Then why do people watch horror flicks, for the popcorn?

 

at least in the early days of rock music the people who created the music could also play it live and didn't rely on prerecorded backing tracks and lip-synching. i will never understand how people today can justify paying hundreds of dollars to watch somebody pretend to perform their own music. i'll only charge you five bucks to lip-synch some of todays hits.

 

Thing is, they're not "pretending," they are performing their own music.

The key thing is they are performing [along with] their own music. There are perfectly legit reasons for this:

1. Show lights are so complex and intricate now as to need to be automated. Tracks keep all systems on... track.
   
   
2. Modern pop production is DAW based, and much of it is sound design. "People today" expect the same sound as the record.
   
   
3. Pop artists usually perform with dancers, you know, to "justify paying hundreds of dollars." More is more.
   
   
4. Dancing along while singing is exhausting - you don't see opera or jazz singers do it. Pop singers must, to "justify paying..."
   
   
5. Touring is exhausting - sleeping 4-5 hours in tiny bunks in diesel powered (i.e., noisy, vibrating) buses accumulates sleep debt.
   - There's a reason major artists hire a private chef, trainer, doctor, masseuse 2-3 months before rehearsals and start training for endurance, and losing weight if need be (also, hair colorist for the aging stars, but that's another matter). It's a marathon.
   
   Daily marathons takes a toll on vocal chords, and performance. And pop/rock singers are not the only ones complaining - there's an epidemic of injuries amongst opera singers as well. You see, the repertoire is exceedingly athletic to perform. In the times when they were written though, people traveled by horse carriage. Time zones, jet lag, dehydration didn't factor in. Also, singers were contracted for weeks if not months at theaters and concert halls across European cities. Today, opera singers fly from Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Spain or the UK to Sydney, or Tokyo, or Los Angeles, have a day or two to rehearse, perform a night or two, and right back home, or to the next show they go. The human body was not built to sustain this cadence and abuse.
   
   Unlike opera singers, pop/rock artists can (and most do) rely on their own tracks to supplement or support their own performance - they are singing along, but they don't feel the stress of carrying the whole performance if they're having an off day, moon phase or other physical issue. If they don't feel like hitting that high note, FOH will step in - they can (and most do) sing along, but this allows them to preserve their voice and both mental and physical health. The audience gets what they paid for.

Just think of how cool it'll look and sound on TikTok and Instagram when the audience posts their clips. Everyone is happy. Win-win.

 

Calling 'smooth jazz' "very sophisticated music" is a grand canyon wide stretch. Please.

Miles Davis dropped out of Julliard because, he said: "I could play everything they played, but they couldn't play what I played."

Poogie Bell said recently something similar: "Real jazz cats can play smooth jazz, but the reverse isn't true."

This should be the measure of "very sophisticated music" - can you play Jazz?

Rock is not, Country is not, Rap definitely is not "very sophisticated music," and neither is Smooth Jazz.

Smooth Jazz is a product. Jazz is art. There is a difference.

 

Absolutely!

That's why I mostly listen to Last Exit, rest of the shit is a joke.

 

Please yourself. As someone who rarely listened to it, the musicians who made it are/were highly skilled, technically trained on their respective instruments. While so called smooth jazz went for a more accessible pop approach to appeal to a much wider audience than traditional jazz, to scoff at the musicianship and writing is absurd.
'Jazz' jazz, can be off putting to most [insert jokes about jazz music], even those with more above average tastes.

Just looking at the 'from here to the moon' long list of 'smooth jazz' musicians [most the best on earth] tells me you gotta be one of them jazz snobs

Never listened to Miles early works because I'm just not into the style plus I hate horns.... except for rude saxophones in songs. [Waitresses for example]
Miles fusion/experimental shit sucks. The guys a stuck up asshole who's press went to his head.
"I could play everything they played, but they couldn't play what I played." lol, yeah, sure Miles. Same goes for Poogie, whoever dafuque that is.

 

Last edited: Jan 26, 2026 at 1:31 AM

The only reason I can see that some people might think that what was is better than what is would be because of the tunes that are out there.
There are billions of tunes available now and unfortunately, a substantial number of tunes in the last twenty years have similar grooves, near identical chord patterns with minor variations and many people suggest every tune sounds the same.

The twentieth century music discography indicates a wide variety of tunes that seemed to have their own unique identity. Nowadays the identity factor is limited to much smaller variances and too many tunes that use the same chord structures, near identical loops and samples, many that are of tunes that already exist that have only been processed and some people are stupid enough to call someone else's tune they mashed up their own, and too much to list. A.I. certainly has not helped that differentiation either. So no wonder it all sounds the same to many people.

Better? That is a word that should be used carefully. different? For sure, different times, more people, more accessibility, more available music for the masses at a fingertip and a harder time for many people to find something that is truly unique.

 

I'm 65. It's because they are mentally old/fossilized and cannot grow and evolve. Looking backwards is nostalgia, nice to visit occasionally but wouldn't want to live there. Living in the past, is completely dysfunctional. I see people listening to the same music they grew up with for the rest of their Lives. I think it's a health issue overall...

