The Same Old Tune
by Kacey Byczek

Late in the first semester of my senior year of high school, my Fashion Merchandising teacher stopped class to point out that "there are no new clothes." Our final project was to create an ad campaign for an existing line of clothing, and someone complained that we should try to create something new. "Every shape has been used. Every pattern has been used. Everything you're buying now is a slightly altered version of something that you could've found half a century or more ago," my teacher retorted. "Nothing is new."

Having signed up for the class simply to put off AP Microeconomics for another semester, I never really took her words to heart. It wasn't, in fact, until I accompanied a friend of mine to see The Prodigy on March 26 that this incident resurfaced in my conscious memory. The fact that the show was unbearable is beside the point. Everyone else in the enormous crowd at the Roseland Ballroom that evening was ecstatic. People, presumably fans since the 90s, brought glow sticks and beach balls. They brought their children. Everyone danced. With few exceptions, the floor moved as one unit, a strange phenomenon I had never quite witnessed before.

This deafening electronic-punk trio managed to move over a thousand people more than any band I've seen in recent years, and it's because they were original. The Prodigy, along with The Chemical Brothers and The Crystal Method, were pioneers of the "rave-rock" of the early 90s, a movement the world had never seen before, and it was not simply musical. Raves became popular in The Prodigy's native UK in the late 80s, but electronic rock fueled their reputation even further and quickly spread to the rest of the world. Though they arguably evolved out of discotheques of the 70s, the evolution was natural; raves were not exact replicas of discos.

However, today's popular "warehouse parties" – cheap, sometimes legal, but often underground - appear to be exact replicas of raves of the late 80s and early 90s. "Dance-punk" music of groups like The Klaxons have taken the same basic beats and principles used by the aforementioned groups, strengthened and increased the vocals, and branded it as something "new."

An article in the UK's New Musical Express from the week of March 23 touted 2009 as the year of the rave's revival because cheap entertainment is increasingly necessary in the current economic climate in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The same issue featured The Prodigy as cover artists and included a list of "The 25 Greatest Dance Anthems!"

However, it isn't the revival of rave culture that has become a problem exactly. The issue here is that lately everything feels like a revival. New musical artists market themselves to potential fans by comparing themselves to established musicians. Artists use established musicians as filters to describe the sound of a new album to fans. When one is presented with a new CD, he or she is absolutely more likely to ask, "Who do these guys sound like?" than "What do these guys sound like?"

The reason, then, that The Prodigy's audience was so enthusiastic was because most of them could reflect upon the feeling of newness they experienced their first time listening to the band. With newer artists everything feels pre-engineered, like the group has taken elements of pre-existing sounds and simply rearranged them into something slightly less recognizable. Still, nothing can replace a totally new experience.

So maybe it was mid-show, I realized - as the people around me moved in blissful unison, seemingly unaware of the damage the sound system was doing to their ears - music is like fashion. Maybe every shape (or every note) has been used and every pattern (or every lyric) has, as well. Maybe this is why the musical world, like that of fashion, has been recycling elements of old trends at breakneck speeds in recent years, juxtaposing pieces of one movement against bits of another.