I fully agree with the premise of the video... when you have asswipes like Kanye West being taken as cultural icons, you know
you are sliding into a cesspool.. there is a "sameness" sound to music these days... if anywhere more evident in EDM... (imho)
but I am not a big fan of this genre already... So I will point out American pop country music.. If it wasn't cheesy and silly sounding 40 years ago... it is now the most contrived repetitive drivel imaginable..
but with (of course ) sleek and slick and shiny production...(barf)

I was never a Coldplay fan... and always felt a little left behind wondering why I never liked it..
but now.. I have more courage for my convictions....

peace yo !

 

Evorax,i have to disagree with you there.
Music in the 70s and 80s,especially pop in the 80s was on a totally different level.Pop at that time was experimental with lots and lots of diversity and people who had serious songwriting skills.
Today`s pop tries to please 12 year olds,thats their target base.
The old pop was targeting adult audience,incorporating jazz,bebop,heavy metal,prog rock elements etc...
Sounding different is a trade mark of an original artist of someone who likes his sound tailored to his needs,like a suit.
The problem today is that so many producers use (for example) presets from Nexus,slap Ozone on the mixbus and call it a day.
1000 cloned,same sounding DJs,using the same plugins and same presets.
And altough i think electronic production today is better than in the 90s,it lacks songwriting skills and originality.

 

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Everything the guy in the video says is true, right, and on-spot, and everything I have observed. What he's describing, however, is the ultimate result of a long process, following advances in music-production technology and technocratic centralization of culture-marketing.

The flip-side of this guy's diatribe is reflected in postings on this forum, in which people pose questions like, "How can I get software to write melodies for me?" and, "How does someoene come up with lyrics? Is there an app for that?" People can enter into ostensible "music-" making now without any understanding of music theory, without any particular musical talent, and with no familiarity with playing a real instrument. "Making beats" is – what? – creating rhythms? Early humans did that back in the jungle. That's progress.

For generations, (young) people have been told what to like, and accepted it. In fact, our society is based upon our being told how to feel about things, and believing that we feel that way because the pressure to conform emotionally is as strong as any other conformism. (Even further, I have seen, over decades, a move beyond "conformity" to "uniformity" in how poeple look, act, feel, think, believe and react – but that's another story.) It's easier to let onself be told what's "good," or to internalize the prejudice, than to feel oneself at odds with the whole construct of societal culture. Popular music is all about manipulation on a mass scale; what's going on now is nothing new, just more blatant, brazen and extreme.

The UPS Store where I have my mail delivered has its sound system locked onto that '70s soft-rock crap playing interminably – even after hours, when the business is closed but clients can enter with a key to get mail from their boxes! – despite that everyone who works there is in their '20s. (I'd had to endure that diarrhea in my teens; I was so grateful for punk rock to come along.) Bland-ass L.A.-based soft-rock, a wet blanket thrown on the fire of '60s revolution. Pretty obvious what was going on with that. Even so, the lyrics to the songs were more intelligently-written than what's on "the radio" today, there was more melody and harmony, and real musicianship, to those recordings. What I hear on the radio now sounds like music for children to masturbate to.

 

i have a bedroom so i feel more like a "bedroom-wannabe-producer".
and some of my stinky stuff isn't as bad as all my friends tell me it is...

 

This too, shall pass...

 

what do those T-shirts say "Keep calm & listen to Guided by Voices" its what im doing ;)

 

That is because the artist are talent less. Great video thanks for the share.

 

In the past you had to invest in your musicianship to reach a level where it would make sense to invest money into recording a demo.

Nowadays it's more like "You have a laptop? You're a superstar already!"

 

Yes shake your booty on stage and you too can say you are a talented artist. Not whether you can play a instrument.
Wow that was hilarious to see k west do a remake of Freddie mercury song and botch it up so freaking badly.
I honestly thought I could not sing until i heard that. Thanks to West for building up my courage.

