Why is modern music so awful

[vurt]

i remember the late 80s when dance killed rock.

I don't remember that. I don't remember dance music ever being half as huge as rock was in its Halcyon Days. Rock died but dance music didn't kill it, not over here, anyway.

89 the second summer of love.
indie bands started using drum machines here n there, acid house and techno took over festivals.
lots of the old guard critics in nme and melody maker were upset by it, you younger ones loved it, but yes, like you said, it never really happened.
same as now, once you get away from the charts, the world of music opens up to encompass movements of all ilks.

[BONES]

"Indie" bands were using drum machines in 1982. Shriekback had a Linn Drum, The Sisters of Mercy had Dr Avalanche, The March Violets used a drum machine and New Order got famous on the back of a DMX.

[Starbright]

I don't think that modern music is awful at all, listen to people and stuff like: Olivia Rodrgio, Jorja Smith, Maise Peters, Dhani Harrison, Willow, JoJo, Teddy Swims, The Architects (especially with orchestra at Abby Road), Tommee Profitt, Dorothy, Avi Kaplan, Aisha Vaughan, Tash Sultana, REN and many more...
There's still a lot of crap out there, but that has always been the case throughout history....

[Scoops]

We're just in a down cycle.

I could go on forever on how Renaissance, then Baroque, then Classical, then Romantic, then 20th Century music have gone thru stages of newness and excitement, to beat the dead horse.

Pop music today is just beating the dead horse.

Just my $0.02

[Krakatau]

at my level I deplore how much the introduction of drum machine, step-by-step sequencers and arpeggiators from the early eighties has globally pauperized music creation, I was a big fan of progressive musics and it elaborate creativity and nothing seems to rival with this area

[jancivil]

"I could go on forever on bla bla bla stages of newness and excitement, to beat the dead horse.

Pop music today is just beating the dead horse" (One supposes the intent of that sentence involved 'talking about pop music"? although it being a dead horse itself kind of tracks.)

We'll need some evidence of "newness and excitement" in the pop landscape to agree with your music history you didn't begin to go into. Bringing art music into this destroys that premise completely.

The baroque newness was radical in terms of the whole vocabulary and mechanics of music.
Chords! Major/minor tonality paradigm. Eventually modulation of keys was afforded by new temperaments; EG: 12 keys (x2) after JS Bach Well Temperament, ultimately 12 tone equal temperament from figuring the 12th root of 2. Chromaticism got pushed to a breaking point and finally one Arnold Schoenberg just said f**k it and came up with a whole new schema. The whole thing blew up by the 20th century. Jazz praxis grew into things as unrecognizable to Louis Armstrong as Webern would be to Haydn. The 1960s brought us Ligeti and Stockhausen. Massive 'newness". Micropolyphony. In rock a Meshuggah went wild with rhythm, we have Tigran Hamasyan with multiple streams of metrical time.

We have what innovations from "pop music", music theory-wise (the vocabulary and mechanics of how to proceed)? We have some real dumbing down and narrowing what is even tried. A glut of C major @120 BPM all the time is not new or exciting.
Asked and answered, again: a Blood Sweat and Tears having a number one album in 1969 is not matched at all, instead it would be impossible to do now. My premises are out of lived experience. My disregard of today's pop is not because anything there is new to me. My own father's disregard of Kenny G is not because it was shocking new vocab to him.

The world grows more stupid by the minute.

[n9research]

I couldn't possibly comment on whether modern music is awful, as I haven't heard all modern music, and neither has anybody else.

Though if I somehow were able to, I suspect I might think some of it is good and some of it awful.

So, the premise of this thread appears to be nonsensical.

If, as a substitute, we were to ask the question in a different way - for example, why is the most popular music at this time so awful - then there is something to base a discussion on, as we can go to authoritative sources - revenue charts, for example - sample the music, and make our judgements.

And my judgement here is that yes, the most popular music today is, generally, awful - almost uniformly so, much more so than in the past.

There are a number of reasons for this - but pretty much none of them are to do with the quality of contemporary musicians.

The first idea I think people need to come to terms with is that the vast majority of people contributing revenue to the music industry don't really care much about music. But this is nothing new - they never have.

