Music has been splintering for a while, and it seems that most of what gets radio play doesn’t really seem to satisfy any serious music fans, regardless of what they’re in to. Even the dedicated rap fans I know don’t seem to like much of the mainstream rap, which is dominating the music scene these days. Most of the current bands I like these days are quite well-known among some crowds, but barely crack the charts, if at all. I guess the key is to find fans of a certain type of music, and find out what they like. That has tended to work out for me, in terms of eventually finding stuff I can dig.
It depends on what we mean by “popular.”
Among my peers, bands like Broken Social Scene, the New Pornographers, and Yo La Tengo are practically considered “mainstream” and about as popular as you can get - if you hadn’t heard of them you’d be considered out of the loop musically.
But the average person who just listens to the radio will probably have never heard of these bands. I’ve talked to tons of people who have never heard of them.
Count me in the “90% of popular music has always been crap” crowd.
Having said that, I do believe that our descendants will know that for a brief period (in the long view), say from the mid-60s to mid 90s, songs that were actually written and performed by recording artists with a fair amount of artistic integrity managed to have chart success. The surrounding periods (mid 40s-mid 60s and mid-90s to ?) were pretty much just the empty suit exploited teen idol types who only wanted fame and fortune and didn’t give a flying fuck about artistic integrity.
Well, I myself am cursing both Perez Hilton and Timbaland lately. A song that is pure “sugarpop” by an artist I can’t usually stand (based on the song "You Make Me Wanna La La snort) has won me over. ARGH! The sad thing is, I can hear how he’s regurgitating the same “style” in this song, but I like it anyway. I’m not fond of “The Way I Are” though. AAAAARGGGHH! Get Outta My Head! I think it’s the ironic, delicious twist in the lyrics that finally completely hooked me, that and the fact that she’s pulled off a Cyndi Lauper/Gwen Stefani cross vocal styling, and the hypnoriff synth. (I wonder if Timbaland wrote the lyrics with a subtle ironic twist in mind?)
To paraphrase what RickJay said, today’s music just needs to be passed through the time filter. That’s why I lean more towards listening to older music. It has been filtered.
What the hell is “Artistic integrity”?
If you’re saying it’s important and Chuck Berry didn’t have it, there’s something wrong with your definition of good music.
I think that the richness and diversity of today’s music is unparalleled in history.
Take your favorite music of eras past, and somebody is doing something similar today. On top of that, new genres and styles are being created faster than people can type them into Wikipedia, and most of my favorite stuff these days doesn’t even FIT with a genre.
If you don’t agree, try these experiments:
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Go to your local good purveyor of magazines. Not a grocery store that only carries the popular stuff. Someplace with a deep, off-the-wall selection. Select a minimum of three very different music magazines that you’ve never read before, and that purport to cover genres that you either like, or are unfamiliar with. Park in front of a computer and start reading. Every time an artist or song you don’t know is mentioned, start a-googling and play some of it.
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Sign up foriRate radio or something similar. Fire that puppy up and start listening to the random music it pumps at you. Rate the music (you’ll consider 90% of it crap, I’m sure), and go through at least 50 songs. A hundred would be better.
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Go out to some clubs playing live music that don’t slap an obvious label on the bands. Don’t go looking for “old-time fiddle” or “genuine Chicago blues.” Look for stuff that’s either not described, or is described using different terms you don’t know.
I discovered quite a few new bands that way–especially with #1.
On the other hand, I haven’t discovered a new band I liked by listening to the radio since the 80’s.
There’s loads of good music today. There’s thousands more bands around today than in the 60’s, there’s whole genres that hadn’t been thought of back then, and, within each genre, there’s massive competition for sales. I’m always perplexed when somebody genuinely holds the position that musicians of the 1960’s [for example] were of a different calibre.
