I’ve listened to a variety of music in the past 4 years, mostly consistent of rock and electronic. i never really liked much of what the current youth is being appealed to but i never heard them say its like noise to them. more like “junk food music” to them. music that catchy and fits the current mood of the listener but is dropped within a week or so as its been stretched out to oblivion although that very much just could be radio friendly songs.
i’ve met plenty of people who are into the past generation’s music. some i know like post punk bands from the 70s and 90s while others like the electronic jungle and DnB scenes of the 90s. there is still plenty of experimentation going on with music today with genres like rap, pop, and punk. most people dont really bother to look towards places where this is happening.
Novelty records have almost disappeared from radio airplay. In the last 20 years, the few examples include “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” (2013) by Ylvis, “We No Speak Americano” (2010) by Yolanda Be Cool, and “Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)” (1995) by Scatman John. All three are one-hit wonders in the U.S.
And here I was thinking “This’ll be great, I’ll be around kids half my age, and be learning about brand new genres, and hearing new bands!”
“Sorry, mister grownup, we love classic rock, get over it.”
[ s i g h . . . ]
Rant: the “young’uns” don’t discriminate between GREAT rock from the 70s and GENERIC rock from the 70s. They’ll be listening to Bohemian Rhapsody and Whole Lotta Love, but then pick a playlist full of The Pina Colada Song,Brandy, and Afternoon Delight…
That’s because the more time passes the more we condense an entire decades music into the absolute best of the best. There are tens of thousands of shit songs from the 60s 70s and above nobody remembers, just like nobody is going to remember the overwhelming majority of todays songs. You bet your ass you are going to be able to put together a banger top twenty songs of the twenties mix a few decades from now though.
Young people today are far more open-minded about music than previous generations.
I think social media is having the opposite effect. My 14-year-old is constantly bringing up older bands and artists. Just today he was talking about the Deftones and Tool. I ask him where he hears this music, it’s almost always TikTok.
I am a Millennial on the oldish side (1983.) I love me some classic rock. I discovered Rush in my twenties because some coworker at Jimmy John’s had a mix CD. Heart and Pat Benatar are totally my jam.
I also love early 90s alternative. That’s my generation.
Our former nanny was a young whippersnapper. I caught her wearing a Green Day shirt and was so excited. She was like, “Yeah, my Dad made us listen to it all the time growing up.”
I realized that when Weird Al released the album Mandatory Fun, I didn’t know most of the originals.
I’m not knocking music these days, I just don’t listen to it much.
Here at the Dope it’s become an in-joke referring to obsolete customs and the over-the-hill geezers (like us) who still practice them, despite them being bafflingly pointless to modern younguns.
Most of the other SDMB in-jokes have pretty well died out. Og, “Hi Opal” in lists, penis ensues, death rays, 20 minutes, etc., are rarely seen any more.
But the onion on the belt lives on. Perhaps because it was adopted so much more recently here. Or perhaps because we’re collectively becoming a lot more like Grandpa Simpson than we’d really like to admit.
I actually extrapolated from what I recall from being a teenager (“Herb Alpert sucks!” (Dad had a pile of Herb Alpert LPs)) to how I grew as I aged ("Herb Alpert’s actually pretty damned talented, and the album cover of “Whipped Cream and other Delights” is legendary), versus having a pretty interesting discussion of rock music with my nephew (he’s 21 now) a few years back that I’d never have had with my uncles at the same age.
Thanks to my dad, I still enjoy 50s rock and roll, doo wop, and rockabilly. He was born in 1938, so was there at the beginning. I was born in 71. He always had a “golden oldies” station on the radio. He was pretty single minded in his musical taste, though. He liked to say that pop music died the minute the Beatles landed at JFK. I’m still not sure if was joking or not.
Off the top of my head, here’s some artists I was listening to circa 1975 (when I was 23):
Hank Williams
Billie Holiday
Jimmy Rodgers (the singing brakeman, not the other two guys)
Louis Armstrong
Ella Fitzgerald
The Coasters/Drifters/Chuck Willis etc.
Bessie Smith
Jelly Roll Morton
I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!
I was in the grocery store today, and there was an older gentleman having trouble entering his phone number for the discounts, and I thought, "you know, in 20 years, I’ll be that guy, except I won’t be able to use the brain interface, or the mystillizer interface. It’ll happen to you!
Pickin’ up speed on the downhill at a disturbing clip. And I ain’t even retired yet.
I’ve resisted talking to my phone to make it do things for years. Never tried & not interested. That may be the rock upon which I finally lose grip on tech when they remove most of the tap & click stuff & it’s all voice and I’ll be as lost as a DOS user on an iPad.
My opinion is that there haven’t been any major shifts in popular music since around 1999, for a variety of reasons.
The sources of new music are too fractured for any one style to gain a large following. In the old days there were guys like Ed Sullivan, Dick Clark, and Casey Kasem who helped drive the trends. There’s no such people today. Even Simon Cowell doesn’t come close.
The more new styles that get developed, the less room there is for something totally novel to come along. We may have just ran out of completely new stuff to invent at the turn of the millennium. Yes, there’s been some changes, but nothing that would shock an audience from 1999 the way that the 1985 Marty McFly did with his parent’s generation in 1955.
Due to the magic of mp3s and YouTube, a lot of the old stuff came back in a way that wasn’t possible in the old days. Even taking into account population increases, there’s probably more kids today who like Rick Astley than there were in 1991, when it was no longer cool to like him even though he had been at the height of his popularity in1989. Same for MC Hammer, who was no longer cool in 1994 despite being at the top of the charts a few short years earlier in 1991. That sort of thing (an artist becoming uncool just 2 or 3 years after being extremely popular) just doesn’t happen anymore, barring the artist having a personal scandal.
