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Why Modern Popular Music Is Awful
- Thread starter Wombat
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derp1n
Senior Member
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The 1760s?
- Thread Starter
- #6
OK.OK. Rub-in the senior moment.
You have 2700+ posts. Show me a junior who can remember all that
Don't be so hard on yourself.
watchnerd
Grand Contributor
I mean, it's not like it was that great in the 1960s - 1980s, either.
I have my moments when Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, U2, The Clash, Depeche Mode, The Police, etc are right for the mood, but 90% of the time I listen to classical or jazz.
Yes, it was comparatively better pop...but it's still pop, with mostly cliched lyrics, mostly predictable chord progressions, mostly conventional time signatures and keys...
I have my moments when Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, U2, The Clash, Depeche Mode, The Police, etc are right for the mood, but 90% of the time I listen to classical or jazz.
Yes, it was comparatively better pop...but it's still pop, with mostly cliched lyrics, mostly predictable chord progressions, mostly conventional time signatures and keys...
Like I said in the other thread, Plato was complaining about popular music in The Republic.
It's just Sturgeon's Law combined with the fact that we live in the present and not the past.
It's just Sturgeon's Law combined with the fact that we live in the present and not the past.
I don’t think popular music is worse, it’s just not for you anymore because you are old and no longer the target audience.
- Thread Starter
- #12
You have 2700+ posts. Show me a junior who can remember all that
I've forgotten about it, already.
- Thread Starter
- #13
It is not an age thing, it is about musicality.
I cannot stand repetitious 'heartbeat' electronic metronomic stuff nor am I big on traditional native American or Australian Aboriginal dance music.
It seems that the short attention-span thing mentioned in the video may have some credence. Musical talent being trumped by celebrity image is all too apparent now. I have never been big on 'pop music' but modern stuff makes Elton John and Paul McCartney seem like serious composers.
I think the video explains the decline of creativity and musical content quite well. If that is what the market wants, so be it.
Doof doof
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watchnerd
Grand Contributor
Meh...attention span is relative....
How many classic rock lovers would be willing to sit through the full Ring Cycle at Bayreuth?
I could paraphrase this ...
How many Western Classical music lovers would be willing to sit through the full Ring Cycle at Bayreuth?
Theo
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The OP is about Modern "POP" music, the one that makes a LOT of money and don't care about anything else.
But, if you try to look around, you may find some money-less artists who do write and record great music (no vinyl...). That goes from modern classical to jazz to R&R, even to D&B (Drum and Bass), as demonstrated by the "What are we listening..."thread.
So, music is not dead! The real artists are just getting poorer and poorer.
.But, if you try to look around, you may find some money-less artists who do write and record great music (no vinyl...)
. That goes from modern classical to jazz to R&R, even to D&B (Drum and Bass), as demonstrated by the "What are we listening..."thread.So, music is not dead! The real artists are just getting poorer and poorer
.
How many people here have ever tried to create some music themselves? I sometimes sit at the piano and mess about, having never had a piano lesson - although for a few years I had lessons on other instruments.
I think that what emerges is a combination of what you like to listen to yourself (e.g. Vaughan Williams-esque chords), references to existing music that you accidentally produce ("That sounded a bit like Bohemian Rhapsody"), and what the layout of the notes on the keyboard produces itself - there's a hell of a lot of music out there based on an 'epic' chord progression that is produced automatically if you repeat a sequence with your fingers up and down the keyboard...
The emergence of real music from the basic random noise is sheer magic and takes actual effort to capture in order to re-use it later, but I think that a lot of modern pop music doesn't actually bother with this aspect.
It has rhythm - because anyone can create rhythm. Some of it has complexity, but it is arbitrary complexity - because anyone can produce arbitrary complexity. It is basically tuneless, because creating tunes is orders of magnitude harder to do than all the other peripheral stuff that goes into creating a piece of recorded 'music'. It is empty, has no core.
One thing I hate is 'polyfilla chords' (my term) that are just there to fill a space - not musical, not relevant to the tune such as it is, but just a collection of notes from which the listener is expected to infer their own tune. If you strum the strings of a guitar pressing a random fret or two you will most likely get such a chord: not 'discordant' as such, but not not musical either. You can 'passionately' strum such chords, striking rock star or sensitive artist poses as you do it, creating a sequence of polyfilla that fills up the required three or four minutes on which the producer can go to work. But it is just a pose, with no 'heavy lifting' of real tunes out of the arbitrary random background; it is just arbitrary random background placed in a frame.
I think the reason that people bother with it - creating it and listening to it - is that the rock/pop phenomenon was so huge in the 60s/70s/80s that the echoes are still with us; a fascination remains and people are still going through the motions, unfortunately without the excitement, novelty or good taste. Its evanescence is obvious: no one can remember last year's biggest hits or 'artists', and music from 50 years ago outsells today's.
I think that what emerges is a combination of what you like to listen to yourself (e.g. Vaughan Williams-esque chords), references to existing music that you accidentally produce ("That sounded a bit like Bohemian Rhapsody"), and what the layout of the notes on the keyboard produces itself - there's a hell of a lot of music out there based on an 'epic' chord progression that is produced automatically if you repeat a sequence with your fingers up and down the keyboard...
The emergence of real music from the basic random noise is sheer magic and takes actual effort to capture in order to re-use it later, but I think that a lot of modern pop music doesn't actually bother with this aspect.
It has rhythm - because anyone can create rhythm. Some of it has complexity, but it is arbitrary complexity - because anyone can produce arbitrary complexity. It is basically tuneless, because creating tunes is orders of magnitude harder to do than all the other peripheral stuff that goes into creating a piece of recorded 'music'. It is empty, has no core.
One thing I hate is 'polyfilla chords' (my term) that are just there to fill a space - not musical, not relevant to the tune such as it is, but just a collection of notes from which the listener is expected to infer their own tune. If you strum the strings of a guitar pressing a random fret or two you will most likely get such a chord: not 'discordant' as such, but not not musical either. You can 'passionately' strum such chords, striking rock star or sensitive artist poses as you do it, creating a sequence of polyfilla that fills up the required three or four minutes on which the producer can go to work. But it is just a pose, with no 'heavy lifting' of real tunes out of the arbitrary random background; it is just arbitrary random background placed in a frame.
I think the reason that people bother with it - creating it and listening to it - is that the rock/pop phenomenon was so huge in the 60s/70s/80s that the echoes are still with us; a fascination remains and people are still going through the motions, unfortunately without the excitement, novelty or good taste. Its evanescence is obvious: no one can remember last year's biggest hits or 'artists', and music from 50 years ago outsells today's.
The Ring cycle is a good example of the seismic shift in accessibility to recorded music. In the LP era (or cassette tapes if you preferred) buying a recording of the Ring was a huge investment and unless you were wealthy or a real Wagner obsessive it was hard to justify the cost of a second set. Very few people I knew had more than one Ring (well, very few people I knew had one, but I'm talking about Wagner enthusiasts). Now the cost of buying the complete Ring on CD is peanuts and it is very easy to buy different sets. I find the Solti studio recording and the Bohm Bayreuth recording serve me well enough but a few years ago I wouldn't even have bought these two.
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