That’s my point. With all the new media, the definitions of popular and mainstream no longer exists. As with everything, globalization has segmented our population into enclaves of culture that overlap, but not enclose. Once upon a time, you could only hear music by being upper class and going to giant concert halls to hear some dandy belt out a tune on the tingle tangly harpsichord. Once the printing industry got established, it was possible to flood the market with a brand name, an image. That’s when sheet music appeared. At that point, in every family, there was a piano and a piano player. Well, as we have always done, the people wanted the latest and greatest sheet music. An industry was established to filter the blah. That’s one reason why Scott Joplin became so famous, he was so far above his peers that everyone wanted in his trousers. It helped that he wasn’t black, but was doing black things. His sheet music went multi-platinum. He was talented and the industry needed a face, so he was our first marketed rock star. The point being, in this era, music was all around you, but it was not being played for nations, it was played for members of your community and family. If you wanted to hear music, you had to get Uncle Lupis to sit down and play a rag.
A player piano and a few early generations of recorded media later, the recorded music industry began to really take hold. Instead of having music whenever someone felt like it, music on demand was possible. Any time of the day you could sit down in the parlor, feed the tiny conductor in the gramophone, tickle the beetles under the wheel, and Bach was licking your ears. It took some time for radio to get around to play music, but after awhile it was possible to have a teeny tiny rock band in a box that you could purchase from Sears. Obviously I’m taking liberties with history, but the point I’m trying to make is that after 50 odd years, radio began playing music, and our modern notions of pop were established. Top 40, payola, and the time clock all assured that if someone with enough influence wanted a band to be popular, they would be popular. This happened with sheet music, too. Making records was expensive, the infrastructure for playing music was expensive, so in order to recoop costs someone needed to make money. It’s not a flaw in the system, it’s the reason why the system exists at all.
Through the '60s, little known bands on little listened FM stations became gigantic powerhouses of money fueled by gigantic powerhouses of radio frequencies. This had something to do with the natural rebellion of the times, listening to the FM stations because only old people liked the AM stuff. It also had to do with AM becoming stale. It had to do with a lot of bands on FM stations being insanely talented. All the bands you think of as being really good '60s bands today you only really recognize because FM became popular. Otherwise, they would have faded away into obscurity as well.
Anyway, I’m getting tired of recounting music history for a post no one is really going to read. I’ve done this a thousand times on the board and it’s starting to become my shtick. In the 70s, some people got tired of the mainstream stuff. It was stale, uninteresting, and disco. Most people think I’m going to mention that punk was born here, but I’m only slightly suggesting it. The '70s weren’t the first time an underground existed, it was the first time in history that society was ready to embrace an underground in that movements own lifetime. What I mean is that, while sheet music was being produced, jazz was being born. While Rock 'n Roll was being established, so too was the garage band. By the '60s, guitars became cheap enough and rock was ubiquitous enough that a bunch of kids wanted bands of their own. So you had millions of kids forming bands and releasing stuff, except that there were so few distribution methods available that most of these bands are lost for all eternity. By the '70s, new media came about that allowed people to self record so that those millions of kids with bands in the '60s now became punk rockers in the '70s. Bands like the Desperate Bicycles established the DIY method, allowing people to make music for themselves, for other people, for whoever. For the first time in history, the ordinary person could choose their audience and become rock stars among a certain set.
And that is why mainstream music now sucks. You can either be screwed by a record contract for a faceless corporation, or you can make amazing music and self release it and still sell hundreds of thousands of copies. See: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Blitzen Trapper. Or, you could be apart of an indie label and with a whole lot less work, you could still sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Even millions. See: Shins, Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse. After time, if you sell well enough, you can then finally get a record contract from a giant faceless corporation, only on your terms. See: Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse. There no longer exists an incentive to being on a big name record label, at first. Those that really care about their music, those who want to really move people with their tunes, they either self release or go on indie labels. Because now they can, when they never could before. Now that possibilities exists, there never again will be a mainstream.
For an example of how amazing modern music is, I’d like to point to you my own system of measurement: The Rock Quartet Index. Historically, a rock band is a singer, guitarist, bassist, and drummer. That’s your classic rock band. Now, if rock is going stale and everything has been attempted, then anyone who tries to be a rock quartet will sound stale and uninteresting.
And it’s not true, because of Vampire Weekend.
Oxford Comma
Exit Music (for a Film) (One of the most amazing covers I’ve ever heard.)
