBs jangle of The Strokes, and the sallow-eyed grooves of post-punk. But look to the new innovations in electronic and dance music in the last couple of years, and they, too, seem curiously retrogressive.
Bassline is certainly a fun development, for example, but surely harks back to the 2-step and speed garage. Or there's new wunderkind producer Burial, whose two albums to date serve to cast a shroud over UK raving history. Or look at minimal techno, a half-decade old now, and still elegantly and fastidiously produced, but more concerned with subtle pleasures than staging a music revolution. With all eyes fixed on the past, is this - with apologies to Francis Fukuyama - the end of music?
I write this, naturally, with a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek. Obviously, there's no suggestion the music is going to stop, any more than Fukuyama expected events to pause as if history was a VHS cassette. But if there is a musty whiff of stasis about music generally, this is probably the result of a couple of factors. The first is the easy availability of technology. It's reasonable to assume that we can only tweak what modern music software can do in terms of the manipulation of sound (and there's no reinventing the 303). And the second is the internet, which makes local communities global, but also removes the boundaries that let new sounds incubate far from the mainstream. Punk and acid house felt like the populist groundswell that they did because walls were still there to be kicked down. Perhaps we are - quite literally - spoilt for choice.
Still, I'm cautiously optimistic. There is no impending shock of the new, but then maybe there never really was, outside of a new listener hearing something with fresh ears. But there's still space for strange fusions, mistranslations, happy accidents. Maybe the death of CDs and the gradual carving out of a new market model is the next genuinely new step. Or maybe the next big development will grow out of metal - a long derided genre, but one that has been quietly breeding new strains away from the full glare of publicity.
Fukuyama was wrong about the end of history, of course: a happy world of free-market liberal democracies seems further away now than it did in 1992. That's history, though: it'll always find ways of sneaking up on the jaded observer and pulling the carpet from beneath his feet. Let's hope the same can be said for music.
