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Meaning of Change in an Art Form Such As Music: It's Not Old vs New
Progress and change are two different things. In the arts, progress is meaningless, but change is both normal and necessary. Music and all the other arts are in a perpetual state of transmutation and diversification. Always were, always will be. That’s how a dozen major new popular musical genres emerged in the 20th Century alone.
Change does not mean “the old” loses its meaning. Art has nothing to do with fashion. With one or two minor exceptions, all of the new musical genres that emerged in the 20th Century remain in place today. The new genres that emerged were not more “progressive” than the older genres. They were just different.
Similarly, great artists enjoy long careers because they have the imagination to embrace change, to constantly reinvent themselves artistically: Johnny Cash, for example. Joni Mitchell. David Bowie. And especially Bob Dylan, the Shakespeare of popular song.
Artists of this calibre do not abandon their great classic songs. They realize that, once a classic, always a classic. So they perform and re-record their classics in new ways. And they also continue writing and recording new material and exploring other genres for ideas.
But, to reiterate, newness of artistic output has nothing to do with progress. New material may be inventive and innovative, but it’s emphatically not better than older material, just because it’s new.