As compared to music from the 60's and 70's maybe even early 80's????
I ran into this post on a forum of musicians and this guy pretty much applied hammer to head of nail dead center,
I have felt this way for the last 20 years or so and kept telling people todays music has no heart no soul no feel, well spout off how do you really feel.
quoteAs a professional musician, I can tell you that pop music has gotten much worse. Tightened corporate control of media and the process of songwriting has gorged on the automata of the “fake”, such as auto-tuning, which makes the voice lose personality, individual timbre, expressiveness, and more. It creates a “dead” flat sound that I can hear a mile away as unconvincing. If a voice needs to be auto-tuned, that singer should not record until they learn how to sing in tune-for their own benefit and preservation of their own sound. Other malpractices include the making of beats (any good human drummer can do better and sound more alive), a toxic focus on hyper-marketing(instead of allowing singers and songwriters to develop their craft gradually so they become individuals-see what John Mellencamp has to say on that), an emphasis on dreary special effects and strobes to the detriment of the actual music (like Vegas on steroids…i.e., fake), the criminal exploitation of fine artists such as Michael Jackson, until the life is sucked out of them, the use of samples (some may be better than others, but there is still no air in the processed sound, thus no soul, resulting mostly in the same dead flatness as auto-tuning), and the sheer astounding inability and lack of education we as a society have in really listening, with all of contemporary life’s mechanical distractions. When you have young kids who literally cannot play their instruments masquerading as bands on national late night TV, something is wrong. Pull the plugs, turn off the computers, tell the engineers to hold off, and see if they can play or sing with any competence just using their own bodies, minds, and hearts. That would allow for connection and that is what people want, if they would get rid of the superficial hoopla surrounding pop culture. Frankly, if someone today wants to get into music and be real, they should take the time to learn an instrument and play jazz or classical music, two genres that still have standards. Although they too have been affected by the media’s foisting of instant gratification needs on society, they still have content. Which is why they last, even if cheated of media exposure.
August 28, 2013 at 12:49 am.
Which brings me to the ABB when the original lineup was together and writing their songs just plain Kicked A$$ they were so down to earth and their content applied to our lives unlike anything today and if you say it is out their then leave links....
Pop music today is horrible, and that is not just a "generational thing". It is beginning to improve, however. Pop music from the 60s and 70s, and 90s was high quality art, both musicianship and writing. Special talent was required. Today, talent and art are not required. In fact, it is shunned. Labels figured out that they can buy up the best writers out there and give the songs to any random entertainer that looks good. It's quick easy money. No more scouting, no more shelling out tons of money to the artist.
There is great music being made today, TTB for example, but its just hard to find.
Personally, I think you would be hard pressed to find a topic any more subjective.....I am going to give a nod to the creative process behind making music of any kind as long as it is produced with a musical instrument. No electronic dance, no computer developed loops or sounds shaped into a "song", music made because of a dedication to craft. Music that exists because of percussion, strings, wind and voice.
a lot of Pop music today seems to be more.........a stripper show. lots of lip synching and gyrating around.
Yikes, this might be a more subjective and cantankerous topic than politics! But what the heck, I'll bite.
There is great music being made today, TTB for example, but its just hard to find.
I think this is true of any era. Debating the quality of music in general is very difficult because of this. If we are talking about "today's music" then I think we are really talking about pop music, not music in general. So, in that respect...
I don't think POP music is any better or worse than it was in the past, just different (and generally not my cup of tea in any year). In fact I think some of the stuff today is better than the schlocky stuff from the 60s and 70s. I mean really, how many of the top 10 from '67 are "better" than the top 10 from '07 or '13? I think it is a wash.
Billboard year end Top 10 Songs from...
