When we dislike modern music, are we forgetting the lessons history has taught us?

[Bags159]

The problem is that for some reason every single radio station even those that used to play rock are all obsessed with shitty pop music. Pop music will never ever be good but it will always be there to cater to stupid kids.

"I don't like x genre and anyone who listens to it is a stupid kid"

Really?

 

[manic_depressive13]

However, when I look back at music history and see how pretty much every new genre has been rejected by the "old fogies", I ask, are we really any better than the people that thought rock n roll would be the end of music, because they grew up listening to swing jazz?

You're implying that young people actually like this shit. I find that offensive. No one thinks this is "the end of music". They just think this genre sucks- and they're right. It sounds like crap, and the lyrics are painfully stupid. It's not just what they're saying, but how they're saying it. Why should I feel obliged to acknowledge perceived "value" in shit music just because people may (once) have criticised the music I enjoy? Compromising my beliefs won't change theirs. Besides, there's plenty of good recent music, it's just not played on the radio.

Also, ACDC suck.

 

[Veylon]

Most music from any era is dreck. The good will survive and the bad will slip into oblivion. In ten years we'll be having a discussion about how a handful of songs from the 00's are better than anything in the 10's.

As long as I can find music I like, I don't care how bad the rest is.

 

[SomethingUnrelated]

This irritates me too. Some people today are so obsessed with liking older music by some retarded principle rather than actual taste, and hating new music by the same principle. I mean fuck, Justin Bieber may come to be viewed as the pioneer of a whole genre of music, and that's what people who listen to him, and will grow up to become the main market for music in the future, are happy with. I like what I like, and I leave them the fuck to it, rather than trying to pull us back to what was popular 30 years ago. If that's what you like, fine, enjoy it, and enjoy it in peace, and with other people who enjoy it, but stop trying to stall natural progression. Seriously, this is what some people thought of Elvis when he started out, and he turned out to be one of the better things to happen to music.

 

[BonsaiK]

While I don't think I'll ever be a fan of this new music, should I at least take head from history and face up to the fact that this stuff may be remembered as "groundbreaking" in a couple of decades?

As the first really popular crunkcore act, Brokencyde have in fact already broken ground. Love it or hate it, the music they do is in a genre that simply didn't exist before they started doing it.

As something to listen to I actually prefer Millionaires for the opposite reason, they've got a bit of retro charm about them, especially for fans of EBM and other industrial dance styles. Compare the beat in the Millionaires song you linked to this (and try to ignore the Bush samples which are not part of the actual song but overlaid by whatever idiot made the fan video because he wanted to make some Captain Obvious "Bush is bad" political point):


The same sort of sonic texturing is going on. Here's another one - in this one forget the actual song content and focus on the ambience and sonic treatments:



It's even got the same ideological statement - both songs are using ambience to imply the sound of society crumbling from the inside, albeit from different perspectives. Millionaires are the ones with the more positive perspective of course - they're partying down while it's happening. The sonic connection won't be obvious until you listen to the second track and you start having deja vu flashbacks to 5 minutes ago when you were listening to the first one...

Plus, Millionaires recognise that they're just the latest part of a lineage of manufactured girl groups from the 60s:


Not sure whether the brains behind Millionaires is the sisters themselves or somebody else, but whoever it is, they're smarter than anyone's given them credit for yet. I don't really care whether someone recognises it as groundbreaking or not, I certainly like it, so whatever.

Never really got into Blood On The Dance Floor though, a little bit too prissy and techno-dancey for me, but hey, people dig it so that's cool.

 

[Nickolai77]

Well, i subscribe to the idea that the only reason why older music seems better is because we only remember the good old music and forget about all the crap. Whilst on the other hand we are well aware of all the crap music today, but it will be forgotten within a decade, and so the illusion that music is the past was "better" would continue.

Personally though, none of this effects me because i'm a heavy metal fan and much of my music has been ticking on just fine. Take for instance Iron Maiden's latest album, as well as "new" bands such as Alestorm, Delain and Tyr.

