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Mainstream Music Stinks!
- Thread starter Glenn Johnson
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I was 17 in 1982. I think most of the music I considered "good" was written in the 15 years leading up to that point.
Quantized - time-corrected, pitch-corrected, music sucks. I don't care what genre it is, or what age the artists and producers are.
Over-compressed music also sucks. Again, nothing to do with age or genre per se.
These are production aspects of modern music that are objectively less musical due to unnatural overprecision and sucking the life out of rhythm. This is objective because dynamics are an element of music.
And yes, the mainstream has always tended towards suckage. Mainstream classic rock is an absolute bore, as is the Top 40 station. New-country is a quantized pop cliche of the genre.
But if we look at top music charts of the past, illusions shatter. "Flying Purple People Eater" was a far more popular song than anything Led Zeppelin release the same year.
People like crap. Top 40 and worn-out classic radio exists to give them the crap they desire, and the repetition that seems to sooth most people but which grates on the creative-types' nerves.
However, I find no need to get dark or twisted about it, as quality does show through, and endures in ways that garbage music never can or will. That Led Zeppelin album stands as a classic. Flying Purple People Eater is a largely forgotten, stupid diversion of the day, like most of what's on the radio right now.
Over-compressed music also sucks. Again, nothing to do with age or genre per se.
These are production aspects of modern music that are objectively less musical due to unnatural overprecision and sucking the life out of rhythm. This is objective because dynamics are an element of music.
And yes, the mainstream has always tended towards suckage. Mainstream classic rock is an absolute bore, as is the Top 40 station. New-country is a quantized pop cliche of the genre.
But if we look at top music charts of the past, illusions shatter. "Flying Purple People Eater" was a far more popular song than anything Led Zeppelin release the same year.
People like crap. Top 40 and worn-out classic radio exists to give them the crap they desire, and the repetition that seems to sooth most people but which grates on the creative-types' nerves.
However, I find no need to get dark or twisted about it, as quality does show through, and endures in ways that garbage music never can or will. That Led Zeppelin album stands as a classic. Flying Purple People Eater is a largely forgotten, stupid diversion of the day, like most of what's on the radio right now.
mainstream music would generally be driven by what the youth listens to. as someone who teaches a lot of teenage music students, i feel comfortable assuming (happy to try and confirm!) that none of them have literally ever in their life turned on a radio.
so in a weird way, that is actually a terrible way to measure what is popular. of all my teenage students, none of them are into "mainstream" (really bad) stuff.
the music business is not at all what it used to be. there are no major headliners that sell stadiums anymore. it's far more fragmented, and each young persons individual taste can be far more individualized - and they seem to like that.
Case and point, i have one teenage student who's obsessed with 1920s-30s ragtime piano music. fats waller and the like. knows the songs, the style, historical context, and so on.
I have another student who's only interested in korean pop music (K-pop for those of us in the know
)neither of these things would be on the radar of the folks who grew up in the days of actually popular music on the radio.
and yes, ive heard the really lame stuff some of us are talking about. i'm sure they do have lots of fans, i just don't encounter them is all.
It isn't a new thing in the record industry though. Billy Joel was singing about getting cut down to 3:05 like forty years ago.
For a while all you ever saw on the road was a silvery grey or champagne Toyota or Honda box sedan. No colors, no differences. Completely milquetoast to represent the safe bet. Media is the same.
It’s probably more reliable to not tie musical taste to age but instead to IQ. The dumb listen to auto-tuned trash, and then they grow up to listen to pop-country.
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I think that the problem is more that it doesn't piss me off, or any of my friends, or any parents of my 12 year old's friends. It's largely just fine in the background for some. Those who have been passionate about music to some degree aren't really angry about it, just sad and underwhelmed. Sad because there's nothing there to grab onto. In the past there was music in the midst of the bubblegum nonsense and pop platitudes that had something to grab onto and give you an avenue to explore something deeper and more meaningful. Now, it's difficult as you've got to go out and search on your own because no one is putting anything different or interesting out there for mass consumption. The DJs of the past who wanted to turn people on to something mind blowing just don't exist anymore...
I'm one of the older members of the immediately succeeding generation, the one that had access to all this stuff and didn't want it. I like that stuff now. I even love some of it (Chic) but when I was a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s, I hated most of it with a passion (with the exception of Sly). I felt that it sounded airless and cluttered and didn't have the kind of energy I was interested in. Most of the songs concerned things I couldn't relate to at the time. It seemed like dreck. There was something about 70s songwriting and recording that was alienating to me.
