How did the current trend of mainstream pop start?

[fluffy_little_something]

Maybe it's just that those who are old enough to know the 70's and 80's have their prime years behind them. First love, the world revolves around me, my life lasts like forever, and all those emotions which are often associated with songs from that time.
I assume young people today associate modern songs with those feelings and will feel the same way in 2040. It is hard for me to understand and imagine, but I assume it is no different. I remember that my parents did not think much of the music I listed to, either, probably for the same reason, it did not convey any meaning and memories for them.

[Aryaroman]

I know we´re getting old and all that - true true. If I was a teen today I´d prolly find it so much easier to listen to TOP 40, because I wouldn´t have heard much of what was there before I was born, being what I´d benchmark against regarding what good music should sound like.
But this does not prove being the reason why we, the "matured" people, have issues with the turn pop music has taken. Try going back to the 70s and listen to how music was done back then: You´d need to have an understanding of above basic musical theory to catch anybodys interest, and people would require an investment in educated arrangers and acoustic musicians to play your song. It was all so much more about song writing and knowing how to touch the listener with chords progressions and dynamics coming out of the music itself - not just from the absense of hard limiters.
Today it seems that the focus is mainly on touching people barely listening on a dance floor with the correctly tuned bassdrum, and a repeated catchy phrase which in the 70s would have been just 3 seconds of a song - now there´ll be 4 mins of that same phrase.
So there´s the reason for at least me to not listen to much of the current TOP 40 music.. it´s about more than just age.

You summed up a lot of things in one post. It's more than just age. I'm not the only twenty-something complaining.

This is my thinking, but I think, maybe the last few years trend has been, (as far as I know) for the first time in mainstream music, touching the limits of how far music can go before it can no longer function without the show, because of so many issues that arise, the poverty of musical foundation, filters, volume, copy+paste production, frequency range, repetition, lack of acid, lack of chord progression, dynamics, lack of acoustic instruments, lack of variety, danger of creating a wormhole, etc. Music is in the listener's ear, but if it's ceasing to be music? There's some kind of a limit, although subjective and transparent, maybe it was touched, but the direction is now toward something different.

[fluffy_little_something]

It's like with cars, there are too many models now and most of them look much more similar to each other than in the past. So it is much harder to come up with something special.

I am compiling a list of 80's songs I will buy later today

[Karma_tba]

The one over whelming influence that has brought not only music, but fashion, and art (among other things)to where we are is a lack of respect and reverence for what came before. Now a days people think they burst full grown on to the scene. Instead of acknowledging influences and the transition there's this attitude that they are the end all be all. I've experienced this the most in the two things most dear to me, music and skateboarding. If not for the ground work of the pioneers, both today's scenes would not exist. My bro's and I risked our necks inventing the maneuvers that today's skaters take for granted and for only a T-shirt or a trophy. Now skaters receive thousands in prizes and contracts for what we did for the love of it. Same with the countless bands that practiced day and night and never got a break....but today a DJ can spin a few records and book large venues that we would never imagine. I was raised in a single parent family and my mother worked her ass off to buy me a guitar and tape deck to record my songs. I couldn't afford lessons, but I attended The Alma Lewis School of Fine Arts( a free community school for ghetto kids). From there I eventually received a grant to attend Massachusetts College of Art. Today a few hundred dollars get you a DAW and some VST's. Easy. No Respect.
ACTUALLY...SCRATCH THIS!! DISREGARD ALL OF THE ABOVE!! I AM BREAKING A PROMISE I MADE TO MYSELF. THE OPINIONS OF KVR ARE MEANINGLESS TO ME..AS ARE MINE MEANINGLESS TO IT. MY BAD!

[Aryaroman]

Maybe it's just that those who are old enough to know the 70's and 80's have their prime years behind them. First love, the world revolves around me, my life lasts like forever, and all those emotions which are often associated with songs from that time.
I assume young people today associate modern songs with those feelings and will feel the same way in 2040. It is hard for me to understand and imagine, but I assume it is no different. I remember that my parents did not think much of the music I listed to, either, probably for the same reason, it did not convey any meaning and memories for them.

