'Nuff said.
I'll toss out three basic perspectives:
1) New music is great and those who disagree either don't know where to find it or have a generational bias
2) New music sucks but there's reason to believe it will recover and be great again
3) New music sucks and it's all downhill from here
I probably agree most with 2 but am nagged by the possibility of 3.
I find contemporary pop music to be unlistenable, and the same goes for modern “classical” music such as “433” by the “composer” John Cage which consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. The only decent music being written today is movie music.
It was better back in the day & yes to # 3.
I have a radical idea for the music industry. Bring back Rock n Roll.
Forget pop. Forget hip hop or rap influenced crap. Just give us straight Rock....y’know electric guitars and stuff. You are the ones who insisted we move away from it. We responded by listening to classic rock more than any of the new crap you were pumping out.
In this woke country, we don’t have culture..... that’s a white man concept.
No comedy, no sarcasm, no history, no education, no truth of philosophy, no science, no debate, no religion, no family....
all white crap..... don’t you know?
For better new country music and/or Southern Rock, nearly anything from the Yellowstone soundtrack is pretty good. Blackberry Smoke, Whiskey Myers, Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers, Riley Green, and many more.
For other stuff: Home Free (acapella group that is phenomenal), Marcus King, Billy Strings (alone, with Marcus King or with Molly Tuttle), Jinjer (get ready for weird), the Barr Brothers.
Auto tune
New music seems to be focused on urban customers.
'Nuff said.
Takes nothing to bongo demon sacrifice.
New music sucks. Period.
What new music can hold a candle to
ELO’s Rollover Beethoven (long version)
Rocky Mountain High
Angie
Knights in White Satin
Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my head
Pretty Woman
The City of New Orleans
Me and my Bobby McGee
Blowin’ in the Wind
and on and on and on and on...
There is a lot of good new music out there but you never get to hear it on the radio. Here is a band playing music which it almost 100% influenced by old music. The dead, Allman Bros, soul music for starters. They finally have gotten some airplay on xm radio within the last couple of weeks. https://youtu.be/ebaSPs_kTjA
There is a whole series 2here young kids raised on HipHop react to their first hearing of songs like “House of the Rising Sun” or “Unchained Melody”. The reaction is pretty pleasing to a dinosaur like me. When they hear that voice coming out of a 22year-old Eric Burden or Bobby Hatfield hitting that note it’s like they discovered a new continent.
I’m guessing people’s choices are a vote. They vote for what they like best. That doesn’t mean other music isn’t good. It just means to them something else is liked more.
Also, the doorkeepers of the arts, including music, are all promoting ideological agendas. The old djs were more concerned with sound.
Most new music actually sucks. They write these songs that have lots of words then they end the stanza with one word like su oo uh oo uh oo un because they can’t figure out enough words to fill seven syllables before the word sun. Or they are line after line of nonsense versus that all end in the same rhyming sounds. Bed dead fed head red ed cetera. No imagination. Just stream of consciousness of how bad it is to be from a lower class background. There isn’t much to like.
The problem is, times have changed. From invention of radio til a few year into the internet, people were glued to the radio and local stations and therefore when life events happened they remembered the tunes playing, and everyone was in the same boat, a collective experience, 10s of millions heard same tunes. Not happening anymore, they can stream only what they want when they want..now when life events happen its with streams of old tunes or just music they like, it’s not a collective experience anymore. Radios influence died on the masses, it’s over, there will never be a 60s-90’s/early 2000s again.
“1) New music is great and those who disagree either don’t know where to find it or have a generational bias”
In the 40s 50s 60s 70s and 80s, you didn’t have to “find it”. It was -everywhere- all around you on the radio. You couldn’t avoid it.
Don’t forget that the country’s demographics are also getting older.
Today’s mass cultures is garbage, but I think there are some interesting new musicians off the beaten path. My son, who is 21, grew up with the old music by his own choice, so he has developed a good taste in music. The new stuff he listens to is good. I listen to the old stuff because it is my comfort music, and I will listen to big band, jazz, standards, classic rock, Motown, and traditional country. There is a great radio station in Chicago where you can hear Sinatra, the Buckinghams, Tom Jones, Tina Turner,and Joni Mitchell in an hour of listening. But I have encountered some good new acts as well. I found Mean Mary (country, folk, Americana) and The Carolina Chocolate Drops (black string band, blues, jazz) while looking for something else on YouTube. I heard Porter Union (traditional country) on a now-defunct AM country station one night while driving to St. Louis. I ran into Ray Scott (traditional country) on Facebook. These artists record and perform only at small venues, and it’s a shame they aren’t better known.