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Allison Plean

Allison Plean's column appears Fridays in the 4 Points arts and entertainment section in the Steamboat Today. Contact her at 871-4204 or e-mail aplean@steamboatpilot.com.

Sometimes I feel as if I'm driving around a cassette tape museum stocked will all the mixes I made when I was 17.

Regardless of whether it was because I was too lazy or too broke to put a CD player in my most recent car, my daily drives and the accompanying soundtracks make me appreciate the evolution of music - a subject that seems to come up whenever I interview a band.

It seems as if there are 100 generations of technology in between only one generation of musicians. Just like in the movie "Back to the Future," when Michael J. Fox's character plays the song "Johnny B. Goode" at his parent's Under The Sea dance, the musicians in 1955 could not begin to fathom what the future of music would sound like.

Now, even Bob Dylan has a myspace.com page. And he has 38,691 friends.

The industry has changed so much that genres of music are now like designer dogs.

In an attempt to continue to make new sounds or new anything, up-and-coming bands are breeding genres. For example, Harmonius Junk (profiled in this edition of 4 Points) described its music as "psychotropic funk for the new millennium. Take improvisational rock and jazz, mix it with Southern boogie blues, electronic freak-out, cult classic covers and cosmic craziness, and you get the idea."

Musicians are becoming so specialized that people like Jake Shimabukuro figured out how to play chamber music, flamenco and jazz on his ukulele.

There doesn't seem to be any plain ol' rock 'n' roll bands anymore. The alternative era came about over a decade ago because it was the first time we had music that didn't fit into existing genres.

We have been so desensitized as an audience that Marilyn Manson doesn't look so scary or freakish anymore. And nobody seemed surprised when George Michael came out of the closet.

As members of the MTV generation, we can't be spoon fed music anymore. We need it to quench our short attention spans with things that are catchy, flashy, shiny and new. I don't think this qualifies us as being spoiled. We are just accustomed to having more to choose from and more to entertain us.

Now you can get the sound of 10 different bands in one, and many albums contain multiple artists. The new Ludacris release features nine other artists, and even an old-schooler like Jerry Lee Lewis collaborated with 21 musicians on his latest CD.

The first generation of music icons and the founders of what we recognize as modern music are getting old, and many have already passed away. Yet some, like Johnny Cash, are still releasing albums from the grave.

Hollywood also has claimed the lives of many classic musicians with movies such as "Ray," "De-Lovely," "Great Balls of Fire" and "Walk The Line." And everyone has a CD out, including Jennifer Love Hewitt and Paris Hilton.

The industry has become so saturated that I'm scared we are on the brink of a musical apocalypse. But as long as my cassette player continues to work and I can use a tape converter for my iPod, at least I'll have something to listen to on the way out.