I’m no historian of music but it’s probably fair to say that since the 18th Century popular music has been good at reinventing itself. Classical music as we know it now was the popular form of the old times. In the early 20th Century jazz appeared and became the new thing. For fifty years America honed this genuinely original art-form, from ragtime through Armstrong to the swing and big-band era, to the emergence of vocalists like Sinatra and writers like Cole Porter. When Parker's be-bop culminated in Davis and Coltrane jazz had truly matured. Rock and roll blew all that away morphing into pop which has maintained until recently. Throughout the era country music with its roots in the folk traditions was always challenging the mainstream for supremacy and at times was the most commercially successful music in the world. The new expression of urban America in the form of rap and hip-hop stole that accolade for a while in the 1990s.

I think that currently, possibly for the first time in over two-hundred years, popular music no longer reinvents. There is no shortage of quality acts of course who do what they do as well as anyone did but they are essentially revisiting the old schools. The last conceivably new genres were electronic dance and hip-hop which happened nearly twenty years ago now. Outside of an infinity of sub-genres, since then there have been few, if any, emergent contenders for the crown of fresh originality becoming a new music-kind.

Within that very broad category of ‘popular’, different genres came and went. So called serious music went from being popular to elitist. Same thing happened with jazz. Any given style has its time then disappears from the mainstream of taste. Now there is an emergent coterie of historians defining rock's posterity while a creative void is left in the wake. Currently the conditions for a new and original form seem to be absent and it is hard to imagine how that situation is going to change in the foreseeable future.