Well, the OP’s complaint was about the style or genre: no rock, no guitars. Apparently that doesn’t bother you as much as it does him.
I remember as a teenager watching MTV with my grandmother. Robert Plant was in the midst of a guitar solo while she cringed, trying desperately to be supportive, but finally couldn’t help herself and said, “I just can’t hear this as music, it just sounds like noise to me.”
I hope I don’t ever forget that moment. It keeps me humble.
Robert Plant isn’t music, at least none of his solo stuff qualifies. It’s just him making Robert Plant sounds over commercial sounds. I imagine David Drahman of Disturbed will probably be making monkey mating calls over techno when he’s 50.
Some of the Bieber stuff has guitar (sometimes only guitar), but, yeah, it’s not rock n roll.
My point exactly! Thanks, gramps.
As for modern music, I’ve started listening to it a little more lately. Some of it doesn’t do anything for me (Sorry, Selena Gomez). Others are pretty catchy in exactly the same way that good pop music is. “Shake it Off” is super-catchy. “Bailando” is amazing. “Uptown Funk” is solid as hell. And “Chandelier” isn’t super-catchy, but it’s good in the thoughtful-pop category.
I’m sure it’s been linked on here before, but there’s been studies that have shown that pop music is objectively less diverse today than it was in the past. However, I also think it’s objectively true that there’s more good music today than there ever was. There’s just FAR more artists creating music, many of whom have talent, but wouldn’t have had the connections or distributions to get their music out there. So we have an interesting dichomoty, where the most popular music is getting more and more bland and generic, and the niche genres are going deeper and getting more defined, but they have smaller and smaller audiences.
Imagine, 50 years ago, you had to have a record deal to get anything recorded, a studio was expensive to build, expensive to use, printing vinyl records and shipping those was expensive. Today, one can literally record music for pocket change. PCs are ubiquitous. Cheap and freeware recording and mixing software is pretty solid. All you need is your instruments and some decent cables to connect it to your PC. And even then, there’s software that can mimic or outright replace many instruments. I’ve literally composed fully orchestrated songs entirely digitally for zero cost. Then you can digitally distribute it on countless sites for virtually nothing as well, if one is so inclined.
To that end, I think having to look for great music isn’t a problem, it’s a benefit. It doesn’t matter what sound I love, there’s probably a handful of musicians out there that are making it. I love going down the rabbit hole and discovering new artists, some are signed, some are just on youtube or bandcamp or whatever. And when I talk to others who are similarly as passionate about music as I am, I almost always walk away with a new band to check out.
So it seems to me that, for the vast majority who only minimally care about music, they’re fine with whatever it is because it’s just background music, and for the really passionate, they’re FAR better off. There are some in the middle who are kind of screwed, but to that end, just find someone with similar tastes that’s more passionate and get recomendations from them. I do that for a lot of my friends. They will literally just come to me and ask for recommendations.
Ultimately, if you don’t like music, the way to fix the problem is to stop listening to stuff you don’t like and be willing to put a small investment of time and money to find something you like better. If you find an artist you like, especially if they’re on a smaller label or independent, you have to support them with money to help them. The problem is, people want better music, but they still want it for free. Well, you get what you pay for.
Actually, that brings up an interesting question (at least for me): when was the last time a rock song was #1 on the Billboard charts in the US? (I know the definition of “rock” may be a little malleable here, but let’s throw some possibilities out there.)
“We Are Young” by fun. made #1 in 2012, as did Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know”, which I’d both be comfortable labeling as “indie rock”, if not particularly guitar-driven.
For the most recent #1 that I’d consider to be unqualified rock, we have to go back to 2000, when Santana’s “Smooth” topped the charts. (Creed and Nickelback had #1s in 2000 and 2001, but I refuse to sully the good name of rock by associating them with it.)
Actually, I’ll go with the Creed or Nickelback, then. Gotye is more indie pop to me, same with “We Are Young.” Now, something like the Strokes or White Stripes or whatnot would qualify for me. But, like I said, the term is malleable.
While this post does ring to “Old Fogey” bell I have to say that a lot of today’s music has a real lack of musicality that is somewhat unusual and due mostly to modern post production tools. While we may have had the Kingsman performing Louie Louie in a less than professional manner, at least it was honest bodgery, and not pretending to be anything else.
But today with auto-tune, and other magic done by technicians after the fact, has resulted in a music industry where looks and style are more important than whether you can actually sing. On top of that nobody on the top 40 even plays an instrument anymore. Its just over massaged vocal tracks over synth.
Certainly there are still real musicians out there making real music. But top 40 is even worse trash now than it was in the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc.
Didn’t Shut Up and Dance make it to #1?
That’s interesting. I’m not at all sure that a vocalist-only is inferior to a vocalist/instrumentalist. But even given that, have you listened to “Bailando”? Can you really say that that fits your claim? Does “Uptown Funk” really qualify? Both of those songs have very prominent instruments (guitar/brass section), and are among my favorite recent pop songs.
Nope. Peaked at #4 on the Hot 100.
I’m always amused by these types of discussions. People are complaining about music in the exact same way for at least 60 years but really, this time it’s true! Sinatra said this way back in the 50’s:
…purveying the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear—naturally I refer to the bulk of rock ‘n’ roll.
I’m not a big Swift fan but anybody who can’t realize that she’s not a major talent has their head buried in their prune-juice-soaked derriere.
Neither of these two are about “the same thing” as the rest of the list
Which even by your own expansions on them aren’t even about “the same thing” - some are about breakups, some are about unfulfilled longing, some are just love songs. So yes, 14 of “the same thing” where “the same thing” is romance. Hello, welcome to pop music.
Sure, she’s a major talent…on today’s barren musical landscape. But if you’ll recall, I said that in the 60s and 70s she’d be considered a mid-level talent and something of a lightweight. Would you really compare her songwriting ability with that of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, Laura Nero, Carol Bayer Sager, etc.? Or her singing ability with that of Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Linda Ronstadt, Ann Wilson (Heart), etc.? Please.
Foo Fighter’s Sonic Highways debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200 in 2014.
There are still a lot of (mostly indie) rock bands like Paramore, The Strokes, Imagine Dragons, The Killers, The National and so on.
For Top 40 though, it’s mostly a sort of hybrid crossover dance/hiphop EDM. Taylor Swift feat Lil Jon and Adam Lavine from Maroon 5 (Avicii remix). Whenever I ride in the car, I hear the same 5 songs at least 3 times over the course of a 4 hour drive.
I don’t think it’s a “you’re just too old” thing. With all the radio station mergers, most stations are owned by something like 5 companies (iHeartRadio, Clear Channel, a few others) and they all play the same programming. And I’ve read somewhere that scientists have measured that top 40 music actually has less variety in terms of tones or whatever they measure music with than it did decades ago.
I absolutely would stack Swift against those talents. Swift blends songwriting, singing, and musical ability in ways that few can match. That you’re even arguing this means you are stuck in the past.
This reminds me of guys who used to compare the careers of Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus, when Jack had been a pro for 40 years, and Tiger had been a pro for four years.
Carole King wrote her share of shooby doo wop wop when she was Taylor’s age. Tapestry is one of my favorite albums of all time, but it came out when she was nearly 30. And guess what, its biggest hit was a song about breaking up.
Most of the other songwriters you mentioned also didn’t have their breakthroughs until they were well older than Taylor is now. And most of the singers you mentioned didn’t write their own songs. Let’s see how she looks when we can compare apples to apples, rather than the lifetime careers of some of the greatest singers of all time to a teenager’s hits.
Or else they’ve listened to those artists and to TS. One of those.