 

[Tiger Sora]

I'm a die hard classic rock fan of only 20. I don't have a problem with most modern music except for rap/techno types. They literally give me a headache in less than 5 minutes of exposure. I apparently just have formed a rejection reaction to the music.

 

[aba1]

I just hate that alot of the newest artists all use auto tune which is lame and cheap esspecially when there are all kinds of talented bands who dont need all that crap sitting on the back burner


and I dislike that justin bever kid simply because of his age he is taking away jobs from others who need the money alot more than he does

 

[eternal-chaplain]

Modern music isn't all that bad and it is true that several older artists do in fact grow riper with age and begin to put out better and better things over the course of their careers. But it is not simply incidental that there is much more hate towards modern music in our times. Top-of-the-line software is no longer needed to make music; anyone with a Rock Band USB microphone and a working computer can record an entire song granted they have the instruments (as it was with the Bieber case).

I'm all for letting the youth become popular and I will be the last to discriminate against youthful singers (provided they're any good), my greatest point in that argument being: The Smashing Pumpkins. They're still continuing to put out tracks for their "Teargarden by Kaleidescope" album and the new drummer was only 19 when he was recruited.

Unfortunately, with the low cost of production, music has become a low-risk industry because of the latter reason or because of a general lowering of the public standards. The case used to be you're music had to be very good lest you lose a very large sum of money on it, now what? Risk-free. Literally mass producing music. Nothing is hand-made any more it seems, always a factory product without heart: no one can see, feel, or hear the effort put into music anymore.

I love talking about The Smashing Pumpkins, so here's one last point: albums. Some people have never heard of them or simply associate them with 12-inch vinyls because EP's have become the new album it seems. When someone does release and album, it generally looks like...well...go to Google Images and type in "Lady Gaga Album Cover" It's boring. Bland. Effortless. Says nothing. Nothing! At all. In stark contrast, try to find ALL the album art from Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness. I'm holding the two disk album in my hands now and if you exclude the CD art and the album covers, there's still 5 expertly crafted paintings in an insert booklet; even the lyric booklet has small ink sketches drawn in throughout.

 

[WouldYouKindly]

Let me put it this way, music never ends. Styles and preferences will change eventually but only because those styles go out of style. I don't think modern pop will destroy music, but that doesn't mean I like it and won't call it, in my own opinion, shit. I have that right and it just doesn't appeal to me.

Many of the bands I like aren't that old either, just not mainstream, or less mainstream.

 

[the Dept of Science]

-stuff-

I was actually sortof waiting for you to come along. It was you defending the Millionaires a while ago that first planted some seed in my mind. Sadly it was part of a larger thread so it didn't quite generate the discussion that I was half hoping it would.

Most music from any era is dreck. The good will survive and the bad will slip into oblivion. In ten years we'll be having a discussion about how a handful of songs from the 00's are better than anything in the 10's.

As long as I can find music I like, I don't care how bad the rest is.

But thats the point, all this stuff gets (almost) unanimously labelled as shit, but its the act of labeling it as shit that got me thinking. Not because of subjectivity or anything either, more the fact that the "fogies" have so consistently been proven wrong.

You're implying that young people actually like this shit. I find that offensive. No one thinks this is "the end of music". They just think this genre sucks- and they're right.

Young people listening and enjoying this music is a provable fact, these guys haven't got 7 figure views on YouTube solely from cynical internet commenters. And while, I guess noone has called it "the death of music", I've seen plenty of people using these guys as evidence to back up their point that the music around nowadays is worse than it was in the past.

 

[TheLaofKazi]

I don't like music critics, they make me sad. I like music, all kinds of it, even the 'shitty' kinds. There are so many misconceptions about pop music, autotune and tons of other things in this thread, which also makes me sad.

There's nothing wrong with a song with a robotic, repetitive beat and shallow, explicit lyrics, just as there's nothing wrong with an 18 minute, experimental, avant-metal ambient song composed entirely of the sound of guitars being slammed into the ground by a schizophrenic Amish man.

