I'm getting tired of people saying "It's all been done." It hasn't all been done. I'm 50 years old, and the world I grew up in doesn't exist any more.
In a lot of ways, maybe music still repeats existing patterns, maybe people still have to learn to get along with their signficant others & families & neighbors the same way they always did. But in 1969, it wasn't just that we didn't have laptops, or drum machines, or TB303s, or dance events as they're now known. We couldn't even envision such a thing. We were just getting used to the possibilities of multitrack recording. Many, if not most, televisions were black and white and you were lucky to get 4 channels. A lot of things that are central to people's lives now didn't even exist in 1969. If you say "It's all been done before" really means "something to a greater or lesser extent similar to what happened before is happening again." And it happens in a completely different context, which changes how one perceives it. The point being, Joshua Bell playing Bach on a 300 year old Stradivarius in Carnegie Hall is not the same thing as someone playing the same piece on the same vioin when it was new. Seeing (as I did recently) Rhys Chatham performing his Guitar Trio in 2007 isn't the same thing as Rhys Chatham peforming the piece in downtown NYC in 1971. I wish people would stop obsessing over what's NEW and worry about what's GOOD.
