Topic: The Music Thread

@TheBrandedSwordsman No I haven’t heard of them but I’ll give them a go. Some stuff is good to zonk out to while working so I’ll need to find out if that album’s a good one for it!

@TheBrandedSwordsman back in the saddle...I’m having trouble tracking down much on The Night Monitor, I don’t have Spotify or anything like that. I found a few YouTube videos that I checked out, it’s all very ambient. Doesn’t seem like something I’d dedicate too much time to listening to.

I have a tendency to randomly binge a certain type of music for two or three days before moving on to something else. So like two weeks ago it was modern remixes of old jazz songs/electroswing, and then last week I just listened to Pixies a lot, and now I've somehow fallen into a Psytrance and Progressive Trance rabbit hole and there's no end in sight.

@johncalmc You’ve pretty much described my average week. Niche earwormy genre into comforting indie rock into trance/rave perfect for the weekend. I should probably just make a playlist with 99 copies of Move Any Mountain by The Shamen and one rogue Nickelback song. Save the hassle.

@Jimmer-jammer That's fine, well, why don't you try Nerija, they are a jazz collective and might be more up your street now that I've introduced you to the genre? Let me know what you think. Got any recommendations for me in return?

Choose my music by the mood. Mostly it is melancholic. But smth like FFDP or Diturbed I listen as well.

@nessisonett What do you think of cats like John McLaughlin and Al DiMeola in jazz, who just shred? Think there's a place for them in that genre as well as the more traditional-
style players?

I’ve been more and more gravitating to older music. And when I say older, I mean 50’s-80’s. I’m not sure if it’s just me being an “old soul” born in the wrong era, or maybe my upbringing of having my parents expose me to older tunes, or maybe it’s that legitimately modern music objectively sucks. Whatever it is, I just suspect that in 50 years when our kids and grandkids look back and ask the question “What were the big hits of the 2020’s?” that the Spotify (or whatever the means of listening to music will be... probably a microchip in our brains that connects it to some global wireless interface controlled by Google... but I digress) playlist will pull up a bunch of random garbage that no one has really heard of since or cares about anymore. Whereas I can just pull up the list for any one random year from previous decades and find loads of classics — for example, pull up “Best of Rock 1965” and you have enormous monumental hits from The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, The Who, James Brown, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan... and on and on with songs you hear over and over like “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction)” or “My Generation” or “I Got You (I Feel Good)”... songs that still surface in pop culture repeatedly on TV commercials, movies, and are remade by modern artists. And that’s just from one single year! What will we remember about the music that came out in 2021? I can’t even think of one classic hit that we’ll be remembering from the last year. I pulled a list of best rock from 1990-2020 (30 years worth!) and it was full of forgettable garbage. There are a few standouts like Imagine Dragons, Green Day, or Coldplay that might have some songs with staying power into the next few generations, but not much.

Now I realize these thoughts are the epitome of subjective opinion, but objectively speaking, I really feel like there is much less penetration of modern pop music into a ubiquitous societal sphere of influence. Perhaps some of it isn’t a lack of musical talent or creativity available in the last 20 years, rather the change in the way we consume our music. With streaming and YouTube, we just don’t have the widespread exposure to the same radio songs and albums like there was in the past. Perhaps if Spotify and YouTube were a thing back in the 60’s then The Beatles would have been drown out by the chaos of a million other artists vying for airtime. Or, perhaps the tunes of Roddy Ricch and Doja Cat will live on as classic signposts of popular music for the next 50 years that our grandchildren will be playing over and over, but something tells me probably not. I don’t know. Any thoughts?

@Th3solution I honestly think that just as much good music comes out now as back in the day. We’re also in a better place as consumers, in that we have the tools to sift through what’s pushed by the labels. Back in the 50s, people like Elvis were ten-a-penny, you couldn’t move without being swamped by rock and roll copycats. Same as the 80s, Stock Aitken Waterman produced millions of artists who all sounded the same to the point that almost all diversity was wiped out in the UK. We have a lot more access to a lot more varied music without having to keep up with the underground scene. As much as I’m not a big fan of Pitchfork, websites like that will show you that there’s a whole lot of music these days which is both popular and groundbreaking.

@nessisonett I think you might be right, and initially I felt like current music would be even better than the stuff of yesteryear due to increased access to technology, things like GarageBand and even Dreams where the barrier to entry is negligible for everyone to become a music creator. More music means more quality, I would suspect. However, that theory just doesn’t seem to translate into my reality. My personal experience is that I can’t seem to find any current artists that are producing transcendent quality. But it’s a needle-in-a-haystack type of issue too.

@nessisonett (Sorry for the double post 😄) And really, it’s the same phenomenon with TV, movies, and video games well. We have so much access to entertainment now that the quality products are “better” (if we can label art in such a way) but are drowned out by mediocrity. I mean, is Super Mario Bros 3 better than Assassin’s Creed Valhalla? Heck, is The Legend of Zelda better than Days Gone? Is Casablanca better than Tenet? Is Modern Family better than The Brady Bunch? I feel like the best creative products of each generation are probably of similar quality, and likely even better than prior generations due to the evolution of technology, but there’s just so much more of poor quality that it makes it hard to judge.

@Th3solution Oh absolutely, while there are probably more great albums, TV shows, movies, games etc, there’s a lot more mediocrity. But then that might not even be true as the whole Atari situation and the many dreadful licensed NES games speak to a level of over saturation back then too.