Music doesn't have to sound good, it doesn't have to be intelligent, it doesn't have involve a certain level of technical ability, it doesn't have to be the opposite either, it just is. Some music is good to dance and get drunk to, some is good for inciting spontaneous, existential introversion and conflicting collections of emotions, and some is good for both. If all music was like one thing, or for one purpose, life would be boring.

Music is everything from all of the goofy, stock ringtones on your cell phone to the beautiful, intricate, genre-shifting symphony. It's all culture, it's all music, it's all terrible, it's all beautiful. I accept all.

 

[BonsaiK]

Unfortunately, with the low cost of production, music has become a low-risk industry

Oh, how I laughed.

Music is a higher-risk industry than ever before, and when you look at the success/failure ratio, one of the highest risk industries there is. Sure, it's easy enough to make music now, but to be part of the music industry? I can't think of any other industry with a greater failure/dropout/oops-I-ruined-my-life ratio with the possible exception of acting. Just going on percentages of the total, I certainly know more dead/permanently handicapped/mentally scarred/living in a world of complete delusion musicians than soldiers, police or firemen.

 

[The Funslinger]

I accidentally clicked on the red button again yesterday; seeing a bunch of Justin Biebers argue this is somewhat humorous.

OT: I think there's more to it than old fogey syndrome. The truth is, bubblegum pop has always sucked, and since the late 80's, it's been at the forefront of the music industry. The good news is that pop today is more like it was in the 80's and early 90's than it was in the late 90's and early 2000's, which was the real low point in pop music. Incidentally, the 90's sucked hard for most genres of music, much harder than the last few years have -- and this is coming from someone who was born in 1990 and grew up on the stuff. Seriously, though, compare Lady GaGa to Brittany Spears; one of them is a musician who happens to do pop. The other is a dancer with a pretty face that some record exec thought would look good in a music video. For rock, look at Wolfmother and then look at Nirvana. One is a band made up of musicians who have the chops to play whatever they need to, from the simplicity of Woman to the really complicated stuff that shows up on their later albums. The other is a band made up of people who look nice, who whack away at their instruments and mumble their lyrics, which would be incoherent even if you could understand them. If you honestly think Nirvana is better than Wolfmother, you aren't a fan of rock.

And it's that sentence right there that invalidates your argument and turns it into douche whining.

And before you claim anything, no, I'm not a fan of Nirvana, mostly because I've never bothered to listen to their stuff. However, they're pretty iconic in Rock, so I imagine I'd like them. I do like a lot of rock bands that were around in the 90's. Specifically, Red Hot Chili Peppers. They are basically 80's-present day. The 90's was a fantastic decade for them, they manage to have such a huge variety of music while staying inside of their genre. The only song of theirs I dislike is Porcelain, which grates on me like nothing else.

 

[BonsaiK]

-stuff-

I was actually sortof waiting for you to come along. It was you defending the Millionaires a while ago that first planted some seed in my mind. Sadly it was part of a larger thread so it didn't quite generate the discussion that I was half hoping it would.

I think it's something that people don't want to discuss, the whole idea that discussing a pop group's musical output on a purely musical level requires a certain amount of technical knowledge to even construct any argument at all is something that makes the haters of such music feel distinctly uneasy. Hence, no discussion of that particular topic ever really happened there, and it probably won't happen here either.

If all music was like one thing, or for one purpose, life would be boring.

This person gets it. Music is what it is, and you can choose to be interested in music, or not. Many people who consume music in today's society consume with with a lot of codified junk on top that informs how they should feel: "oh, I can't like that band because they have a stupid dance move", "I don't like them because of their hair", "my friends don't like it", "my friends do like it, but I want to feel superior to them, so I'll like something else instead", "I don't like them because they sold out, they were on MTV, but before that they were cool because less people knew about them", etc etc... in other words, everything but the music. Many music fans aren't really music fans at all, they're culture/design junkies, like a sports fan who likes a team because the colour and shape of the logo and the location of the players appeals to him. In the meantime, other people go "hey, I like the way it sounds".

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I accidentally clicked on the red button again yesterday; seeing a bunch of Justin Biebers argue this is somewhat humorous.