The difference today is that distribution systems for music have been radically transformed - so that this vast majority and their indistinct, undiscerning tastes can be fed an endless stream of perfectly-tailored, unadventurous, unsophisticated and unradical music, of whichever microgenres the listener is partial to, and everyone involved in this arrangement - the providers and the consumers - are perfectly content.

But when we look at the tiny minority - let's call them the "music lovers" - this distribution system also tips the balance. Consider this; nothing is "out of print" any more, everything ever made is available (generally speaking, of course).

As a "music lover", I'm not going to spend all my time discovering and supporting new, exciting music when I can just as easily traverse an entire century or more of recorded music history. Contemporary artists are not just competing against their peers - they're competing with Robert Johnson (died 1938) and every musical giant since.

So, looking at it like this, it would seem that music does appear to be entering a "long tail" of entropy, stylistic atomization, lack of originality and enforced obscurity. Popular original music phenomena, driven by mass-market appeal, are not arriving in the frequency they used to, and the results they bear are not as significant.

That mass-market segment of the audience is never coming back, and everyone may as well get used to it.

People have said "music is dead" for as long as music has been made. And of course, as we have seen, those people have eventually been shown up for fools, time and again.

But will it become true eventually? Is music inexhaustible as an artform?

I'll remain optimistic. But it wouldn't surprise me if the next breakthrough or paradigm shift in music is discovered by AI rather than people.

[starflakeprj]

I prefer listening to newer music instead of the same old tracks over and over again, for the 10,000th time. Does that make newer music objectively better? Maybe not. But my perception of music is shaped by my preference for variation and change, and I quickly grow tired of old tracks.

[thecontrolcentre]

[BONES]

I don't think that modern music is awful at all, listen to people and stuff like: Olivia Rodrgio, Jorja Smith, Maise Peters, Dhani Harrison, Willow, JoJo, Teddy Swims, The Architects (especially with orchestra at Abby Road), Tommee Profitt, Dorothy, Avi Kaplan, Aisha Vaughan, Tash Sultana, REN and many more...

I've never listened to any of these artists, so I just took a random sampling from YouTube and it begs the question, what makes this "modern" music? The Architects sound like any metal band from the last 30-odd years, Tommee Profitt sounds like Nine Inch Nails or Stabbing Westward circa 1996 (or Gary Numan from the early 2000's) and the Avi Kaplan song I listened to was just folk music. Dhani Harrison has that soft-rock "indie" sound that's got to be 25 years old now and completely lacking in anything to recommend it. Nothing new, nothing original. In fact, it all sounded utterly derivative. The Tommee Profitt song, in particular, was just cliche after cliche. I didn't hate it but it was nothing special.

To me that's what's wrong with modern music - it's far too derivative. I don't know what you do about that; if everything worth doing has already been done, it's hard to expect anything new to be as good as that which went before. But these artists aren't even trying.

[mjolnir]

Thanks for the Billy Hume video. 'Twas pretty nice. And great points about the status quo of "modern" music.

[BONES]

I prefer listening to newer music instead of the same old tracks over and over again, for the 10,000th time.

I'm a bit like that, except with the stuff that's really important to me. e.g. Nobody is ever going to make another 154 and I will never get sick of listening to that album. Same with classics like Another Music in a Different Kitchen or The Crack or The Cars' eponymous first album. But they are definitely the exceptions, the vast majority of my collection is only there these days because it's part of my collection, not because I will ever listen to it again.

[Slowjamz]

I think what the OP was meaning to say is that Modern music doesn't have the same impact as music in the past. Not that the music today is bad, just that it seems microwaved. There are some hidden gems out here, but over the years we have just had some Iconic songs that feel like they were meant to be made!

[ghettosynth]

I think it is partly the fault of the media who lavish the most ridiculous and absurd praise on modern pop musicians, I even read one Guardian reviewer seriously trying to compare Taylor Swift lyrics to Shakespeare!

ROFL! That's almost worth searching for.

https://www.the-independent.com/arts-en ... 20716.html

[Bunny_boy]

I think it is partly the fault of the media who lavish the most ridiculous and absurd praise on modern pop musicians, I even read one Guardian reviewer seriously trying to compare Taylor Swift lyrics to Shakespeare!

ROFL! That's almost worth searching for.

https://www.the-independent.com/arts-en ... 20716.html

I linked to an article about that on the first page!!!! Kids today, I don't know...