I’m in my early 50s here and yes I do like new music from new artists or bands sometimes, but most of the time not.
The more popular music though has gotten mostly boring and repetitious, on the other hand my favorite type of music is blues and blues/rock so I shouldn’t be qualified to complain about it really.
There seems to be a current small movement of celtic/pop/rock fusion that I generally enjoy. But I am also past the point of buying anymore music. I have 450 CDs and I seem to be content with that. *Overwhelmingly classic rock. *
Some more recent artists that I seem to like:
Meghan Trainor; Some of the less auto-tuned Ellie Goulding; Mumford and Sons; Kings of Leon; some Bruno Mars; Lorde and Gin Wigmore especially Kill of the Night.
Meh. I don’t like most rap, but there are some very good rap songs that I enjoy. It’s still music even if you don’t like it. I was in my late 20’s when Eminem first hit the scene, and I still love listening to his older stuff.
My husband absolutely hates rap/hip hop, but even he enjoys a Macklemore song here and there. ‘Downtown’ is a lot of fun.
My kids have a big influence on a lot of the music I listen to(mostly rap/hiphop) But I’m not ashamed to admit that I like listening to chart toppers too. I love Ed Sheeran, and George Ezra. Especially George Ezra.
There have been some great bands and songs listed in this thread, especially Paul Simons Graceland, my all time favorite album.
Late 50s, and yes, I’m always looking for good new music. My kids range in age from 30s to teens, and make these bemused comments that they’re most likely to hear good new stuff because ungroovy, unhip old Mom plays it. To which I say twenty-three skidoo.
Generally not. What I liked about music in the 60s and 70s was that it was innovative and kept going off in different directions. There were new styles and voices.
I don’t see that any more. The modern music I hear is just recycles pop from the 60s, and second-rate variations on the the music from the era. Even worse, is the homogenization of sounds. All woman singers sound the same (sometimes their fans can’t tell the difference). The music powers that be have decreed that everything should have the same sound, and it’s very difficult for a new sound to break through. Marketing goes for the most popular format and freezes out other formats.
And the audience is happy with it. I remember someone defending the concept of lip synching on live performances because the audience wants to hear something exactly like the record. I always thought the point of going to a live concert was to hear something that was different from the record – variations that showed the music in a whole new light. If the lip synching justification is true, it means that audiences don’t really want to hear anything new, or anything to challenge their current tastes. Artists have a disincentive to grow.
This is, of course, a function of the cost of recording and of attending concerts. The more expensive it becomes to create or attend art, the more conservative an audience will be. If you can go to a concert for $10, you’re much more likely to take a chance on a new sound than if the concert costs $100. The industry has moved from creating good music to creating good marketing, and that brings up Price’s Law: If everybody doesn’t want it, nobody gets it.
If there were any new movement in popular music today, I’d be glad to check it out. But I haven’t heard anything new since Rap came in. And I haven’t heard a new distinctive voice since well before then.
DC101, I assume. I listen to them in the afternoons, mixed in with WRNR - in the morning they hardly have any music, just all deejay talk.
I know a few of these. This one’s Weezer, “Undone - The Sweater Song”
Portugal the Man, “Feel It Still”
Which reminds me, there’s almost a mini-trend of band names like this. It started off with The Band Perry, not to be confused with the platypus by the same name. Then there was Portugal (the Man, not the country). And this year we have lovelytheband, distinct from lovelytheadjective.
The Dreamers, “Sweet Disaster.”
One of my favorite songs from last year.
But it’s 1974 that they’re dressing like the Rolling Stones; in 1984, they’re dancing like the Talking Heads.
Which (along with “Feel It Still”) has made me wonder: were the people in these bands even born by some of the years they talk about? To remember 1974 (Dreamers) or 1966 (Portugal) in 2017, you’d have to be 50 (Dreamers) or late 50s (Portugal). Not many people that old in new bands.
The Lumineers, “Cleopatra.” You might’ve heard “Ophelia” and “Angela” by the same band, all from 2016-2017. The three songs sound pretty similar, but I like the sound.
ETA: One nice thing about WRNR if you can pull it in (or listen to it on the Web) is their TuneGenie. If you’ve heard a song on RNR and can remember when you heard it, you can look it up, even going back several days. I think DC101’s lookup only goes back 8-10 songs.
