Right, this has gone on long enough; time for Ed Costello's Patented Thread-Killin' Music Bachelor's to do its thing...
*cracks knuckles*
Leaving aside the stupendously provocative thread title, there's a problem with the premise of keeping music 'the same as in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s'. That problem is that, so far as guitar-based popular music is concerned, that's exactly what's been happening for the past ten years. I don't know if it's reached quite the same extent in the US (though there's issues there even if it hasn't), but British music throughout the last decade has been caught in a seemingly endless cycle of what Simon Reynolds terms 'retromania' - a constant mining of the past for inspiration, whether it be 'revisionist' (lifting elements from various artists, genres or records and melding them together or with original ideas to create something new) or 'revivalist' (swiping a sound wholesale from one reference point). We can argue ourselves hoarse about whether this is a good or a bad thing - I'll white out my thoughts below, in case anyone's interested (I'm not really sure it's appropriate to this debate) - but it does have the effect of essentially canonising the first half-century of modern popular music (in the sense that it becomes regarded as an inviolable canon where all that it contains is great, and all that is great, it contains - although given the adulation heaped even on such minnows as the Stone Roses you could be forgiven for thinking it meant something else entirely).
So yeah, now I've desperately tried to validate four years of my life I give this thread about a dozen more posts before dying on its arse?
Okay, 'retromania' - difficult one, this. The prevailing opinion associated with the term (as outlined in Reynolds' book of the same name) takes a mostly negative view of current popular music trends like revisionism and revivalism (both of which, I should add, are my personal terms and aren't widely used). Personally, I find some of the assumptions made to be somewhat flawed, in particular: the idea that the 'generation gap' manifests itself in some kind of noteworthy rebellion-as-new-genre against the prevailing musical establishment, denying the validity of respectful reinterpretation and essentially welding music to the context in which it was created; the idea that music must continue to be as insanely creative as the first fifty years of modern popular music, dismissing as stagnation what I consider to be a necessary period of consolidation (especially in the wake of the maelstrom that is the internet); and the idea that musical innovation can come only from the young, an idea often voiced by people who revere Morrissey or Ray Davies.
As to the revisionism/revivalism split, I find myself quite firmly on the revisionist side, at least when it comes to how I make music, but I will freely admit a lot of my favourite records and bands are revivalists. As ever, just sticking a label on something does not magically make it good or bad.
You all stopped reading about six paragraphs ago, didn't you.