1967
1 Lulu To Sir With Love
2 Box Tops The Letter
3 Bobby Gentry Ode to Billie Joe
4 Association Windy
5 Monkees I'm a Believer
6 Doors Light My Fire
7 Nancy Sinatra and Frank Sinatra Somethin' Stupid
8 Turtles Happy Together
9 Young Rascals Groovin'
10 Frankie Valli Can't Take My Eyes Off You
1977
1 Rod Stewart Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)
2 Andy Gibb I Just Want to Be Your Everything
3 Emotions Best of My Love
4 Barbra Streisand Love Theme From "A Star Is Born"
5 Hot Angel in Your Arms
6 Kenny Nolan I Like Dreamin'
7 Thelma Houston Don't Leave Me This Way
8 Rita Coolidge (Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher
9 Alan O'Day Undercover Angel
10 Mary MacGregor Torn Between Two Lovers
1987
1 Bangles Walk Like an Egyptian
2 Heart Alone
3 Gregory Abbott Shake You Down
4 Whitney Houston I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)
5 Starship Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now
6 Robbie Nevil C'est La Vie
7 Whitesnake Here I Go Again
8 Bruce Hornsby and The Range The Way It Is
9 Bob Seger Shakedown
10 Bon Jovi Livin' on a Prayer
1997
1 Elton John Candle In The Wind 1997 / Something About The Way You Look Tonight
2 Jewel Foolish Games / You Were Meant For Me
3 Puff Daddy and Faith Evans I'll Be Missing You
4 Toni Braxton Un-Break My Heart
5 Puff Daddy Can't Nobody Hold Me Down
6 R. Kelly I Believe I Can Fly
7 En Vogue Don't Let Go (Love)
8 Mark Morrison Return Of The Mack
9 LeAnn Rimes How Do I Live
10 Spice Girls Wannabe
2007
1 Beyonce Irreplaceable
2 Rihanna feat. Jay-Z Umbrella
3 Gwen Stefani feat. Akon The Sweet Escape
4 Fergie Big Girls Don't Cry
5 T-Pain feat. Yung Joc Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin')
6 Carrie Underwood Before He Cheats
7 Plain White T's Hey There Delilah
8 Akon feat. Snoop Dogg I Wanna Love You
9 Nelly Furtado Say It Right
10 Fergie feat. Ludacris Glamorous
2013
1 Macklemore and Ryan Lewis feat. Wanz Thrift Shop
2 Robin Thicke feat. T.I. and Pharrell Blurred Lines
3 Imagine Dragons Radioactive
4 Baauer Harlem Shake
5 Macklemore and Ryan Lewis feat. Ray Dalton Can't Hold Us
6 Justin Timberlake Mirrors
7 P!nk feat. Nate Ruess Just Give Me a Reason
8 Bruno Mars When I Was Your Man
9 Florida Georgia Line feat. Nelly Cruise
10 Katy Perry Roar
Billboard Top 100 songs for any given year CLICK HERE
[Edited on 11/25/2014 by gondicar]
Aside from being more about a lip-synced, choreographed type of thing - the biggest disappointment in current pop music is that there is little discernible difference in styles or genres.
Consider that Taylor Swift started out as a country (or pop country) artist - and her current stuff (or the stuff that I've seen parodied and promoted on SNL) is pretty much computer generated gyration "music". It's all corporate generated machine programed tones set to a common beat.
You get all of these hat singers - performing pretty much to the same computer generated pop beats - passing themselves off as country and western. Rock and Roll seems to have rolled over and died and what has taken its place is a bunch of females who can barely squeak out a note while slithering around in as little clothing as current social norms and standards deem non pornographic.
And Kenny G ... passes for jazz.
Thank God for my 45 years worth of collected recorded music!
The short answer is "yes".
The longer answer is that it's relative. If they asked your parents the same question when you were a kid, they would have said "yes" to the music we grew up with, and if they ask your kids or grand kids down the road, they'll probably say "yes". So it's really an inter generational transfer of taste to the music at a point in time. In other words, it's relative.
I find myself loyal to bands & music I grew up with as well as some that expanded my knowledge & appreciation of music as time moves forward.
So now I'm going to go back to the beginning & say that for the most part there's only a little portion of today's music that appeals to me.
and keep your ball outta my yard........damn kids.
aww,,come on now, what's not to like about today's pop
I think after clicking on that link I may be scarred for the rest of my life... lol welll it seems alot of you are saying the same thing the man in the quote was saying that todays pop music and music in general is computer generated ,looped voice, enhanced crap! I agree my personel take is this computers ,click tracks loops and triggers have taken away the personal parts of music when I learned to play you had to play period not grab a PC and make the parts you can not play..... and that is sad music is made in the heart not in the CPU!
I'm digging some things going on with the neo-psych bands, like...
