Why do the majority of new songs SUCK these days?

[blue2blue]

I have never seen Antaeus represented as a Centaur.......

Yeah... well... see that's the public story. They just don't want the common folks to know the real truth... they can't handle it.

 

 

 

Yeah... that's not the first time I accidentally let the insider scoop slip. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it was you who tried to wise me up last time... You probably know all the Christian saints and the Hindu pantheon, too... Sheesh.

[blue2blue]

 

i think that the changes we're looking for in music suffer a number of darknesses. First of all, it's only 2010, i'm not sure we could say with certainty how different our music is from 1995, not for another few years, not until this music is on a compilation disc being sold on late night tv (in the backseats of our flying cars). Second, i'm not sure what kind of evolution we're looking for, since the Dawn Of Western Recorded Music, we have had Three kinds of music to my mind, Classical, Blues, and Country . Those genres have mixed and matched their modes and muses for the past hundred ot years and have produced an Amazing variety, but really, it's all from the same seed, and now we have universal access and stimulation overload, i think the Evolution is still there, it's just Subtle, i can tell apart Indie rock from the mid-90's and today, because Indie rock from the mid-90's was a mix of Grunge and Electronica, and Indie rock from today is a mix of Brit-Blues-Revivalism and Americana, now they sound very simmilar, but i think they came from different slots. Getting back to Evolution being Subtle in today's market, i think because of our general over-stimulation we're worse at picking out the differences, so maybe it's not a problem with the artists, but a problem with the consumers.

[bold added]

 

There are only two kinds of music that matter: country and western.

 

 

With regard to musical evolution... I'd like to think there's growth and evolution... I'm certain that it's happening outside the public spotlight. There will always be creative, provocative, interesting innovators out there -- whether an audience finds them or not.

 

What concerns me is that, in the past, the big pop music machine -- no less onerous and corrupt in many ways then, don't get me wrong -- was nonetheless more open to, even seeking new music and ideas. To exploit -- to be sure. But now, the perception among the demographic marketers is that taking chances can't be justififed by the bottom line. (Of course, one of the big problems is that the people who today would be taking the chances are by and large soulless, tin-eared lawyers and MBAs.)

[easilyspooked]

 

What concerns me is that, in the past, the big pop music machine -- no less onerous and corrupt in many ways then, don't get me wrong -- was nonetheless more open to, even seeking new music and ideas. To exploit -- to be sure. But now , the perception among the demographic marketers is that taking chances can't be justififed by the bottom line.

 

 

i agree with you completely here, Except! that i believe we're already seeing the dethnel of the profit margins on completely drab art, ok no, that's not what i mean, that's never going to die, which is good because we need soemthing to be iconoclastic about, What I Mean Is - entreprenuers are discovering more and more each day that they can make a Small, Tidy profit by engaging Ultra Specific subcultures with Great Art and building a Streamlined Infrastructure around said subculture to pander to it and create for it. look at "Urban" styled clothing (always look to impoverished population centers for true innovation), there is some Kick Ass clothing being made for that populous, now i worked in a retailer that catered to this group for 2 years, and i can tell you that at the end of my tenior in Retail Management (thank pete) i could immediately tell by the subtlty of their clothing whether something was made by The Man or by an Artist, and it was always the truly cool kids supporting the real artists, and always the 12 year old suburban white kids in the Nike {censored}.

 

So there is hope, and it's in Small Art. Local Art. which is exactly where we find our crowd as musicians, none of us is ever going to hit it big in this climate, i have Never been paid for a show, and i don't expect i ever will be, i spend my time and gas because i love it and i love the scene and i have no delusions of making a living, and this is a whole big nother argument i've seen go down a thosuand times on the Band forum, but really, crap i just lost my train of thought... i make small cash selling t-shirts that i paint in my basement, and i hear the best music being made by my brothers and sisters in the dank ass clubs.

 

If you think all New Songs Suck these days, you're not helping.

[blue2blue]

Well, songs that suck, suck.

 

 

But, yeah, no one should confuse the mass music market with the breadth and depth of the music scene... like I said, I firmly believe there is great as well as innovative music being made out there. But at this point in the evolution of our music markets, you're probably not going to hear any of it in the mainstream music marketing channels.