I can not only associate a feeling of cool-ness, but an evolving spectrum of feelings with Bee Gees's Staying Alive. I can associate a spectrum of feelings with Anastacia's Sick & Tired, or Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight, as much as with Frank Sinatra's Strangers In The Night, Alla Pugatsova's Million Roses, Sean Kingston's Beautiful Girls, to Ariana Grande's Love Me Harder, or Avicii's Wake Me Up, the spectrum becoming smaller as we get from the 60s to 210s... I can't however, associate anything with the "mush." My emotional frequency range doesn't go beyond that point, I don't hear anything to associate with. Only frequency full of audio.

[Aleatoriac]

How did the current trend of mainstream pop start?
A fanatic devotion to the financial bottom line, for the most part. There are a lot of people in that "top 40" who are *still* as much an artist (whatever that really means) as you and I, we; the unknown toilers in the chaotic noise of "unproductive" musical apophenia. Some of it moves me as much as the music I enjoyed as a child. Some of it I can see as a product built specifically for the purpose of making money, with just a baseline nod to the art for art's sake approach.

But hey, all art is actually quite useless if all you need to do is survive. Me - I plan to thrive forever if possible.

[Aryaroman]

ACTUALLY...SCRATCH THIS!! DISREGARD ALL OF THE ABOVE!! I AM BREAKING A PROMISE I MADE TO MYSELF. THE OPINIONS OF KVR ARE MEANINGLESS TO ME..AS ARE MINE MEANINGLESS TO IT. MY BAD!

Okay, we'll just pretend that wasn't you who brought a good point up. The disrespect of our past and the drastic change in ease of music production.

[arkmabat]

So wait... in 2013 everybody stayed up all night to get lucky?

[sfd]

Maybe it's just that those who are old enough to know the 70's and 80's have their prime years behind them. First love, the world revolves around me, my life lasts like forever, and all those emotions which are often associated with songs from that time.
I assume young people today associate modern songs with those feelings and will feel the same way in 2040. It is hard for me to understand and imagine, but I assume it is no different. I remember that my parents did not think much of the music I listed to, either, probably for the same reason, it did not convey any meaning and memories for them.

+1
Since there's no "Like" button

[MOK19]

This is interesting. It occurs to me, that the darker stuff will mostl likely mean more distortion for the electronics and thus more pressure on the ear. There will be a lot more ear-bleeding and damage, hearing loss, etc.

Not necessarily. Darkness or aggression can come out of the note combinations and cadences, not just the sound design. I'd say composition is more effective at evoking any and all emotions than SPL is capable of.

[Aryaroman]

So wait... in 2013 everybody stayed up all night to get lucky?

The lucky ones (pun intended) did. It is a brilliant record and proof that quality can sell, if it is well produced+well marketed. There was a SOS article about Random Access Memories. Here is a link to it, it is a very interesting article and a look into music production as well:
https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul13/ ... t-punk.htm

In short: Daft Punk spent four years and invested millions or so into the record and they were very strict about the quality. They wanted to revisit the golden age of record production, inspired by records like The Eagles' Hotel California. So they only used the best analog equipment and avoided using software, like plugins or any digital processes (remember, this is mostly an electronic record) to get the best and warmest audio quality possible. However, they even made cross-comparisons, recorded both tape and digital and compared the two. Their "mission" was to, as they put it "breath life back into music."

This is a quote from the article itself:

"Random Access Memories sees Daft Punk throwing down the gauntlet at the entire music industry, challenging almost all current preconceptions about the way in which music is made and how to present and sell it."

[t3toooo]

Can't find anything wrong with the current mainstream pop.

[GeckoYamori]

There's lots of modern trends in pop music that throws me off. The way women sing with this really nasal timbre, for one. Why the hell did that become so prominent? Whenever I hear something on the radio it almost sounds like it's the same person singing every song, since they have all converged around this same vocal style. And of course all the "eh, eh, ey" vocalizations.

[Roman Empire]

So wait... in 2013 everybody stayed up all night to get lucky?

The lucky ones (pun intended) did. It is a brilliant record and proof that quality can sell, if it is well produced+well marketed. There was a SOS article about Random Access Memories. Here is a link to it, it is a very interesting article and a look into music production as well:
https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul13/ ... t-punk.htm

In short: Daft Punk spent four years and invested millions or so into the record and they were very strict about the quality. They wanted to revisit the golden age of record production, inspired by records like The Eagles' Hotel California. So they only used the best analog equipment and avoided using software, like plugins or any digital processes (remember, this is mostly an electronic record) to get the best and warmest audio quality possible. However, they even made cross-comparisons, recorded both tape and digital and compared the two. Their "mission" was to, as they put it "breath life back into music."

