has this been discussed before?

Yes, we are in a new era when it comes to the weight of cultural memory about music that we now have access to.

Maybe we should consicously start easing up on our expectations of constant rapid turnover and artistic revolutions. Accept more continuity for the sake of pacing ourselves (at a societal level).

Even so, I'm convinced there is a great deal that could be done that isn't being done. Also there is still a lot of music that is still new to many many people. That means, the musicians among those people haven't had a chance yet to respond to it, to get ideas from it, etc.

Also, let me say I feel no urgency for something new, since I am still hearing new-to-me music which excites me, even if it is not from the last decade(s), and even if it does not represent a paradigm shift.

"which in turn was" (sorry, didn't proofread)

again, searching for new sounds i suppose is something that has been accelerated since the invention of the record. also live music has suffered. Imagine the orchestra trying to make the best of shitty accoustics when there shiny and lovely recordings of the same piece. or a rock band trying to reproduce the brilliant recorded preformances night after night on tour (whose venues might be ill equipped to dealing with their 'revolutionary' sound).

I think there are many things to accomplish. when i met mark s we talked abt Xenakis and i told him how uninteresting techno was in comparison (didn't jody do a thread on stockhausen?). here was Xenakis, who had shitty machines but had the compostional ideas and on the other sides a lot of the techno crowd who have some nice gear but poor ideas (not all of them: this is not an attack on the whole techno thingy OK and the aims of techno and classical ppl were diff), maybe too restrained by form. so i think that's one area where there are problems that might be worked through.

there's much much more that i think about but maybe for another time.

Of course there is. There always is. It might feel like stagnation if you're experiencing it in real time, but there's a lot happening right now -- pop culture develops as things that are slightly new eventually become more pervasive and affect the way the old things are now made (see: disco's influence on the Stones in '78). People will look back in 20 years and recognize the late '90s/noughties as its own era, with specific styles and sounds.

Actually, disco is an interesting example, because it was around for YEARS before it even had a name. It infiltrated the culture before it was given a name, and once it was its own meme, it filtered right back into the culture.

There was disco in some of the late '60s Motown stuff; in stringy easy listening pop like the Fifth Dimension; in Brazilian samba; in vibey cop-show jazz-funk. People hailed "disco" as something new, but it didn't spring up from nowhere -- no music ever does. If you want new sounds, you can easily find them; they're all around you, waiting to be scooped up and mashed together.

Jeez...depressed after watching telly. like all of us! which is why i don't watch it anymore.

Somebody brought up a good point recently in ILX/NYLPM/rockblogsville. Your ears are trained to seek out the familiar, so rather than focusing on the "retro" elements of a band's sound, it might help to think in terms of what the band is doing differently -- and it is doing something differently, if a group of distinct individuals have formed to fuse their personalities into a musical unit.

I'm sure that some other countries or regions may be experiencing a more clearly recognizable "new sound" of some sort than many of us who post here see around us in our world.

Maybe this is irrelevant to your question, since it doesn't do you much good if you don't find out about it, or if it's not interesting to you. But the fact that something new is actually happening somewhere on the globe could provide hope that something new will happen closer to home.

Acid House/Techno, etc. were well-positioned to go international, thanks to the relative unimportance of lyrics.

Things to look forward to (that may be happening already):
1 Computer sound-software becoming so cheap that it's taken for granted and poorer communities will gain access to them, allowing the creative elements in those communities to come up with new shit. I'm tired of academic computer nerds making boring music because they like computers - I wanna see someone who doesn't give a fuck about a computer because its a 20-year old piece of shit and using it to do something completely unheard of (a la Kool Herc and his turntables).
2) The spread of the DIY ethic/meme to the developing world. A slight variation on the phenomenon described above.
3) The return/revival/reinvention of ever older forms. The blues is still with us. Classical English folk is still with us (in heavy metal, for ex.) Garage is the current flavor of the month. What else will be dug up - doowop? gogo? ragtime? 70s am singer songwriters? These will be smashed together with something else and re-filtered through new technology, so who knows what will result.
4) Speaking of which - new technology always results in new styles of communication (eg, music as well), and at the current rate of development, some as yet unheard-of sound generation system is inevitable.

haha Mixmag has a cover CD this month labelled "Trance 'n' Bass"; I think this is not the next big thing.

haha it says in the small print on the back of the CD "Next month: country & bass" which I would look forward to, if it were real, and I assume it isn't.