OT: I think there's more to it than old fogey syndrome. The truth is, bubblegum pop has always sucked, and since the late 80's, it's been at the forefront of the music industry. The good news is that pop today is more like it was in the 80's and early 90's than it was in the late 90's and early 2000's, which was the real low point in pop music. Incidentally, the 90's sucked hard for most genres of music, much harder than the last few years have -- and this is coming from someone who was born in 1990 and grew up on the stuff. Seriously, though, compare Lady GaGa to Brittany Spears; one of them is a musician who happens to do pop. The other is a dancer with a pretty face that some record exec thought would look good in a music video. For rock, look at Wolfmother and then look at Nirvana. One is a band made up of musicians who have the chops to play whatever they need to, from the simplicity of Woman to the really complicated stuff that shows up on their later albums. The other is a band made up of people who look nice, who whack away at their instruments and mumble their lyrics, which would be incoherent even if you could understand them. If you honestly think Nirvana is better than Wolfmother, you aren't a fan of rock.

And it's that sentence right there that invalidates your argument and turns it into douche whining.

And before you claim anything, no, I'm not a fan of Nirvana, mostly because I've never bothered to listen to their stuff. However, they're pretty iconic in Rock, so I imagine I'd like them. I do like a lot of rock bands that were around in the 90's. Specifically, Red Hot Chili Peppers. They are basically 80's-present day. The 90's was a fantastic decade for them, they manage to have such a huge variety of music while staying inside of their genre. The only song of theirs I dislike is Porcelain, which grates on me like nothing else.

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<spoiler=Nirvana><youtube=zYxkezUr8MQ>
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Note that I didn't say that Nirvana was absolutely terrible -- although I can't personally stand what their influence did to music for the last 20 years. What I said was that any fan of rock would be able to recognize that Wolfmother was better. Listen to both selections; if you honestly think the Nirvana song is better, I don't know what to say to you.

Edit: And to clarify, those are Nirvana's three biggest hits, and Wolfmother's two most famous songs, plus a random one I pulled to get the same number of songs on both sides. I didn't cherry pick Nirvana's worst and Wolfmother's best.

Since I still apparently have time to edit this, I'm going to talk about the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Basically, they were pretty atypical for the 90's. While they were good, they weren't in any way related to the grunge movement. You can trace a line from 70's punk to 90's grunge to early 2000's punk pop and from there to modern emo and hardcore variants, but RHCP is not directly in that line. They weren't bad, but they weren't typical of mainstream 90's rock either.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

The forum ate my post; hopefully this will get it to show up.

Edit: Yep, that did it.

 

[eternal-chaplain]

Unfortunately, with the low cost of production, music has become a low-risk industry

Oh, how I laughed.

Music is a higher-risk industry than ever before, and when you look at the success/failure ratio, one of the highest risk industries there is. Sure, it's easy enough to make music now, but to be part of the music industry? I can't think of any other industry with a greater failure/dropout/oops-I-ruined-my-life ratio with the possible exception of acting. Just going on percentages of the total, I certainly know more dead/permanently handicapped/mentally scarred/living in a world of complete delusion musicians than soldiers, police or firemen.

I am speaking strictly in terms of economics. Compared to any number of decades ago, music is becoming much cheaper to make with some bands becoming completely digital and releasing music strictly online to cut the cost of compact disks (which aren't very expensive anyways compared to the vinyls music used to made on). I am not at all saying you are not risking time, one can certainly waste a lot of time on music that will never be popular, but now, remember my Lady Gaga example: anybody could make an album cover as crappy as that, the same goes for most modern music videos which are now mostly about the artists as compared to twenty years ago when music videos were nearly at their zenith and the ratio of art to artist was in a beautiful 5 to 1 proportion.

 

[Mrsoupcup]

I just don't find any quality in this generations music. The reason music was disliked in the past is because the newer generations were always to deviant for the older ones. The reason most people don't like music now isn't becuase it's deviant, it just isn't good.

Spoiler: Examples of quality music from different genres and generations.

Talking bout' my generation....