I listened almost exclusively to 50s and 60s (Beatles, Stones, early Who, Stax, rockabilly) stuff until I discovered punk rock in the early 80s. All that stuff sounded more energized and alive to me.
It just goes to show how individual the way we listen to music is. I'm sure the kids now are hearing stuff that we can't hear too well within the music, just as we could hear things within what our parents thought of as noise.
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Excellent presentation (the vid)
"You actually play more guitar?" Oh dear, how does one process that <c:
Was mainstream music ever that great? While kids today may have 6ix9ine and Post Malone, we had Crazy Town, Limp Bizkit, and Sugar Ray in mine.
Retirement community... we've been playing bass since some were filling their diaper with mud.
Golf? No interest in playing, but love to watch the greats on t.v.… Brooks Koepka is taking them all to school...
Glenn: I tip my hat to you, good sir! Why? Because you are 100% correct!!!
I use two words to describe the modern day tripe: major suckage! Not minor suckage, not sorta suckage, not in the vicinity of suckage-hood....................*M-A-J-O-R* suckage.
The reason? No talent. Plain and simple. It's all over-processed, fake, auto-tuned crap that any bozo can do.
And I don't buy into the nonsensical premise that I'm just being old and reminiscent of the good old days when good music was made back in the 70's. Why do I have the cajoles to say something like that right in front of my excellent TB brethren who are reading this? Because back then, although I didn't care for the music my parents liked, at least the musicians from their era had talent. They actually sang and played real instruments. Same later on with my era....the 70's. The musicians actually sang and played real instruments (Led Zep, Yes, Rush, Styx, Queen, Boston, Supertramp, Creedence, Eagles, Elton John, etc.) No fakeness. No stupid sounding auto-tune. Just real talent from real musicians. So, even though the songs were different from my parent's era to my era, both eras had real musicians performing and recording. But nowadays it's just a bunch of fake crap, and it's gotten faker with each passing year. Today, any under-evolved neanderthal (who somehow developed sufficient motor skills to walk in an upright position) with zero musical talent and a computer can generate some crappy noise using digital technology and try to pass it off as music. Sorry, but I'm not buyin it. It sucks, and it sucks bigtime. Real musicians, with real talent, don't need auto-tune and all of that fake over-processing. Those with no talent *DO* need it.
But, being who I am, I always try to look on the bright side of things, so there's this: even though the digital technology has brought about music that sucks wangus, it has provided a wonderful way for humans with no musical talent whatsoever to participate in the recording industry. Without that technology, those humans would be repeatedly asking other humans "did you want fries with that?"
All IMO, of course!
Joe Walsh does a good job of spelling it out in this vid from 0:20 to 1:20...
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I remember in the 90's watching some documentary thing on VH1, and when the subject of DJ's used to be able to put things on they thought people would dig, and then they had some exec on there that said he changed all that telling them they can only play the hits. IOW, the stuff being force fed. Even the oldies stations here only play the same songs over and over again -sometimes twice or three times a day- , when I remember those same bands having several popular songs on the radio back then.
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Lee Abrams, I believe. All I know is that when I was a kid, we had a couple of rock stations that played lots of album tracks and "underground" artists. I loved it, but their ratings were in the toilet. They started playing the hits, and their ratings went up and so did their ad buyrates. It wasn't enough to save one of the stations, but another lasted a good while.
Don't blame the programmers...blame the people. They want the hits. Simple as that. If people wanted underground artists and album tracks, they would play them.
If that's who that dude was on that show, never did I want more to be able to reach thru a screen and ring his neck!
I don't care for Vanilla Ice, but a perfect example was Ice Ice Baby was a B side and the corporation was pushing the A side song until a DJ said the B side song was better and played it.
But yeah, I see how the non-musical public doesn't care what they're listening to. I see that in my fellow co-workers in the repair shop I work at.
This isn't about being 'old'.... today we have so many avenues we can stream hundreds of genres we want to listen to without needing the radio. It's great!
Yes there is new music out there being made by actual people on real instruments that isn't anything like the awful pop stuff being force fed on the radio that's created by samples and computer. It doesn't take much effort to look for it.
Yes there is new music out there being made by actual people on real instruments that isn't anything like the awful pop stuff being force fed on the radio that's created by samples and computer. It doesn't take much effort to look for it.
The reason that we think music from the 70's was so great compared to today is that only the top 2% of music from the 70's survives and we're comparing the entire decode of music to a snapshot of today. That and old people hate rap.
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