Posted on 12/02/2021 7:26:02 AM PST by dmam2011
As I’ve grown older, I’ll often hear people my age say things like “they just don’t make good music like they used to.”
Why does this happen?
Luckily, my background as a psychologist has given me some insights into this puzzle.
We know that musical tastes begin to crystallize as early as age 13 or 14. By the time we’re in our early 20s, these tastes get locked into place pretty firmly.
In fact, studies have found that by the time we turn 33, most of us have stopped listening to new music. Meanwhile, popular songs released when you’re in your early teens are likely to remain quite popular among your age group for the rest of your life.
(Excerpt) Read more at clarksvillian.com ...
That’s generally been my trend as well. I’m occasionally forced to listen to ‘new music’ due to grandkids and other relatives. I find modern music variously chaotic, non melodious, boring, sounding to ‘processed’, or just plain vulgar. Various combinations there of.
I attended my first opera when I was 25. Prior to that I turned the radio off on Saturday afternoons when the opera was broadcast. Now I listen almost exclusively to opera, and have attended as many as 20 Metropolitan Opera performances in a year.
ML/NJ
There is no shortage of new music that is awesome and with modern tech it is not hard to find. It is just not what the powers that be push as “popular”. There are still lots of bands that actually know how to play actual instruments
Same here, the good thing thing is rediscovering bands that I largely ignored back in the day like Hall & Oats and Hughey Luis and the News.
I instantly switch stations when a Pink Floyd song comes on and I was a big fan.
The playlists were not much different from the playlist you would have heard at my High School Graduation party 30+ years ago
That's really interesting. I've long thought that the songs of today have nothing in particular to make them memorable, and that they won't have any endurance in the marketplace.
BTW, I happened to hear Olivia Newton-John's song Something Better To Do last night, for the first time in probably 40 years. Even though I never liked the song that much, I marveled at the superb musicianship of ONJ and the other musicians who accompanied her.
Olivia Newton-John - Something Better To Do.
No Autotune used at all. The recording studio and engineering is top-notch though.
Song composed and produced by ONJ's long-time collaborator John Farrar.
A great album.
These days, you might just wear it out playing it so often. :-)
Auto-Tune.
Sampling.
Rap.
Synthetic drums.
The list is long.
Music is more than a cacophony of sound with unintelligible lyrics screamed into a microphone.
What passes for music these days is abysmal.
But then you have groups like Swedish Sabaton, whose work focuses on the history of human conflict and war. Their music is muscular, epic, melodic and often heart rending as they remind us of the history that so many are trying to erase or falsify.
En Livstid I Krig, or A Lifetime in War is a moving account of one soldier's perspective of the Thirty Years War. Almost any of their work is worth listening to. Check out their "A Christmas Truce," or "The last Stand"
Then,there's a Finnish outfit called Nightwish. Basically the poetry of band leader Tuomas Holopainen set to what's called symphonic metal. The Greatest Show on Earth is a 21 minute masterpiece of composition. All the Works of Nature Which Adorn the World is another 31 minute purely symphonic masterpiece well worth hearing.
Love the sax.
auto-tune? all sounds the same?? it’s woke/lame???
Autotune papers over a lack of talent. Rap is little more than animal grunting.
Gads, that is really broad statement in that title. If the definition of “New Music” is current pop music, then the reason is that it is so overproduced that it is easily disposable twaddle. There is plenty of new music that is not part of the current pop mainstream (especially the current US mainstream) that is listenable, even good - you do have to go looking for it, though.
Bingo.
Bingo. Mass-produced McMusic. Much like fast-food, the music industry can sell a lot of processed noise as an alternative to silence.
It's the same with television and movies. They can make more money with less risk selling a lot of low cost / low quality products instead of hiring real script writers, directors, actors, and crews to make fewer but really good movies.
From Wikipedia: The theory of the Least Objectionable Program (LOP) ...developed in the 1960s by then executive of audience measurement at NBC, Paul L. Klein ...viewers consume the medium of television rather than television shows, treating the medium as the end of their consumption itself rather than using the set as a means to access specific programs ...Since the introduction of television, the same percentage of sets are in use on, say, a Thursday evening at a certain hour, year after year, regardless of what content is broadcast ...The result was an often mass-produced, bland output of popular culture focused on leisure, targeting the American middle class.
Because it sucks and you are right on target! You can usually judge the mood of a population by the music common people listen to and what we hear now is pretty much nothing but disjointed jive and noise. Not to mention that in the past you could at least remember a tune as it may have stuck with you, but today hardly. Where are the days of Moody Blues, The Beatles or Pink Floyd etc. The sounds we hear today is pretty much a reflection of what’s going in government, and we see on the street of big cities, nothing but mayhem and discord.
LOL. Yes indeed. That song was my response to everyone that wished me a happy birthday this year.
I am donning my flameproof suit, and waiting for the mortars to drop.
The so-called generation gap and cultural music issues came around because of the radio and the TV.
Prior to these, most people listened to the same music as their parents and had the same likes and dislikes. Radio changed that due to pressure to get people to follow something different.
Gospel music is proof of this. Young or old, generation or not, most people like the same music that the previous generations for several hundred years have liked. Amazing Grace from 1772 is still sung be every generation and loved by every generation. Good or bad they might sing it, Hallelujah Chorus (1741) still thrills. My Jesus I Love Thee (1862) is still understood, its melody can be heard in a dozen languages. Open up a new hymnbook or an old, it’s pages will still cover several hundred songs sung by every congregation worldwide.
In Jesus Christ there is no age, no divide, and what the older generations loved, the new ones love too. The church triumphant erases all those divides.
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