Category: the Rant Board
this is a post on the current state of rock music, wanna know what you think. I think it sucks not trying to offend thoes who like indy pop but I feel that once it crosses over to chr alternative should drop it fast! the current stage alternative is in right now is verry Annoying! what do yall think? everyone has there own apenion so fire away
What I think is, expand your horizons. Don't judge all alternative music by what you hear on the radio. In fact, that goes for all genres. There is much, much more to listening to music than scraping the bottom of the barrel, which is the top 40. I can tell by just the few sentences you've written here that you probably just listen to a select few radio stations, and don't try to dig deeper into the underground scene. Do that, or, if you have, elaborate on it, and then come back and talk to me about the state of the music industry.
100% agree with that.
Broaden your listening sources, and you'll find music is deep still.
I think music will continually change. If it doesn't then it will not be fresh and new. However, sometimes artists tend to worry more about being played on the radio more than being true to the music. I understand radio has potential to make them money. However, some of the best artists get little to no air play and still sell record breaking numbers of music.
People always said music isn't as good as it used to be. Me? I don't like the hip hop, but some of the alternative I do like. My own parents, if they heard rock or metal, would say: "What's that noise?Turn that down, boys!"
Guess I'm weird, but as a dad myself, I would say to the daughter: "Who is that? Turn it up."
We had good discussions about music changing. It's kinda softer now, more raw acoustic sounding. It's nice sometimes.
Look at my profile and you'll see my eclectic taste in music (some of it.) There's a lot of music to choose from out there. Sadly only a select bit of it gets played on the radio on a regular basis. I agree with everything said above.
I think that you, OP, should expand what you listen to, cause there's something to love and appreciate, in most genres, for everyone.
as with most other things, though, if you aren't open to the numerous possibilities that exist, you'll be a lot less likely to appreciate music for the beautiful art that it often is.
I agree and I do happen to listen to afew good radio stations that play good rock music I do realize alternative goes through stages post punk, new wave, grunge, and active. digging deeper is the only thing we can do until it changes.
but I agree with everyone.
Originality in music is dead. Everything has been done before.
Knowing a second or third language can make the selection of music you plunder many times greater. Though I am certain monoglots enjoy foreign music just the same, some avoid it like the plague.
Everything may have been done before, in a general sense. But those things that have been done before are the foundations, and as long as humans harbor creativity, they will be able to build on those foundations to keep music circulating as long as we exist.
It may all be the same foundations, in the grand scheme of things, but to those who keep trying to make something of them, there will always be some shred of uniqueness.
I doubt it. Everyone just rehashing these days.
Imprecator, you sound like you were born old. But I hope when I'm old I'm not half the crank you are at times. I realize at times I can be a bastard but ...
So what if they are, though? Music is mostly about expressing yourself anyway. Well, unless you're a soulless pop sensation, but let's take that out of the equation for just a second. Let's assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that the people in question who you're accusing of rehashing are writing their own lyrics/songs.
Now, let's be logical here. There are only so many chord progressions, drum patterns, melodies, etc. But people are still finding ways to make them into music, right? If every single way to produce songs had been explored, then music wouldn't still exist at all. And I doubt that's a world that any of us would want to live in. Well, I'm sure there are a select few who would. I used to date a guy who claimed to hate all music. Anyway, I'm oversimplifying this majorly, but that's because I have about 10 other things on my mind at the moment.
I love to dance and listen to music to much.
Couldn't date someone that hated it. It wouldn't work.
Oh, I feel the same way. That's one of the main reasons that particular relationship was short-lived.
It drove me crazy to not listen to anything whenever he was around. Not to mention that I'm one of those people who likes to use music to set a romantic mood, so yeah.
I think most music that is meant to appeal to as many people as possible is kept simple and predictable. Now the cynical part of me says that the music industry thinks people are simple-minded and stupid and can't deal with music that's too complex. That's why bebop jazz is kept on public radio, for example, and Frank Zappa rarely gets airplay at all. But really I think musical taste is such a personal and subjective thing. You can take a person to task for dismissing away whole genres or time periods of music, but this is what most people do. If you like all music of all sorts no matter what, you are a rare and gifted person and people who have preferences are going to give you headaches. In my case, I do not classify music as good or bad like most folks do, and I don't quite understand what defines a good song versus a bad song. For me, the question is, is it interesting to me or is it not. If it's not, I'm not going to listen to it no matter how fascinated you are by it. For example, I know a few folks who love extreme forms of metal, death, black, doom, etc. Me, I do not find those kinds of music interesting so no matter how they might wax poetic about that kind of stuff, I won't listen to it unless I change my mind on my own and decide it's fascinating. There's lots of music out there that I'm sure is painstakingly made and produced and played and performed with great technical skill, but if the end product isn't interesting to me I'm going to miss out on that. I also think it's silly to dismiss a person as closed or narrow minded because they either don't like everything or don't see the artistry in whatever yu personally find fascinating.