[blue2blue]

Oh, sure, I completely agree. It's not like there's a conspiracy to only sell crap. If the companies thought they could consistently and as effortlessly make as much money selling good stuff (whatever one imagines that to be), there's a good chance that they might. If only for the novelty of it all.

 

I think an important aspect of what I'm trying to get at is that one of the reasons that so much crap is sold is because it's easy to develop standardized methods and formulas of making and selling crap -- in a way that is not parallel to what it takes to make and sell various forms of adventurous or quality product.

[Badtux]

I'll admit that, right now, I'm not finding much music that satisfies my adventurous side... most of what I hear is retreaded and target-marketed to younger audiences who presumably don't get the fact that they're getting repackaged cliches.

I get your frustration that there was no massive change in how music sounds since the 1990's. But that's because the basic technology for making music hasn't change. When the electric guitar came along in the mid to late 50's, suddenly we had rock'n'roll because the new technology enabled a guitar-driven amplified sound that older acoustic guitar technology simply couldn't achieve. When modern multi-track recording techniques and early electric organs became commonly available in the mid 60's, suddenly we had Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. As the ringing capabilities of electric guitars were explored we got Jefferson Airplane, and as feedback and distortion were explored, Jimi came along. When fully electronic synths became widely available in the 1980's, we got electro-pop and electronica. Then in the 90's we got DJ'ing and scratching and beats and such, which added some new sounds, but not, apparently, ones that you appreciate. But since then? We've pretty much exhausted the possibilities of what sounds can be produced by the current technology available for modern folk music (which is what I consider most modern pop to be -- music that can be made for relatively modest budgets using commonly available gear, i.e., music for the common folk). So naturally the sound isn't going to change the way it did when there was a quantum leap in the technology during the early 60's or early 80's.

That said, true, much of the recent stuff played on the radio is so blatantly derivative that I can name who they're imitating off the top of my head in many cases. Still, I wouldn't say that all of the recent derivative pop stuff sucks. The most sincere stuff has all the appeal of watching a puppy play in your back yard. Awe, isn't Paramore cute? Oh sure, it's derivative alterna-pop, but WTF. Not everything has to be earth-shatteringly revolutionary. The kids are enjoying themselves, so who are we to throw stones at them? (Lady Gaga, on the other hand... well, actually I have a lot more respect for what Ms. Germanotta does than a lot of people do because she pulls it off so well, but if the whole basis of your act is to be Madonna except skankier... ).

As for stating that the 90's sucked, I'm not sure that a decade that included Portishead, Nirvana, Smog, The Chemical Brothers, Radiohead, Neko Case, (fill in the blank) could be called sucky. Yeah, there was a lot of derivative junk too -- just how many covers of "Wonderwall" do we need, for cryin' out loud? But dissing an entire decade because your local radio stations only played The Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls on constant rotation is ridiculous.

As for good stuff going on today, there's a *ton* of good stuff going on today outside of the derivative stuff you hear on your local radio. Check out the music blogs if you want to get a good feel for it. Most of those folks would get radio play sometime when Yuma Arizona freezes over because they fit no preconceived genre (or fit into one that the Powers That Be have decided there is no money), but there's tons of good stuff out there. You just have to go looking for it -- it's out there, in obscure clubs you've never heard of, in cities you've never visited -- and now thanks to the Internet we have the tools to find it ourselves without gatekeepers getting in the way.

[blue2blue]

Actually, I was an early fan of hip hop and I love watching a good turntablist -- but you got your timeline wrong -- scratch mixing goes back to the seventies -- not the nineties.

 

Even before rap had made much of a dent, DJ's were augmenting their table-crafted 'extended mixes' with drops and scratching from other records. And it wasn't even restricted to inner city rental hall shows. I remember seeing/hearing a white DJ in a mainstream disco in the late 70s dropping phrases in and scratching. He wasn't the kind of table whiz you'd see five or ten years later, but he was out there doing it.

 

I did my own first rap recording in late 79 or early 80 with lyrics I found folded up on school kids notepaper on a bus... bouncing between two cassette machines. It was... awful. But within a couple years I had done a couple of hip hop radio jingles with some friends, one of which made it into rotation on a local mixed format modern pop station [they played The Message (which the jingle owed a real debt to) and some other rap, too]... although the jingle we did with the X-like gliss harmonies got played a lot more.

