I’m stuck in the past when it comes to music despite trying something new. I occasionally force myself to listen to the top 50’s playlists on Spotify and all I find is redundant crap. My music journey now focus primarily on finding what I had missed when growing up, often taking tangents of the previously and forever unpopular but extremely good music that the music biz never deemed appropriate for mass consumption.
Thanks for sharing. Beato’s channel has some excellent content and analysis.
To me, all genres of modern music sound just alike. I couldn’t even begin to tell the difference between any female pop singer, all the rap sounds exactly the same, and I don’t even want to think about modern “country”. I quit listening to new music in 1982.
Yep. It’s soul-crushing.
We talking “key” changes or key “changes”? We changed keys the other night at a jam session. 😎👍🎸
Not really. There’s tons of amazing stuff happening in modern music. The problem is it isn’t popular. Modern POPULAR music has flattened out with a level of sameness. Modern Optional Entertainment (to borrow a phrase from Zappa) has more variety than ever. Tedeschi Trucks, Rival Sons, Pretty Reckless, Gary Clark Jr, Alter Bridge. There’s AMAZING music being made today. But you gotta go find it. It’s no longer served up to you on radio.
Compared to the quality of music between the mid 60’s and mid to late 70’s, today’s music doesn’t even register on the radar. It’s that far off.
My tagline is true.
The overwhelming vast majority of current music has absolutely no staying power, is uninspired, lyrically lazy, copycat rather than influenced and repetitive beyond belief.
Every so often a really good song will come along but it is rarer and rarer because so much of a piece of music is focused on how the visual presentation will be.
All of the above is my opinion and your mileage may vary.
There. Fixed it.
Maybe the purpose of music today is not to communicate sometimes complex emotions and celebrate life anymore but instead seems to be mostly rhythm and beat.
This communicates primitive mating rituals and celebrates the pervasive modern hook-up culture worship of the easy, cheap, and often “O” that supercedes all other matters.
(Also occasionally the goal is to simply disturb, which is easy to accomplish. Baroque, Classical, Jazz, Folk, Rock, now has become the Narcissism Age of Music.
Today’s music is not music...................
On a separate but related note, if I were Czar, I would ban autotune post haste.
“I’m stuck in the past when it comes to music despite trying something new. I occasionally force myself to listen to the top 50’s playlists on Spotify and all I find is redundant crap. My music journey now focus primarily on finding what I had missed when growing up, often taking tangents of the previously and forever unpopular but extremely good music that the music biz never deemed appropriate for mass consumption.”
I’m the same. One way I’ve found new-to-me music is by exploring the top 40 charts of the UK. While there is a lot of overlap there are actually quite a few hits there that did not chart here, or charted very low such that they didn’t get airplay.
I also did a deep dive into regional/local acts of the 60’s plus/minus a few years from my part of the country. Even 10 years ago you could find those singles for reasonable price. Now that’s a huge market for people with our same interest and Ebay prices have skyrocketed.
Modern “dance music” is little more than a 120bpm drone with emphasis on bass and sun harmonic frequencies. Throw in hateful and vulgar language and you have a modern pop song. Music was better when it was produced by old white guys in suits in smokey back rooms. Now that young hip people are producing music it completely sucks.
There’s a funny story the pianist Arthur Rubinstein told about the time he met some Spanish royalty on a tour of that country. He was introduced to the then-current monarch, King Alfonso XIII. Rubinstein said the man was completely tone-deaf, and kept an aide by his side to “elbow him whenever the Spanish national anthem was being played.”
They same seems to be true of theater. Its a post-modern wasteland.
There’s a correlation of the devolution of education and the devolution of today’s music.
Rap/HipHop sounds like animals in the jungle with racist lyrics accompanied by a computer bass program. It is NOT “music”.
It was a beautiful song
But it ran too long
If you're gonna have a hit
You gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to 3:05
I like the old classical/progressive rock. Kansas, Rush, Yes etc and most of their songs were well over 3-3 1/2 minutes. I like other music too, including some pop and a few R&B tunes. Country too if it's not too cliche, doesn't repeat the title of the song 20 times in the song and isn't too tear in my beer. Most blues songs are too standard. Bluegrass is ok if it's not a standard format like most blues is.
There's still some good music being made but it doesn't make the radio even when the song isn't too long. John Rich writes a ton of songs including for many other artists like Faith Hill but they won't put Rich's recorded songs on the radio because he's pro American. A lot of country songs hit #1 in fan popularity and never get played a single time on the radio because they don't fit the political/cultural agenda of the industry, which like every other industry, has been taken over by the commie left.
Aaron Lewis' Am I the Only One comes to mind. Pro American, fans loved it and made it #1 but they wouldn't play it on the radio. The music's not dead. The music industry has just been assimilated into the Borg.
That’s exactly where I am. I grew up in the 80’s but now I’m listen to 40’s 50’s jazz. It’s absolutely depressing to listen to the crap being played today.