Those genres are far and away the most popular forms of music for an entire generation now, and exhibit a high degree of craftsmanship with techniques never used before them. Whether you personally enjoy the music or not, an honest academic exploration of music would seek to understand and explain what makes those styles of music tick.
I don't think "advances" implies that something is subjectively better, but that it builds upon previous techniques and methods in some way.
You can dislike synthesizers and samples all you want, but there's no denying that they opened up new creative avenues for composers and sound designers.
OK. Fine with me. "Your music sucks" is a totally dead end and I'm not going there.
What I will say is, arts do not advance linearly, more or less, like science does. You can't say that drama has "advanced" since Shakespeare -- it's just changed. So "what's popular?" is not a shorthand for "what's good?"
I think you're reading too much into the word "advanced".
One sense of "advance" does mean to improve, but another commonly used sense is simply to "move forwards". History advances, literature advances, music genres and technique advance, time advances. None of those imply improvement or a value judgment, just moving-forwards and building-upon (or building-in-reaction-to).
You can absolutely say drama has advanced since Shakespeare, and few people would misunderstand. To say it hadn't would mean nobody had continued to write plays in the same tradition of western literature.
ok, sure, there are two senses of the word. Certainly artists react to each other and take advantage of new technology. They also make things more readily accessible to their contemporaries.
> To say it hadn't would mean nobody had continued to write plays in the same tradition of western literature.
To say it hadn't, in my sense, would mean nobody has written any "better" music than Beethoven's 9th. Nobody has.
To say it hadn't, in your sense, would mean the form of the symphony hadn't continued to evolve, and of course you're right that it has.
Why couldn't someone say that music has advanced since x period of time? Similarly, if you ignore the popularity of music for the sake of argument, how is possible to determine if specific music is "good"? Or how would someone determine if music is advancing in the first place?
Jawdropping music is produced by kids using laptops making sounds that were simply not possible a decade or two ago. If you don't enjoy the breakthroughs that are being made you are the one that's missing out.
All i've heard is mostly the same types of "sound" copied over and over again. Nothing jaw dropping so far (but there is definitely something that has to come out of this technological revolution one day...)