@Th3solution @nessisonett
Really interesting discussion, guys!

Objectively speaking, popular music has always been a reflection of society. I think that, post WWII, with the advent of radio and television further commercializing music, the 60’s to 80’s was a sweet spot in music history where trailblazing artists such as The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin (to name a few), unbound by the chains of ‘genre‘ and combined with widespread teenage/societal angst, were able to produce truly original music with staying power through a streamlined form of exposure along with significant cultural instability. Beyond being “the firsts”, this was a perfect recipe for the powerful force that is nostalgia.

As the music industry became more about money, it became more about genre and formula. You rarely hear 7 minute progressive epics on the radio outside of that era. I wonder why?

Today, the internet has blown the music industry up, for better and worse. Over saturation is an incredibly valid point. There is so much out there, and in the ADD age of playlists and 30 second TikToks, nothing is given a chance to breathe culturally. Objectively speaking, popular music has always been a reflection of society.

@Th3solution I like this topic and really enjoyed your long post above. I feel the same way, and have come to a few conclusions of my own, be they rational or otherwise.

I think MTV played it's part in killing off talented musical groups. It used to be how well you can play that mattered, and MTV helped shift this towards looks and attitude over musicianship. If you dig up some old videos, pre mtv, and watch guys like Ritchie Blackmore tearing it up, heavily influenced by classical music, students of their craft, it's amazing. I can't find anyone now who is as well versed as many guitarists of the fifties through the eighties.

I think another reason might be, and this applies to far more than musicianship, into learned crafts over all fields, that we all spend more time with our gadgets these days, be it computers, phones, or whatever modern distraction tickles your fancy. This is time we humans used to spend strumming a guitar or playing a harmonica or singing or doing any other number of things. I feel like modern technology distractions might have led us astray from pastimes that required us to develop any skills.

Not just in music, either. When was the last time you saw a neighborhood football game? How many kids still read books for enjoyment? Show me a kid who knows how to whittle.

I don't know, just some random out-there thoughts. It's possible I'm not in the best frame of mind as I write this.

@johncalmc
I was quite into the electroswing for a while, there are some really fun songs out there. Mostly I tend to stick with Synthwave and music in that sort of genre these days.

@Th3solution
I feel like it's an inevitable byproduct of having a much larger world population along with it being easier to publish music. There will be a lot more awful music out there, making anything amazing more difficult to find as you say.

The big companies realise what's popular often isn't the same as being good. An image that inspires younger listeners can make a fortune on its own regardless of talent or a passion to create brilliant music. That's why we have shows like X-Factor which has never actually been about music.

@Jimmer-jammer Yeah, I like that point about music being a reflection of society, rather than the other way around as I was thinking about it where society’s global talent seems to be waning. Rather the talent and output is out there, it’s just in a form that reflects itself in a frankly more short-sighted and distractible way.

And to honest, going back to the classical and baroque music, the same could be said that even the modern musical classics would be considered shallow and cursory by someone living in the 1700’s.

It goes right along with what @LordSteev astutely points out that the rising generation has no time, energy, or interest in the mundane things like learning to play an instrument, much less compose a symphony like Mozart at age 8. Perhaps if little Wolfgang Amadeus had a PS5 and an iPad, he’d never have ventured into learning and writing music. Of maybe he would have produced the most awesome musical levels in Dreams, who knows. But I definitely agree that, for better or worse, the pool of music is larger but the actual number of people who are well-trained and practiced in musical performance is probably much less than 40 or 50 years ago.

And the corporate angle is definitely a factor, as pointed out by @LieutenantFatman — The struggling artist making his way in the world is likely to never be discovered based on talent alone. Money makes this world go around so he or she has to be marketable. The Idol shows were designed with that in mind; that is that talent is only part of the equation with becoming a pop star.

@Kidfried Yeah, I don’t get the comparison to things like the X Factor because it’s not like The Gerogerigegege were turning up on Top of the Pops. You always have to look for music you love and the fact is that it’s easier now more than ever to do so. When artists like Weatherday can put a post on r/emo advertising their album on Bandcamp and it ends up completely blowing up, that’s a real win. There are whole genres which only came into being recently but people just seem to want to live in the past.

@Kidfried I was speaking very specifically to popular music, which no longer exists as it once did. There has always been a wide array of diverse music, that hasn’t been lost and probably never will be. The love of music is incredibly subjective and there is still very high quality music being made. These things should go without saying.

The mega hits of yesteryear, along with their cultural significance, is not likely something that will be emulated again. Beatlemania is incomprehensible for people who didn’t grow up with it.

In hypothesizing the possibilities of why the mega hits of that era and their staying power seem lost to time, I stand by my post.

@TheBrandedSwordsman I’ll check it out! I have no recommendations at the moment, but when I find something I think you might fancy, I’ll let you know 👍

@Jimmer-jammer Beatlemania’s probably directly comparable to the insane fandom surrounding BTS and wider K-Pop at the minute. While the Beatles went on to create incredibly varied and fantastic music, their original album is essentially boy-band music of its time. Personally I’d say that even The Beatles’ worst stuff is better than 99% of BTS but the point still stands. I can guarantee that people in their 30s and 40s back when The Beatles first came onto the scene were moaning about the good old days and how music these days wouldn’t last the same way that the music from their childhood has.