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How would define "bad music"?

#281
gln1955 said:
People love to hate on anything that is popular in the mainstream. I actually like their song "Radioactive". It's all subjective anyway.
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Radioactive is a perfectly serviceable pop song, no beef there.

Thunder, however, is one of the best-selling singles of the last decade, and that one is garbage water.

Honestly the only genre I consistently hate is indie folk. I'm out right now and there's some song playing where all I can hear is kind of jangly guitar and the vocals, which are mixed way louder than everything else. It's at least four people trying to harmonize, but nobody is quite in tune with each other, and as best I can tell the lyrics are "eeHhehhheeeeeeeeeeehhh haaaoouughh! whoooaooaaaaaa hoaaaohhhh!! heeeeeeyyyyy y aaoooooooggguuh! whoaaaaaaaa oaaaahhuhhhhh!! uhhhhh hawwwwwwwww, guuuu buuh buh gubbuh geee, yee HAWW UH WHAA HAW UHhh, I said a WHOoaaaaaaaaaa ooooohh oohhh huhhh! ahheeeeuuhhhhehehhhh yeeeahh!!!"

Get this junk outta here, man!
 
#282
Obese Chess said:
Now, we would mostly agree that that is bad music, but per Wikipedia:
"Imagine Dragons have sold more than 74 million albums and 65 million digital songs worldwide, making them one of the world's best-selling music artists. They have also earned 160 billion streams across music platforms. They were the most streamed group of 2018 on Spotify, the first rock act to have four songs ... to surpass one billion streams each, and the only group in RIAA history to have four songs certified higher than Diamond."

So what do I know?
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I'm just gonna say, I will nevermore judge something as good/bad depending on how much it sells.

I am old enough to have a very clear image that the worst stuff made by humankind always sells very well, be it for money or votes/consensus. Example: nothing sells better in politics than hatred towards a foreign or minority group. Some of the most-sold industrial food products worldwide aren't probably technically "good" but still sell mostly thanks to a carefully crafted image, marketing and playing with people emotions. To understand how markets work or why people "buy" bad stuff in mass, it is enlightening to even just read some basics of social psychology.

In the particular case of Imagine Dragons anyway, I don't know the song but the fact that it has essentially one word in the lyrics still doesn't tell me it's bad. All classical music except opera, many styles of jazz, ambient and so on, don't even have one word, and certainly aren't bad.

This is why I previously wrote that I can't explain clearly why I think a music is bad when it does feel bad to me... Often I would say that "not having enough content" is a reason for being bad: a pop song that has the usual verse-chorus structure, minimal melody in each, two chords at all, basic guitar strumming and primary-school level rhythm section, is at high risk of being "bad" for my tastes, but if they manage to put in at least ONE redeeming feature that is at least partially a novelty to me, it might end up not being bad at all. I just can't rationalize it enough.
 
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#283
The easy answer is too technical:
Music is bad when it is played by bad musicians. Out of time and out of tune, with mistakes.

However.
Music serves a purpose. So one could argue that when it fulfills that purpose, it is good.
Black Metal is most likely perceived as noise (and therefore bad music) in a retirement home.
German Schlager is equally unfit to play to a crowd of face painted, black leather wearing Black Metal fans.
Even if it is very good Black Metal / German Schlager.

If you listen to that super repetitive electro music that consists of very few elements and has minimal changes happen every few minutes, that might be a bit tedious when you're in your listening chair and played a classical record before that. But ask the crowd on a goa festival and they will think differently.


My argument would be:
Music is bad when
1. It completely fails to be well received by the target audience
2. No other audience steps forward and adopts that music into their ranks.
3. No one discovers that music years/decades/centuries later and realizes that at the time this piece was written, the world was not ready for it, but now it is.

There still is an exception, though. What if that piece of music was designed to be rejected by the target audience for some reason? 4'33 by John Cage comes to mind.

So perhaps I could add

4. The piece was not intended to be badly received by the target audience.
 
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#284
Shenron said:
I'm just gonna say, I will nevermore judge something as good/bad depending on how much it sells.

I am old enough to have a very clear image that the worst stuff made by humankind always sells very well, be it for money or votes/consensus. Example: nothing sells better in politics than hatred towards a foreign or minority group. Some of the most-sold industrial food products worldwide aren't probably technically "good" but still sell mostly thanks to a carefully crafted image, marketing and playing with people emotions. To understand how markets work or why people "buy" bad stuff in mass, it is enlightening to even just read some basics of social psychology.

In the particular case of Imagine Dragons anyway, I don't know the song but the fact that it has essentially one word in the lyrics still doesn't tell me it's bad. All classical music except opera, many styles of jazz, ambient and so on, don't even have one word, and certainly aren't bad.

This is why I previously wrote that I can't explain clearly why I think a music is bad when it does feel bad to me... Often I would say that "not having enough content" is a reason for being bad: a pop song that has the usual verse-chorus structure, minimal melody in each, two chords at all, basic guitar strumming and primary-school level rhythm section, is at high risk of being "bad" for my tastes, but if they manage to put in at least ONE redeeming feature that is at least partially a novelty to me, it might end up not being bad at all. I just can't rationalize it enough.
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See? It's fun to think about:
Obese Chess said:
Oh, oh!

This is a fun one for me as it's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about - and with the death of music criticism this century I think it's something more people should think about, but I digress.

For me, the biggest part of whether I label something "bad" vs "not for me" is whether or not what I am listening to is authentic. If I can tell that someone truly put their heart and soul into something, whatever it is, even if it's something fun and silly, I'm not going to say it's "bad," but it might not be for me. There's stuff out there that leaves me cold but I can tell someone busted their ass to make it, so I give it a pass even if I don't like it much.

I think that leads to a second thing, which is that a lot of music I think is bad is also incredibly lazy. Endless droning vocalizations (ooohhh hooaaaahhh whhoaaa whoa whoooaaa hey), frequently repeated lyrics, rhyming words with themselves over and over again, incredibly basic song structure/composition in a genre that doesn't lend itself to it, that sort of thing.

I also agree with an above comment about some things being poorly composed, poorly constructed, or poorly performed, but it's pretty rare to hear stuff that meets those metrics outside of like, DIY punk or noise shows these days.

So, basically, if I can tell someone worked really hard to show me their vision, I'm not going to think it sucks, even if I don't like listening to it. If there's no vision or they phoned it in, it sucks.
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I always enjoy the introspection involved in figuring out why I like something or why I don't, but I also do a lot of mushrooms so YMMV ;)
 
#286
For me, it's stuff that is clearly trying to be on-trend without particularly standing out or having a personality of it's own. I came of age in the mid-late 90's so for me this sums up a lot of the somewhat disposable post-Cobain, grunge-gold rush bands that were mainly sound-alikes of already established, popular artists who carved their own niches in the genre. After a while, you can't really tell one from the other.

There are definitely genres/artists/production styles that I can't stand, but I wouldn't necessarily call them "bad". Taste is subjective.
 
#290
There is a very good music,but man,there is very tough s.its on the music field too and second ones are predominant-IMHO.
I really don't understand why on earth some people makes some ugly covers lately which are unbearable to my ears.What they try to proof,lack of talent or that audience don't understand or care what they do? Anyway,i don't have time to waste for bad music.
 
#292
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