 

I may not totally disagree on the point : a lot of the best-sellings songs are dumb... and the musical industry is making us dumber and dumber.
But come on man, what are all these so-called facts in the video, with not even one proof or one source (apart from the pseudo-statistics and texts made with a cheap knowledge of CAD softs, trying to make them look official)?
Feels a little like conspiracy theory to me, and one thing I know is that conspiracists will always make you afraid (afraid of your neighbour, and afraid of all the rest of the world in the same time) and will always give you answers to make you feel smarter than anyone (yes i know, the illuminati probably washed my brain with burgers, bad music and subliminal messages ).
This being said, Kanye West is one hell of a shitty singer

 

Yeah...The piano roll generation...They don't have good artistic references, they're lazy and undisciplined. They think that remixing somebody else's song and getting a few thousand views on youtube is somehow an artistic accomplishment.

Honestly, we're all fucked. 15 years ago I used to listen to pop songs and think that it couldn't get any worse. Those songs sound like masterpieces if compared to the pop songs of today.

It always can get worse...And it probably will get much worse.

Music is going back to its most primitive elements...We've manged to evolve music from its most basic paleolithic drum beating form to the complexity of Mozart...How did we manage to do that? I don't know...The will to know more, to evolve, to improve the human race, to become something better? The sense of responsibility that we, as a the most evolved species on this planet, have the moral obligation to always improve?

Somehow, humanity has lost this thing...This flame that used to push us forward, specially regarding the arts...All of them, not only music.

It probably has something to do with technology, making us lazy, making people believe that reading quotes on the internet is the same as reading a book, making people believe that playing an instrument should be as easy as playing guitar hero, making people believe that learning to organize samples in a time line has the same artistic value as learning to play an instrument.

It's really shameful.

 

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lately , i was having in mind that theory, that guy came up and told it all

 

"Hang the D.J., Hang the D.J., Hang the D.J. ..."

It wasn't me.

 

Thats the Point!
POP music is defined by the audience, that's getting younger year by year. Pop is mostly defined by sales numbers and most of the time 10 to 12 years old girls are buying music. So it's just natural that the language has to be easy enough for this audience. And the topics of course.

 

Yeah...Current pop song's language, lyrics, symbolism and iconography are pretty appropriate for twelve year olds indeed....

Music has a huge power to influence behavior. Aristotle used to discurse about that 2300 years ago...Shit, Plato was already talking about it way before him.

Fuck this industry, man...They're trying to turn kids into sluts and they know that...They're doing it deliberately so kids can become full fledged consumers precociously.

 

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Being a kid in the 90's and very much into rock and metal, my only gripe was that there weren't many rock/metal radio stations and the pop/grungy stuff wasn't doing it for me.

Nowadays there are no rock/metal radio stations in my country and after tuning into an "all 90's" online radio station I remembered why at that time I could at least keep the radio on. The songs were awesome and very well arranged.


Bands like Garbage and Guano Apes are light years ahead of all the crap we have on regular play nowadays.

 

I know what you mean, man. That's why I don't even have a radio...Man, I don't even have a television at home. Seriously. My mind can't stand being bombarded by so much crap all day long. Whenever I listen to radio or watch TV somewhere else, I swear to you, I can feel my brain melting.

Tv, radio and all these crap aren't even entertainment anymore...They're blatant social control weapons deliberately crafted to create mindless zombies who just want to eat, fuck and spend their money on useless things.

 

In the Golden Past they used to call that a "rock band".

scnr

 

Yeah, zapping through channels feels like "marketing, marketing, brainwashing, marketing, brainwashing"... I can only stop if it's something like "oh, cool.. a Seinfeld rerun"

 

But there's a huge gap in what the concept means now.

You had a bunch of guys with the desire to make music and live the lifestyle. Very often there would be a producer to tighten things up, give focus to the band and work on their arrangements. Now you have one guy, a laptop and a desire that has very little to do with music as an artform (or with music at all).