 

I think it has a lot to do with actual skill and talent. Most people now make digital music on a DAW and they don't jack shit about musicianship or even how to play an instrument, myself included. I think we say this because it took a level of creativity and know how to actually produce great music. These days any and eveyone can become famous just watching youtube videos and sounds from sample packs. Stuff like that wasn't available back then, they have no vsts or computer. They had to actually know to play guitar, piano, organs, drums etc. Music is a lazy mans game now and you could teach a 5 or 6 year old to use a DAW and Vsts. To me most new music sounds like dogshit, I don't even know how these people get a buzz or who finds that shit appealing.

 

Based on the fact that Its easy for us to quote good artists and good songs, but it is quite difficult to remember the bad ones, especially those from the past. Try it for yourself!

 

Nope. Those people will only make junk. It's just when people do this, today you somehow end up hearing it. But you always hear it for free.

 

I think nearly everything I hear these days is junk

 

Your comment goes along with the sentiment of "real musicians" who think you can just open up a DAW, load a few plugins, and out pops a track worth listening to. And it's not even close to that.

That's why plenty of Electronic "producers" of those similar talent and skill levels are so afraid of AI. Your DAW and plugins don't do it for you.
If you don't know what you are doing, it's going to sound exactly like that.

 

mr.personality indeed. Makes sense now. This spiteful, hateful puke says a lot more about you. "Please yourself" indeed - you just have.

Btw, I'm not a jazz snob - but I do favor good music (complex or not, sophisticated or not).

I'll terminate our exchange here by quoting Duke Ellington:

May you be blessed under piles of the latter.

 

Interesting topic!

Something to consider is when you ask "why do people think like that?", who are the "people" that you're referring to? What age? If musicians, what style? etc. Or are they "listeners? Or from a particular country, or culture?

Another thing (as others have mentioned) is "the sieve of history" - a lot of the so-called junk gets quickly forgotten. And then there's the formation of "canons" of masterworks or what someone above has referred to as "good" music. This is one of the main focuses of a field of study called Musicology and it's controversial to say the least.

Personally, I think nostalgia plays a big part - songs that are part of your life in the formative (teen?) years seem to carry strong extra-musical associations that are tied up with the music and remain strong throughout one's life (maybe the even get stronger as one gets older).

The real problem though is that you first need to figure out if music from the past was actually better, and prior to that, you need to figure out what better actually means - does it mean a song made more money, was more popular, had more complex chord sequences, had novel timbres, had a groove that people wanted to move to, etc., etc., etc.

Cheers!

 

All musical intervals are not equal, therefore all musical compositions cannot be equal. Period.

 

You can't simply look at music from the past today with today's mindset and Spitit of Times.

You have to have lived back then and experienced it yourself, because besides your and my state of mind, millions of other states of consciousness exist. In short, talking about the past today, in the present, is usually somewhat distorted and relativized. I know many pieces of music that are far too sophisticated for the mainstream or radio and therefore aren't played and don't sell in large numbers.

Our system of evaluation is therefore not always fair and also varies from person to person. Listen to bands and musicians yourself and decide if you like it, but also allow others the freedom to listen to your music without judgment.

Think back to the first punk movement when it emerged: the clothes, the mohawks, the safety pins—they were a nuisance to the establishment, with music to match. The musical style was completely new; some followed the music or were punks themselves. Of course, it eventually died down. This movement can't be reinvented; it was unique.

Back then, in the early 80s, there were other movements with their own music: Teds, Rock n Rollers, Mods, Rockers and Poppers.

 

Last edited: Jan 26, 2026 at 8:51 AM

A lot of back and forth here. I think its undeniable a lot of great past acts were such strong song writers and musicians its hard to ignore the power and impact of their work even now. Most new artists can never be as original or as exciting. However, there's a ton of low key amazing new genre releases everyday once you start poking around. And in some areas musicianship is getting better and more complex. But its all niche music.

Pop has really lost its way. The world has changed, its not nostalgia to say that.

The quality of music is entirely personal, but I do think being a music and pop fan between 1960 and 2000 was much better in many measurable ways. When people talk about music being better then, i think they are also feeling what has really changed:

It was physically and socially healthy - from hanging out in record shops to cheap gigs. New music built real highly passionate communities.

Much more surprising and innovative - by the 70's new main genres and sub genres were appearing every year.

Culturally important and life changing - from the Beatles storming America to the Rave culture explosion in the 90's. Music shaped and changed the lives of whole generations.

Grassroots non corporate innovation was regularly dragged into modern culture and the charts, the 'public's' taste was forced to be quite sophisticated - review pre 2000's charts and see a wide mix of indie and corporate labels having success, and a general hunger for new genres and artists in the pop charts. Now the top of the streaming charts is a closed corporate ecosystem.

The modern music fan has gained convenience and lost nearly all of the above vital elements - the things that made popular music so exciting.

 

Last edited: Jan 26, 2026 at 9:05 AM

Well observed, but that leads us to the following question: What kind of world are we actually living in today? The internet has changed the world; you can talk and exchange information with anyone in real time. News tickers arrive in seconds. I believe the internet has also changed us. You can look up everything that's available in real time; the internet is a huge data repository and statistics platform.

Modern humans are individuals who install the software they need and use on their PCs, laptops, or smartphones. Whether the music people make today is good is secondary; the main thing is that they engage with music and are creative. We let computers do more and more of the work because humans always choose the easy way out.

Young people would like to work less and have more free time; machines have always taken the hard work off our hands. However, this also means we're losing the ability to use our brains less effectively. That's a bit of a generalization, but I hope you understand some of it!