 

And I was using samplers from the first time I could get my hands on one. I'd been using synths since '81 and was a synth lab tutor at my school. In '83 some friends and I formed a project band that heavily featured our keyboardist's Emulator '1' -- we had to sidetrack it when he leased the Emulator to UK band, Girlschool for a set of tours (Emulators were expensive and in demand -- he'd picked his up relatively cheap just before early interest in sampling peaked, leasing it out just about paid for it).

 

I don't think I dissed the 90s (but when I get going, well, the hot lead flies) -- I actually was having a good time musically, particularly in the last half of the decade. There had been in the 80s and ealry 90s in LA a mostly pretty good (college) station that was pretty adventurous (it's since gone very commercial -- they changed MD's to a brit guy with really lite taste in white wine soft rock and now swapped him for possibly the worst electronica DJ I've ever heard -- he was a club DJ and he has an unerring radar for clumsy, tennis-shoes-in-the-dryer bad beat matching. Not talking drum-n-bass syncopation here. Talking bad beat matching by people who manifestly can't keep time.)

 

And the early and mid-90s twin provocations of NIN's Pretty Hate Machine and the first Portishead album really fired me up. I'd been living two musical lives... working with synths and sampling doing instrumental music (for years I had a live echo loop act called Frippenstein] and, for a while, Tranz Azul when I tried to expand my appeal] -- that was before they made that easy with all these push button loop boxes) and, at the same time, also doing acoustic shows under my own name, singing my post punk folkie, country and blues flavored songs.

 

But, with lead offered by NIN and Portishead -- and later liberated and accelerated by the move from linear digital tape (ADATs) to DAW recording -- starting around '96 I started merging (in my clumsy way) the postmodern production techniques and textures of dub, trip hop and hip hop with my own roots-oriented writing. (Maybe three, since I was in that period really involved in consuming hard core noise pop bands in the form of Skinny Puppy and Ministry and the like.)

 

As far as actually listening to pop and rock radio -- hell, I haven't done that since the mid-80s when I realized while trying to work some records I'd been involved with that there was only one real way to get music into rotation on the local modern rock station: payola in the form of drugs or hookers, preferably both. (And if the hookers were underage, that would suit the MD just fine. As court records would later demonstrate.) So, you know, I wrote off radio a long time ago. Ditto MTV.

 

Since the late 90s, I've pretty much got all my music tips from either 3DW friends and the internets.

 

PS... you'd be surprised how cold it can get in Yuma.

[Lee Knight]

I'd like to comment on the original question, "Why do the majority of new songs SUCK these days?" without wasting my energy questioning the very question itself.

 

I think the songs of today, by and large, are not as good as earlier eras because it is too easy for the writer of today to gussy up his work before it's done.

 

I want to hear the top 10 from this week done by the writers through a simple YouTube performance. Type the lyrics, and let us hear it.

 

Of course, that's not the medium they're delivered through, but that kind of scrutiny early on only helps whatever direction they go in during the final production stage.

 

Just a thought.

[Stackabones]

When the Beatles were writing songs, folks were saying that they don't write them like they used to. When Gershwin wrote songs, folks were saying that they don't write them like they used to. When Schubert wrote songs, folks were saying that they don't write them like they used to. When King David wrote songs, folks were saying that they don't write them like they used to.

 

GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

[Lee Knight]

GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

 

 

That was my original criticism of the question itself. Still, I do think there is something to really writing the song to its fullest before you start werkin da beetz.

[blue2blue]

 

When the Beatles were writing songs, folks were saying that they don't write them like they used to. When Gershwin wrote songs, folks were saying that they don't write them like they used to. When Schubert wrote songs, folks were saying that they don't write them like they used to. When King David wrote songs, folks were saying that they don't write them like they used to. GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

They might have been saying that, but, not so much about the Beatles. The musical establishment fell all over itself covering the Beatles almost from the word go.

 

What was the most conservative part of the music biz at that time?

 

Nashville. Yet no less a Nashville luminary (and record exec) than Chet Atkins recorded his Chet Atkins Picks on the Beatles within a year or so of the Beatles' breakout performances on Ed Sullivan.

