why are people mostly concerned with making beats? Whatever happened to songwriting? I recently tuned into a video program and lamentably caught the top 20 and there was barely a "song" to be heard. Everything was beat based, yet the beats were hardly innovative. In fact most were an 808 kick and a clap.

 

it's called getting old...

 

I think a lot of people make beats because, *in it's simplest and most unimaginative form,* it's easy, and people are lazy. (People are going to jump my shit for that one, but it's the fuckin' truth.) I don't really consider a lot of what is on the radio "beats," per se, let alone pretend that it takes any sort of songwriting prowess; but, you could argue that many songs written by reknown songwriters of any genre are very minimalistic, so, as always with any art form, it is difficult to find lines that can be drawn with having said lines littered with your personal exceptions.
I make a lot of songs that are closer to straight Soul tracks than Hip Hop beats, but that doesn't mean that I don't sample stuff (sometimes stuff that I've made,) chop it up and rearranged so that it is nearly unrecognizable, and yes, I consider those arrangements a form of songwriting. Honestly, the biggest arguement that I hear from friends of mine, some who play multiple instruments (which I do as well,) is that none of these people are actually playing the instruments so it doesn't count as songwriting, but, if you want to get technical about it, many great composers didn't play an instrument, and if they did, it was rarely with enough proficiency to play what they wrote and arranged, so....
At the end of the day, I think minimal music has it's place, but I don't know if it's a good thing that it is becoming The New Standard.
As for filtersweep's comment (which I do find amusing....and slightly true

I don't think my distaste for a lot of new music and the talent (or, lack-there-of,) that goes into it has to do with getting older, since I hold just as much scorn for music of any decade, including mine, that is just talentless drivel and brain-dead, radio-friendly crap....I just think that there is more of it nowadays due to the fact that anyone with a phone can make a "song."
I could ramble for days, but I'll end with this: Why does it concern you? I used to get sour about all of the music out there that is obviously created by label-owned producers who couldn't give a rat's ass about the soulless music they are creating for talentless imagery icons who will sing/rap over them, but what's the point? I am happy making my own little musical Xanadu with my lonesome, so why concern myself too heavily on what other people are making? Music is cathartic; just do you and forget all of the politics that people seem to think are necessary.
Now get off of this goddamn site and go make some music.
Selah.

 

I generally dislike songs. I like music, and I like speech. But I have a hard time processing singing. Once people start singing words, I have a very difficult time following what they are saying. And once I do figure it out, I regret it, because I find most songs banal. There are two kinds of singing I can enjoy some of. First, is music where the sung parts are handled more as part of the music, like in choral music or doo-wop. Second is songs where they don't depend upon cliched traditions, like Brian Eno or the Butthole Surfers.

I agree that artists and listeners alike tend to be lazy, and this I see as making them reflexively resorting to the familiar. And this plays out with both beats and songs. When is the last time you heard a top 40 track without lyrics? Most radio won't even play a track at all unless there is singing, and they really don't care about what. But if it's Mike Patton, or Diamanda Galas - hell yeah, nothing lazy about that. My experience has been that listener's attention fits into a narrow band between simplicity and complexity, and anything that pushes too far in either way will escape their notice and memory, because they lack reference points. Music that requires effort to listen to is a "hard sell". But I think that worrying too much about that buys into the notion of art/entertainment as market commodity. It's egotistical to care about how many people will want to hear your music.

Ideally, there shouldn't be any "mainstream" - just billions of creative people enjoying each others' work. The irony is that so-called pop music is not really for and by the people, it is bankrolled, pushed, and exploited by a tiny parasitic elite who have no creativity of their own. What people commonly think of as mainstream music, movies, books, games, etc are in reality less than 1% of the ones that are made. They are a tiny minority, amplified to drown out the majority

 

I completely agree. It gets depressing sometimes, but then I remember that I don't make music for any other reason than to push all of the ideas/riffs/melodies out of my skull so I can stay sane....ish. "Making it," would be nice, but in this day an age, if you do make it, that's *almost a sure sign that you're making garbage. (I exaggerate, if only slightly. )

 

Deja vu