Now, if you want to hear some good music, get a subscription to Paste . A magazine and CD of all the latest most hyped indie bands, for as low as 1 dollar a year. It’s only a dollar, what could you lose?
Also, if you want actual recommendations, ask. For anyone else, please correct anything I’ve said. I’m only 19 and have really only been into music for a few years, so I have a lot to learn.
My God, that’s fucking awful!! Everything about the intensity of the way the song is paced is mauled to death!
I’d much rather Mark Ronson’s Just, any day.
No, no, tell us what you really think. 
You really should have a newspaper column, you know. And while we’re in tiny font, Acton Town.
I’m 1 of 53 people in the world who don’t like Radiohead. They do nothing for me. So, me loving a Radiohead song is, in fact, fucking amazing. The song itself, its intensity, I rather like that, regardless of the source material.
Have to agree. The quiet desperation of the original has been replaced by robotic beats and cheesy synths. I’ll take Brad Mehldau’s cover anyday.
Now THAT’S fucking awesome. I’ve been hearing this guy’s name for awhile now, but I kept getting him confused with David Bowie’s old guitar player. I’ve never heard his stuff until now.
As for the OP, I’m in the camp that there’s never been a richer variety of good music today. Affordable recording technology, the internet and a mobile world population has led to a huge proliferation of recorded music and unprecedented cross-pollinization of influences and genres. You’ll just never any of it on mainstream terrestrial radio or television and it probably isn’t for sale in Starbucks or any of the big box electronics stores, either.
ZebraShaSha, your post was interesting, but you led off with a couple of things that made me say “what the heck?”
Music has always been everywhere, from the mother singing a lullaby to her child, to the chants of the workers in the fields, to the churches, to public squares where street performers held forth. I’m pretty sure from the rest of your post that you were talking about commercialized music, but this sentence really had me scratching my head.
Scott Joplin wasn’t black???
You’ll probably like this, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YEU93XKQSU
Damn you, and your tiny fonts, making me almost miss the diagonal to Euston Square.
Yeah, among the kids I work with, I’ve developed a reputation for, ummmm, speaking my mind when it comes to musical preference, such as mini-rants on how I can’t stand Haydn. But it applies in both directions, they’re also familiar with me getting ridiculously enthusiastic about Beethoven or Xenakis or Aphex Twin. I’d rather that they didn’t feel there was some predetermined canon which is Good Music, and that they’ve got every right, if not need, to decide that something is fucking awful for themselves 
It’s better to say that in the old days, your options for listening to music were limited to what someone around you was willing to perform.
I know I’m throwing all these replies around in a stupid order, but hey, it’s 1am.
Do you mean you do, or do not, like the original Exit Music? While OK Computer is an album which I’ve got a certain emotional attachment to, I nowadays find it patchy in terms of the quality of individual songs, much more than I used to. That one, however, I think is absolute gold.
Yea, that’s what I meant. Of course there has always been music, but I meant in the sense of composers who could distribute their stuff. Don’t forget folk music, blues, and the marches that lead to jazz.
Yea, I don’t know, I’m weird sometimes. I confused him with another ragtime composer dude. Pretty sure he is black from that entry. The point I was making was that a lot of white artists at that time were taking black music and making it culturally friendly to whites. No idea why I was making that point, please disregard.
See, I listened to OK Computer a couple of times several years ago, but haven’t really listened to much since then. I just never could connect with it. I just rediscovered Vampire Weekend a week or so ago, and that song in particular. It made me relisten to the original, and I like that one now as well, but it’s a different thing altogether. Radiohead has this strangely timeless, ethereal, floating along feeling to me. Hard to describe, but I think it’s what makes everyone love them. It scares me. Vampire Weekend obviously love the song as well, but they are talented enough to know they could never accomplish the original. Instead, they make a fun as possible cover, which never sounds like, or pretends to be, more than something they would play in their garage.
For instance, how pretentious would it be if they covered the song using similar music and tempo? It would be boring and stupid.
Also, if you weren’t so emotionally attached, listening objectively to that song, would you enjoy it anymore? Vampire Weekend, I mean. Do you enjoy them at all?