I started getting into music in the early 80s after someone gave me some vinyl LPs. They were rock albums from 10 years prior, and consisted of Black Sabbath, Zeppelin, The Doors, The Who, etc. I loved listening to them, especially Sabbath. I still love those acts. Also love me some Velvet Underground and Mothers of Invention.
A little later I discovered Zappa (after MoI was disbanded), The Ramones, and Joni Mitchell.
Even today, 99% of the music I listen to was produced between (approx.) 1966 and 1980. The “newest” act in my CD collection is Sonic Youth, up until their Goo album (1990).
So I guess I haven’t listened to anything made after 1990. Music made since then seems very contrived and “derivative” to me; I find it very boring. Oh, and get off my lawn!
I’m 54. My sons, all in high school or older, keep me up to date on new music they think I’d like. Some favorites of mine from artists quite a bit younger than me:
Rihanna, “Where Have You Been”
Usher, “Scream”
Cobra Starship, “You Make Me Feel…”
The Killers, “Human”
Edwin McCain, “I Could Not Ask for More”
I’m a major fan of Kesha, although she can hardly be considered a new artist at this point (having first become famous in 2009). I love her new, more acoustic work on 2017’s Rainbow album as well as her earlier dance-pop music.
With the exception of Kesha, however, I’m not finding much to like on Top 40 stations over the last 4-5 years. A few short years ago there would be uptempo songs with memorable melodies, but those seem to have disappeared from top 40 radio. I find that most new music that I enjoy is on modern rock stations these days (e.g., Chicago’s 93 WXRT).
I’m 43. I listen to Top 40 radio quite a bit, so, yes, I do listen to new music. My wheelhouse is more alternative rock acts, but, for whatever reason, I have the top 40 station on a lot in the car. This year I went to concerts by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and St. Vincent, of the more recent acts. Plus I like to listen to stuff like Kendrick Lamar and Beyonce and Chance the Rapper and Kanye to get a sense of what’s going on in those genres, as well.
I’m certainly not as obsessively exploratory as I used to be, but I still do like listening to whatever new is coming out, and I vehemently disagree that all new music is crap or somesuch nonsense.
Thank you. Yes, DC101; they seem to be all talk when I drive in in the early morning and I listen to 1970s-80s music on other stations then, but check out DC101 on the way home.
I had no idea that Sweater Song was Weezer–I did think it was someone new. I’ve been hearing a lot of their cover of “I Bless the Rains Down in Africa” too lately and, once, I believe Toto’s reply cover of “Hashpipe”.
I doubt it, but it’s the partly nostalgia that attracts me to these songs. Also one of the others I mentioned, which I think is called “Swinging from the Fire Escape” and evokes an era that’s almost certainly before the singer’s/songwriter’s time.
Ever listened to Sun Kil Moon, Father John Misty, or the National? They don’t necessarily sound like Sufjan, it’s more the vibe they give off. If I’m in the mood to listen to Sufjan, I’m also in the mood to listen to those three.
I’m still quite a few years off 35. Right now I’m still listening to new music, but I’ll come back in the future and update you.
They’re so much alike (at least, to my ear), that the only way I knew that Weezer’s cover of “Africa” wasn’t Toto’s original was that I heard it on DC101, so it couldn’t be Toto, on account of the way radio formats slice and dice the pop music universe. (Actually, I only thought that the second or third time I heard it there; the first time, I just assumed it was a screwup of some sort. Not that I minded; I was just perplexed.)
ETA: Who knew that Toto was still together to do a reply cover of a Weezer song? That’s incredibly cool of them.
But I’m not totally ossified. I like exploring music that’s new to me, but what passes for rock these days doesn’t float my boat, and pop never really did. Lately I’ve been exposed to a lot of Mexican and French African pop music, and it’s as musically and emotionally uninteresting as English and American pop. Give me the DK’s or some jazz from ECM instead.
Tip: Download the Shazam app on your phone. When an unfamiliar song comes on, Shazam it. You can even hit a button to magically add it to your Spotify playlist.
mmm
Sure it is. My go-to music on Spotify now is hip-hop, trance, and electronica, and without my J Dilla, Stars of the Lid and Wax Tailor, I’d have nothing interesting to listen to. Well, except for dream pop like Pink Shiny Ultrablast, post-rock like Public Service Broadcasting, and alt-country like The Handsome Family. There is so much great stuff out there. and that means keeping an open mind to genres: limiting yourself to only stuff that reminds you of Classic Rock is like deciding to only ever eat macaroni cheese for the rest of your life.
