I know who Beato is. I apologize, but he bores the crap out of me, so I’m not going to watch another of his videos. People have been complaining about click tracks since before he opened a studio. He’s still wrong if he wants to blame the computer. He himself uses the computer, and it doesn’t ruin the music he produces. It’s the lazy choices by the lazy producers who are “ruining” those genres of music.
I haven’t really ever listened to them heavily, so I can’t really say if they’re improved or worsened by the practice. After all, the point of mass produced modern pop and rock is to move your butt and largely little else. If those tools make a track that makes you want to do that - I’d consider it a success, even if does sound stiff for his tastes.
We can describe the vocabulary and grammar of languages that are in use. The syntax of one language will not necessarily apply to any other, but we may look for more general principles with somewhat greater applicability. What we do not get with this approach is a metric of which languages are “better”.
Books specifically about pop songs like Everyday Tonality, due to the global scope and protean nature of the subject, will always have some lacunas, but at least I do not get the impression the approach is to try to fit everything into 18th-century Western music theory.
The mass-producers have computer plugins to “humanize” drum tracks as well as quantise them. If anything, affordable access to powerful computers opens up a myriad of new possibilities and does not take any away. Of course, we might debate whether the sound a producer dialled in for a particular song, possibly because that is what was explicitly considered fashionable, was a good fit or not.
Hehehe, I’m not a giant fan of Grohl, myself. When he mentions it, I give a half-hearted defense of him, and just live with the fact that this producer is never going to blend with that sound. It’s one of many, and he’s not the be-all end-all of drummers. At the moment, I think that that is Black Pus (Brian Chippendale, from Lightning Bolt) .
Well, yes. The (software) drum machine I’m using is doing largely the same things the mass producer’s plugins do. I think we’re in agreement here.
However, I’ve yet to run into a music theory system I thought was anywhere near “complete”. Some are useful in certain circumstances, but outside of those situations, not so much. It’s not that they’re a fiction, but they’re all descriptive, and even the music they try to describe has already usually escaped them. Once you leave the 12 tone system, the western ones are entirely useless.
Not just music. There was something similar about people who are old car enthusiasts. (Meaning, old enthusiasts of old cars.)
People of a certain age love their Model A’s. They keep them sparkling shiny, in working condition, and go cross-country touring with other Model A enthusiasts in their Model A’s. They expected their Model A’s would also have continually appreciating value as collectors’ items.
That didn’t happen. It turns out, older people who get into nostalgia over their old cars, get all nostalgic over the cars that were fashionable when they learned to drive. So the kids of the 1960’s car culture generation became collectors of 1960’s era cars (with the flaming paint jobs and Daddy Roth and Moon Eyes decals), and never got really enthused about those old Model A’s.
The only early 80s stuff I like were bands from the 60/70s, but yeah, it pretty much died after 1979… I think Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” was the last great album. I still listen to Pink Floyd, The Doors, Supertramp (Breakfast In America was another great from 1979), Led Zeppelin, The Who, Steely Dan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, ELO, Black Sabbath, America, Curved Air, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac (especially Green/Kirwan lineup), Illusion, Neil Young, Nino Ferrer, Catherine Howe, etc.
P.S. - I was born in the 80s - it has nothing to do with nostalgia, but great songs/albums, engineering/production, originality, etc…
Even those who don’t use computers, apps, “drum machines”, auto-tune, etc., don’t sound good… I can think of ONE good song, and it’s a Karen Carpenter rip-off… The sound of her voice, the double-tracking right before the chorus, etc… Except for this new (awful) thing I hear female singers do, where they barely pronounce the consonants for some reason.
They don’t re-make em like they used to! Or steal em, I mean “sampling”. Go listen to the original stuff!
Sometimes people’s tastes can change over time, I guess. I just recently listened to the complete album of “Dark Side of the Moon”, for the first time in maybe 30 years. I used to like it. This time, I found it awful. Just terribly boring from start to finish, with a few short exceptions.
Note that the title of the video is “How computers ruined rock music.”
Why is it important rock music be a thing? It’s a very old form of music. If it dies and is replaced by other types of music, bitching about that is no different from bitching about the death of big band music.
I mean, who knows. Maybe it’ll come back. Rock and soft rock had a huge revival with grunge and “singer/songwriter” music in the late 80s and early 90s, so it’s happened before. Or maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t that doesn’t mean the new kinds of music aren’t real music.
People have been complaining about new technologies/techniques ruining music since the first day Grog banged a gourd with stick. There were complaints about harmonies and minor chords. There was much fretting that recording sound on wax cylinders would ruin music. The Rite of Spring caused a near riot (admittedly it wasnt just the music). Electrifying guitars was vile and blasphemous.
People need to stop saying [new technology] ruined music because it’s bullshit. New technology changes music. Some people like it. Old people don’t.
I seek out albums produced by T Bone Burnett. He produced Raising Sand with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. It won a Grammy. There’s a lot of good blues influenced music being made today.
Yeah, I mostly fall on that side of the thought process. There’s this thought out there of “now any schmoe without a lick of talent can produce a decent pop song – they don’t even have to know how to sing or play an instrument” and I can’t help but think … so what? Why is that a bad thing? It still takes some talent and music sense to write a song people want to listen to. Who cares if you played the instruments yourself or if you composed it all within your computer? We should be celebrating the expanding access of music. Who cares how you get there? It’s how it sounds and how it makes you feel.
I never said I don’t listen to the old stuff as well. I remember most of those on your list. By the way, you left off Karla Bonoff and Maria Muldar. I just don’t think that talent ceased to exist somewhere around 1981.
I don’t necessarily disagree. . . but what if it’s not just “how it sounds” or how much “access” there is?
What if the value is in the context by which the creator created it, or the performer performs it?
If music draws significance from these cultural elements, whether explicit or implied, then it makes perfect sense to devalue music that doesn’t come to us in a way that feels valuable or honest.
“Music written in a writer’s room, or music created with a computer and sample libraries is worthless” is a totally defensible position (with an understood “to me” appended), if music is delivering not just lyric/melody/harmony/arrangement, but a cultural sense of place.
I need clarification on this conditional. Would not that music, by virtue of being created with a computer and sample libraries, deliver a cultural sense of place? It exists in a certain time and reflects certain cultural aesthetics that mark it tied to a time and place.
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