This is a quote from the article itself:

"Random Access Memories sees Daft Punk throwing down the gauntlet at the entire music industry, challenging almost all current preconceptions about the way in which music is made and how to present and sell it."

I agree it´s a nice piece of work that DP did, but also think it´s a bit overrated. What they´re doing is what alot of musicians would love to do, but can´t because it costs money to hire good legendary musicians, finding the right old gear etc.
Ironically, in the 70s you´d not have spent 4 years on such a thing but a few weeks and then, it´d be so much more lively than any of those Daft Punk tunes.
I do understand though why it took em so long.. If your mind is better than your skills as a physical musician, it takes much longer to get things sounding lively and natural. I have the same problem, being a not so skilled piano player. The easy choice would be to make modern TOP 40 crap with no emotion at all, but it gives me a much higher satisfaction to spend ages on getting the arrangements sounding lively, wait for the right ideas (and not accept all the mediocre ones) try to make sample library cellos sound like they were cellos etc.
So I deeply respect DP for thinking a bit in this same way, and I´m glad they exist - just don´t forget that this is the passion that musicians would generally invest in their music in the past and a luxury that many musicians would still invest in it if they had the money.

[Roman Empire]

I know we´re getting old and all that - true true. If I was a teen today I´d prolly find it so much easier to listen to TOP 40, because I wouldn´t have heard much of what was there before I was born, being what I´d benchmark against regarding what good music should sound like.
But this does not prove being the reason why we, the "matured" people, have issues with the turn pop music has taken. Try going back to the 70s and listen to how music was done back then: You´d need to have an understanding of above basic musical theory to catch anybodys interest, and people would require an investment in educated arrangers and acoustic musicians to play your song. It was all so much more about song writing and knowing how to touch the listener with chords progressions and dynamics coming out of the music itself - not just from the absense of hard limiters.
Today it seems that the focus is mainly on touching people barely listening on a dance floor with the correctly tuned bassdrum, and a repeated catchy phrase which in the 70s would have been just 3 seconds of a song - now there´ll be 4 mins of that same phrase.
So there´s the reason for at least me to not listen to much of the current TOP 40 music.. it´s about more than just age.

You summed up a lot of things in one post. It's more than just age. I'm not the only twenty-something complaining.

This is my thinking, but I think, maybe the last few years trend has been, (as far as I know) for the first time in mainstream music, touching the limits of how far music can go before it can no longer function without the show, because of so many issues that arise, the poverty of musical foundation, filters, volume, copy+paste production, frequency range, repetition, lack of acid, lack of chord progression, dynamics, lack of acoustic instruments, lack of variety, danger of creating a wormhole, etc. Music is in the listener's ear, but if it's ceasing to be music? There's some kind of a limit, although subjective and transparent, maybe it was touched, but the direction is now toward something different.

You´re raising alot of good points there. Well, there are tribal cultures outthere to whom music´s always just been a repeated pattern on percussion instruments. It´s music used mainly for putting people in a special social trance - not to rush their emotions up and down, enjoy particular details, feel that they´re part of a song writers life, have them drooling over how a sophisticated modulation lifts the song and so on. I consider both of these music, but I consider modern TOP 40 closer to the tribal social trance and I find it sad if the understanding of "music from the old world" ranging from Bach to Culture Beat (yes, I still consider that so much more vibrant than todays stuff) is being lost. To me it looks like the music of today is made by people that are first of all there to be loved and rich but without the pride of having earned it. A bit like people in reality shows who want to be famous for no reason; not for playing a saxophone, not for having a great talent as a journalist, not for having the knowledge and charisma to become a great politician.. no, they´re just in it to be loved for no reason. Maybe that´s what humans are doing all the time: Cheating evolution to not let the strongest (or those with most talent) survive. Or you can say that the definition of what´s somebodys strength is something we´re changing. We´ve just let MTV degrade the musical understanding of a whole generation, so that anyone with a near-to-zero understanding of song writing can become succesful. I guess things are cheaper to do that way, and you can replace the entries of TOP 40 more often to generate more cash, cause people get tired after a few weeks of them.