 

 

What folks were saying is that they weren't singing them like they used to. A lot of folks were totally unprepared for the loose (the word then was "sloppy") vocals... They were at once surprised by the harmonic inventions in both the songwriting and the vocal arrangements -- and often mildly horrified by the vocals. To many ears in 1963, the Beatles' singing probably seemed as chaotic and dangerous as punk rock would 15 years later.

 

BTW, consider that, kids -- not more than 12 years or so between the debut of the Beatles and the emergence of first wave punk. But consider all the musical changes and style shifts and innovations that came between.

 

It's been that long since the late 90s -- what's happened since then?

 

That's a serious question.

[Stackabones]

I've heard some pretty damn good songs written since the 90s. Some have actually come from this forum. Genre or styles or production shouldn't mean {censored} to songwriters. You can sing the end of Beethoven's 9th without a symphony and a chorus.

 

The majority of everything sucks. I think I said as much earlier, and I'm quite sure I stole that from someone who said it a hundred years ago. But just because the majority sucks, doesn't mean that there isn't anything marvelous in the minority. Takes a lot of coal to make a diamond.

[Mcfontio]

It's been that long since the late 90s -- what's happened since then? That's a serious question.

Dispersal. You've already talked about the corporate headlock on the music biz. Add total ease of production and what do we get? Music coming from everywhere and going nowhere - in terms of getting heard.

I wouldn't know, but I would think the same percentage of truly talented musicians is about the same now as it was at any point in history (percentage to the whole populous). Of course, there was {censored}ty music at all times. But now, even {censored}ty music is backed by money. And kids are growing up listening to it.


Maybe the earth came loaded with a fixed amount of talent for music. So no matter how many musicians are out there, we have to share it.

[Badtux]

BTW, consider that, kids -- not more than 12 years or so between the debut of the Beatles and the emergence of first wave punk. But consider all the musical changes and style shifts and innovations that came between . It's been that long since the late 90s -- what's happened since then? That's a serious question.

 

 

I think you have to look outside the music industry itself for that. Two things happened that to me made a big difference:

 

1) Internet connections got fast enough to make music distribution over the Internet possible, and the record labels responded by attempting to sue their customers rather than figuring out some way to shift music distribution to the Internet (it took Steve Jobs to figure that one out and he had to drag them kicking and screaming down that path), all of which slammed music industry profits into the ground like a WWE superstar piledriving his opponent into the ring, all of which eliminated any inclination to distribute anything that was at all adventurous, and

 

2) the world has basically been in a slow depression (papered over by playing with statistics) since the dot-com crash in 2001, median family income in the largest single market (the United States) has declined every year since 2001 and in a depression like this, people don't buy stuff that's edgy or anything, they buy stuff that reminds them of better times like the 1990's. Thus why if you turn on the radio you hear plenty of Nirvana-inspired alterna-pop on the "hard" rock stations and plenty of bubbly 90s-boygirl-band-inspired teen pop on the "soft" rock stations and plenty of innocuous "Nashville sound" on the country stations, and why 1930's hits during the Great Depression were stuff like Bing Crosby singing "Pennies from Heaven", Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" (in down times people want something danceable!), or Gene Autry's "Back in the Saddle Again" rather than something daring or adventurous. In down economies, people look backward when it comes to music, not forward.

 

Then there's simply the fact that there hasn't been any real technological change as far as the core process of making music. The Beatles could be the Beatles because of a quantum leap in the technology of how music was recorded and made, a quantum leap that mirrored what was happening in the real world where at the beginning of the decade satellite communications were science fiction and at the end of the decade man was walking on the moon. What quantum leap in technology occurred since 2000? The already-existing technology became cheaper and faster thanks to China and Intel, but cheaper and faster is not a change in the fundamental technology.

[blue2blue]

As I've said before, it's not that I don't think good, interesting, even inventive music is getting made... it's just not getting into the Big Machine that tells the kids what to like at any given time... that interesting, inventive music is just too hard for the suits and lawyers to wrap their spreadsheets around...

 

I listen to music on average about 8 to 12 hours a day. I'm not running out of good music to listen to. But when I go looking for new music about the last place I expect to find it is on the radio, TV, or charts...