Temples
Tame Impala
Alice Cooper in a recent interview raved about these kids from Ireland, The Strypes...when this was recorded the singer was 17, the rest of the band 18, now they are 18 and 19 respectively, great album, I hear Beatles, early Stones, early Who, etc:
aww,,come on now, what's not to like about today's pop
This is much better version... 
Alice Cooper in a recent interview raved about these kids from Ireland, The Strypes...when this was recorded the singer was 17, the rest of the band 18, now they are 18 and 19 respectively, great album, I hear Beatles, early Stones, early Who, etc:
Good stuff! 😛
I'd go see those guys do a show in a NY minute.
Live from this year.
Music has always sucked. It is only those that dig for the deeper and more virtuosic that keep the classics to continue on.
I think there is a lot of great music and artists out there.
Can't compare whatever you grew up listening to.
My wishlist for this year
St Paul and the Broken Bones
Jason Isbell
Roadkill Ghost Choir
Lydia Loveless
If you are an AC/DC fan, iTunes radio is streaming their forthcoming new album "Rock or Bust" in its entirety. It is classic AC/DC with some great new riffs...if you are a fan of that AC/DC signature sound, you'll like this one. Much stronger album than 2008's Black Ice IMO, no real throw away tracks. Rumor is that Jason Bonham is going to play drums with them on their 2015 tour, which would be sweet.
Here is the video for the title track:
I think the point of the original post is more about Pop music and the machine that puts it out there.
yes there is a lot of great music still out there that doesn't fit the "Pop" model.
Pop music has always sucked though. I remember back when I was working as a DJ for the college station back in the mid 80's that we had certain songs we had to play every hour. most all of them sucked. so I would follow Janet Jackson with Zappa "please don't eat the yellow snow". it was a lot more interesting working on the jazz station they had than the Pop station. I learned a lot about jazz doing that.
I think the point of the original post is more about Pop music and the machine that puts it out there.
yes there is a lot of great music still out there that doesn't fit the "Pop" model.
Pop music has always sucked though. I remember back when I was working as a DJ for the college station back in the mid 80's that we had certain songs we had to play every hour. most all of them sucked. so I would follow Janet Jackson with Zappa "please don't eat the yellow snow". it was a lot more interesting working on the jazz station they had than the Pop station. I learned a lot about jazz doing that.
Gotcha, the Pop Crap that is out now is unlistenable.
I think the point of the original post is more about Pop music and the machine that puts it out there.
yes there is a lot of great music still out there that doesn't fit the "Pop" model.
Pop music has always sucked though. I remember back when I was working as a DJ for the college station back in the mid 80's that we had certain songs we had to play every hour. most all of them sucked. so I would follow Janet Jackson with Zappa "please don't eat the yellow snow". it was a lot more interesting working on the jazz station they had than the Pop station. I learned a lot about jazz doing that.
Gotcha, the Pop Crap that is out now is unlistenable.
I thought the same in '69 with Sugar Sugar! 😉
And...I believe it was the #1 song for 1969...which was a GREAT year in music otherwise.
I think the point of the original post is more about Pop music and the machine that puts it out there.
yes there is a lot of great music still out there that doesn't fit the "Pop" model.
Pop music has always sucked though. I remember back when I was working as a DJ for the college station back in the mid 80's that we had certain songs we had to play every hour. most all of them sucked. so I would follow Janet Jackson with Zappa "please don't eat the yellow snow". it was a lot more interesting working on the jazz station they had than the Pop station. I learned a lot about jazz doing that.
Gotcha, the Pop Crap that is out now is unlistenable.
I thought the same in '69 with Sugar Sugar! 😉
And...I believe it was the #1 song for 1969...which was a GREAT year in music otherwise.
Billboard Top 15 from 1969...
1 Archies Sugar, Sugar
2 Fifth Dimension Aquarius / Let the Sunshine In
3 Temptations I Can't Get Next to You
4 Rolling Stones Honky Tonk Women
5 Sly and The Family Stone Everyday People
6 Tommy Roe Dizzy
7 Sly and The Family Stone Hot Fun in the Summertime
8 Tom Jones I'll Never Fall in Love Again
9 Foundations Build Me up Buttercup
10 Tommy James and The Shondells Crimson and Clover
11 Three Dog Night One
12 Tommy James and The Shondells Crystal Blue Persuasion
13 Cowsills Hair
14 Marvin Gaye Too Busy Thinking About My Baby
15 Henry Mancini and His Orch. Love Theme From Romeo and Juliet
Alice Cooper in a recent interview raved about these kids from Ireland, The Strypes...when this was recorded the singer was 17, the rest of the band 18, now they are 18 and 19 respectively, great album, I hear Beatles, early Stones, early Who, etc:
Good stuff! 😛
I'd go see those guys do a show in a NY minute.Live from this year.