I'm mainly talking about how nobody seems to have their own sound anymore. Everything is Pro-Tooled to digital perfection so it's all loud and harsh all the time, no room for the music to breathe.
The interesting thing about what you're saying Imp is that over the past fifty years, the dynamic range of music has narrowed considerably over that time. So basically it's all normalized to the point that the whole song is about the same volume throughout, rather than having dips and peaks in its volume. I imagine this is to do with how people don't, as a majority, listen to music the same way as they used to. A big stereo system with amazing speakers isn't really as interesting to people when it comes to music.
Don't get me wrong, I think DRC is great for playlists and broadcasts and such. Just saying the volume should be in the hands of the listener rather than the producer.
I agree. Especially when a lot of players have the innate ability to normalize.
If you only listen to top 40 radio you will be let down every time.
Listen to the album Top 40 Hits by Anal Cunt instead.
Lol. Yep, good stuff.
I don't like how everything is AutoTuned these days.
I wonder how that works. Is it used in post-production so the vocalist has no say in the matter, or during the actual recording?
@Godzilla, your temptation to be cynical is founded. Now, with limitless access to music online, people still flock to the popular en masse. Of course there are artists getting exposure that weren't earlier. The "media" as it were, is just a business. And the open market has proven they were technically right. Again, statistical averages here, what people generally do most of the time. Even those who explore pockets of unusual stuff often revert to popular.
Hell, even now, I listen to some popular songs that when I was younger I was too cool and avant guard for. Know why? Reminds me of a summer afternoon on a beach with a ghetto blaster, booze and friends, or some other memory. Yes, I said ghetto blaster. Lol. But those were great for outdoors, getting full of dirt and sand, being beer-spilled-upon, and would still work.
There's a lot of reasons why people listen to different stuff. I listen to industrial sometimes, just because I am in the mood. Most people, even non-mainstream types, find some of it positively weird. I don't blame them for it, no special snowflake here. But it's just one of those things sometimes that I like listening to. Everyone's got some of that.
I doubt that any artists, and I use that term very loosely, who are depending on auto tune give a shit at which stage it's applied to their vocals. The end product is the same: it sells, they bost about having more talent than they do, they do something stupid which gets them media coverage for a month or two, they go to rehab, and, if we're lucky, they drop off the face of the earth. But more often than not these days, the cycle just repeats over and over until no one cares anymore.
I don’t understand the blanket dismissal and hatred of top 40 music. When people complain about top 40, they’re usually complaining more about CHR – called “current hit radio,” which is the format that you hear in America when you turn on the local [usually corporate-programmed] pop station. These stations rarely play 40 songs; they usually have about 20 tracks in high rotation and they cycle through them every hour or so. Even many of these songs aren’t horrible – they’re just overplayed. But beyond what you hear on the radio, there’s lots of talent – from indie pop and alternative to different forms of electronic music and hip hop – that actually does chart and just “bubbles” below the surface of the top 20 or 30 songs. Look deeper into the charts and you’ll find a lot of hidden gems. Just because something is popular does not mean it sucks.
well said, Brice. I couldn't agree more.
True. You don't need to listen to the radio to do that, though. My point is that a person can, and should, look elsewhere for music that they might like. If they still want to listen to the top 40 after that, that's their business. It just doesn't sit well with me personally when people gush endlessly about how great someone like Justin Beber is. When I ask if they know other stuff exists, stuff that is actually not autotuned, or written by the actual artists themselves, and I get a response like, "no, why should I?" those are the people whose music tastes I tend to dismiss. They are obviously uninformed, and will stay that way unless they choose otherwise.
Now, not every top 40 hit is bad. Before the last decade or so, lots of them were great, or at the very least tolerable. But maybe it's a generational thing, too. Maybe people have a soft spot for what they grew up listening to.