[blue2blue]

 

 

Now there's an angle I had not considered... economic upheaval-inspired nostalgia...

 

That said, the thirties during the Great Depression was a veritable golden age of progressive pop music. The increasing mainstream popularity of jazz all but wiped out the early century popularity of treacly neo-operatic pop ballads (think Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddie) and the adoption of swing syncopation in mainstream pop music revolutionized pop over the course of the 30s... The jitterbugs (think break dancers who could actually dance [no slag on the sweat-suited b-boys of the 80s, some of them were amazing athletes -- but just check out the black [and later white] jitterbuggers of the mid-late 30s -- some truly amazingly inventive, athletic and graceful dancing) totally shocked the musical establishment -- and revolutionized pop culture over the following decade, setting the stage for both the bobby-soxers and rock and roll.

[rockinrobby]

That was my original criticism of the question itself. Still, I do think there is something to really writing the song to its fullest before you start werkin da beetz.

[eeglug]

Now there's an angle I had not considered... economic upheaval-inspired nostalgia...

 

 

Combine that with rampant illegal downloads - there's not much incentive for a music exec to want to invest on new talent.

[blue2blue]

Think about the upkeep on that Gattling gun...

 

No wonder there's a push to work on solidstate, no moving part weapons like death and disintegrator rays and such.

 

Efficiency is the byword in building a green tomorrow.

[rockinrobby]

LOL! I knew a guy who worked on these :-)

His job was to repair them and keep them in working order... Like this video, it shows bursts/tests in the shop?

I mean "just damn..." It puts the mini-gun to shame? Can you imagine? This is the gun in the nose of an A10-Warthog. The plane was designed as a tank killer? It was a plane "designed around a gun?" And this is the gun it was designed around... Now I like the mini gun? But the cannon in the nose and the length of an A10? That will make a believer out of you... Jesus? Allah? It doesn't matter, if you're on the receiving end of this weapons platform, you'll be crying out for one of them...

[LeonardScaper]

Think about the upkeep on that Gattling gun... No wonder there's a push to work on solidstate, no moving part weapons like death and disintegrator rays and such. Efficiency is the byword in building a green tomorrow.

 

 

You do crack me up.

[blue2blue]

 

LOL! I knew a guy who worked on these :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sALiuWg_I1k His job was to repair them and keep them in working order... Like this video, it shows bursts/tests in the shop? I mean "just damn..." It puts the mini-gun to shame? Can you imagine? This is the gun in the nose of an A10-Warthog. The plane was designed as a tank killer? It was a plane "designed around a gun?" And this is the gun it was designed around... Now I like the mini gun? But the cannon in the nose and the length of an A10? That will make a believer out of you... Jesus? Allah? It doesn't matter, if you're on the receiving end of this weapons platform, you'll be crying out for one of them...

 

Yes. That's fascinating, Robby.

 

Probably best to take it to the politics forum. Otherwise, I might be inclined to share more of my views... And I'm pretty sure we don't want that here.

[blue2blue]

You do crack me up.

Just trying to keep it light.

[blue2blue]

:cop:See what happens when we let politics rear its ugly head in here? (And I'm busting myself as much as anyone. Certainly for what I redacted.)

 

Understood it's a part of life and there's no problem discussing political songs and such in the appropriate time and place, but -- if only because I have a hard time keeping my lips buttoned and I suspect others do, too, when it comes to politics -- let's drag this puppy back to the topic of sucking...

[Badtux]

Regarding file sharing as the culprit -- certainly it reduces the amount of money in the system. A hole blown in their business model -- and their refusal to deal with reality until Steve Jobs hauled them there kicking and screaming with the iTunes store -- hasn't helped. But even before file sharing, 99% of what you heard on the radio sounded like the other 1% that was on the radio. Recording industry mooks were always as trend-following as lemmings and as timid as mice, someone would manage to sneak something a bit different sounding through the recording industry filter (the 1%) then there would be a thundering herd of every other mook in the industry to sign bands that sounded just... like.... that. See, for example, the post-Nirvana effort by every single label to sign bands that sounded "just like Nirvana" . Some of those bands were good. Others... not so much. But you get the point, I think -- even before file sharing, this is what the industry was like.