Sweet! Love the "How Many More Times" bit in the middle.
Hope Mike comes back by his thread and checks these kids out, they are all good players, there's hope for music after all.
Oh I am on it and I hand it to these kids they are trying to recapture the Yardbirds sound , but when all is said and done has this not already been done? I mean really the Yardbirds were the start of all the hard rock and roll and birthplace of the guitar lead.... they are not bad but they are not that great they need to be driving that song more like a deisel truck instead of a ford escort... I saw the yardbirds many times with all the different lineups they influenced me more than any other band.... you have to go a ways to fill those boots of course this is all just my opinion.... but thanks for the link..
There is nothing wrong with pop music per se. As someone else pointed out, there has always been bad music along with good in every decade, era and genre. The 1950s gave us Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis ... and Pat Boone.
The Beatles were a "pop" band -at least in the beginning.
I have heard a lot of well crafted "pop songs" - catchy hooks and lyrics, good song structure/progression and good playing ... that I didn't care for, yet I recognized the merits of the song, the singer and the song writer.
It seems to me that what we are witnessing is another "make another one like the other one/ flavor of the month" movement. Currently, the trend (forced upon our ears by corporate programmers) is scantily-clad dimbettes who in five years will be reconciled to the day shift who DANCE more than they sing and who DO NOT PLAY INSTRUMENTS.
Of course music was better back when everyone walked 10 miles to school each day all the while practicing their instruments.
You know what mostly sucks? Old people blathering on about how everything was better in the old days. And I am 55.
You know what mostly sucks? Old people blathering on about how everything was better in the old days. And I am 55.
X2. Right on.
You can't live in the past. You have to live in the present with hopes & wishes for tomorrow.
those two posts are really well dumb! I mean really don't live in the past????? well tell you what when you find music equal to led Zep or ABB, or deep purple with the quality musicians let me know till then I will stay in the past and enjoy really good music not computer generated junk. youtube is full of bands who play three power chords and that is it if you can not tell the difference, well I feel for you ... you probably think vinyl is no good ....lol
You know what mostly sucks? Old people blathering on about how everything was better in the old days. And I am 55.
X2. Right on.
You can't live in the past. You have to live in the present with hopes & wishes for tomorrow.
I agree with your statement, but not as far as music is concerned. Just think about the bands and the players of the past vs. today. We all know the names. There might be an exception today here and there, but the overall amount of immense talent in writing and musicianship is nothing today as compared to the past.
IMO.
Traditionally, in addition to the overall triteness and sappiness of pop music (nothing new to this era) the other and possibly most annoying factor is the over-exposure of it.
Having spent most of my life living in the state of Alabama, I decided to pull for Auburn in last year's NCAA National Championship game (vs. Fla State). But I made one stipulation: if they start playing that stoopid God damned Katy Perry song (I Am the Eye of the Tiger) that I would switch my allegiance at that moment. Well, they did and I did. Ironically, it was at that moment where the shift of control (and eventual victory) moved from the Tigers to the Criminoles.
Yes there is good and current pop or pop flavored music. One of my guilty pleasures is Foster the People. Yep, they're young enough to be my kids. Their music has a real Brian Wilson quality to it. I'm betting that many here do not like them. But I like lima beans.
Edit: "there" to "their"
[Edited on 11/27/2014 by Rusty]
There has always been crap music. And as long as you sit in your high chair whining while being spoonfed corporate digestive gas, you deserve what you get. There is a whole planet of amazing music out there. Open your ears. So what if for about ten years great musicians managed to go mainstream? That was a flash in the pan. there are probably more incredibly talented musicians wailing away out there than at any time in history, so no point in sitting around bellyaching that the golden age of music is over.
No matter, it's nothing to get upset about.
