Why Is New Music Dying?

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Love Rick Beato (Bee-at-o), thanks for posting that video, @matt72582.

For more on the subject at hand, here is an interesting video on the science behind the simplification of music, as well as some other thoughts on the subject, by Thoughty2.


I'm always hesitant to get into 'it was better back in the day' style complaints, but this makes a pretty good case as to why modern approaches to recording music have been detrimental to the art. Anytime any art form starts finding formulas to access the attention of as many people as possible (instead of allowing the eccentricities of an artist to naturally find their audience), it turns into a marketing project and not art. Call this the Robert McKee-ing of music production.



I still think there is always good music to be found when one digs. But there are probably legit complaints about the quality of what is now 'making the charts'. Not that I would know specifically, since I don't even know what is chart popular these days...but whenever I hear the latest mega smash, I almost never like it much.



A system of cells interlinked
I'm always hesitant to get into 'it was better back in the day' style complaints, but this makes a pretty good case as to why modern approaches to recording music have been detrimental to the art. Anytime any art form starts finding formulas to access the attention of as many people as possible (instead of allowing the eccentricities of an artist to naturally find their audience), it turns into a marketing project and not art. Call this the Robert McKee-ing of music production.



I still think there is always good music to be found when one digs. But there are probably legit complaints about the quality of what is now 'making the charts'. Not that I would know specifically, since I don't even know what is chart popular these days...but whenever I hear the latest mega smash, I almost never like it much.
I concur. My wife and I still listen to a wide array of music, both old and new. In the metal genre, we tend to listen to mostly new stuff, for instance, even if we still adore much of the classic material. Still, even what we consider to be the best, or at least our current favorites in the genre, still suffer from a somewhat formulaic approach, or are stuck in the ruts of their alleged sub-genre, or especially in metal, are a clear casualty the loudness war or other production annoyances of today.

As far as more popular genres are concerned, there is a clear simplification in everything from melodic complexity to depth of arrangement, with some err...actually many of the most popular hits simply focusing on a single, repetitive passage, only building energy through additive production - I image artists spending 14 minutes on the writing process, and then 2 weeks on production ideas/tricks.
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Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
Is Rap Music? Um.....yeah.
Eh, most naysayers don't say that rap isn't music. They say that rap isn't music music.

It's a kind of reactionary retort simply saying "(to me) rap is so terrible, it's not worthy of being called music".

I really don't think anybody's arguing that rap isn't music in the general sense. If Harsh Noise is music then so is rap.

Also, the "rap isn't music" thing is a part of the trendy rap-hating of several years ago that became a meme of sorts (we say "rap is the music of subhumans" in Poland). Similar to "anime is for f-word (no, the other f-word)". If you're into rap or anime, you just gotta live with people bad-mouthing them from time to time.

Moreover, old geezers may spout these "rap isn't music" opinions just as another way of bemoaning the good ole times that are long gone and are never comin' back. This was the time of their youth and true happiness. Now they're old and wrinkled so their defense mechanism is to reject anything new. Yes, they not only claim that rap isn't music but that basically, anything made after the 80s sucks.

All in all, I'd say that people who really believe that rap isn't music in the theoretical sense are in the minority so all points you're addressing, although valid, sound kind of like preaching to the choir. Rap-haters know all of this, but they still reject rap on other (subjective) grounds.
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Eh, most naysayers don't say that rap isn't music. They say that rap isn't music music.

It's a kind of reactionary retort simply saying "(to me) rap is so terrible, it's not worthy of being called music".

I really don't think anybody's arguing that rap isn't music in the general sense. If Harsh Noise is music then so is rap.

Also, the "rap isn't music" thing is a part of the trendy rap-hating of several years ago that became a meme of sorts (we say "rap is the music of subhumans" in Poland). Similar to "anime is for f-word (no, the other f-word)". If you're into rap or anime, you just gotta live with people bad-mouthing them from time to time.

Moreover, old geezers may spout these "rap isn't music" opinions just as another way of bemoaning the good ole times that are long gone and are never comin' back. This was the time of their youth and true happiness. Now they're old and wrinkled so their defense mechanism is to reject anything new. Yes, they not only claim that rap isn't music but that basically, anything made after the 80s sucks.

All in all, I'd say that people who really believe that rap isn't music in the theoretical sense are in the minority so all points you're addressing, although valid, sound kind of like preaching to the choir. Rap-haters know all of this, but they still reject rap on other (subjective) grounds.

I get that most of those who say 'rap isn't music' aren't truly speaking literally. It's a joke. Brash hyperbole. But the intent of such an off-hand and obviously ridiculous comment isn't to necessarily prove a genres non-musicalness. Instead, it is the bold declaration that is used to kick open the doors to delegitimize a form of artistic expression. To not take the things these artists are saying seriously. And it is a broader dismissal than simply 'rappers just talk fast'. It always immediately turns towards taking shots at cultures that are deemed unsophisticated, and the damage to society they invariably cause. It's tired and boring and has been cribbed from a very old playbook that I don't have any patience for.



The same shit is used against films that don't fit a very specific function to its audience, or writers who don't abide grammatical constraints, or basically anything that doesn't offer comfort to those who just want to see, hear and experience the same old shit they liked back in the day, ad nauseum, forever. So yeah, its a joke, but it's also both deliberately and not-so-deliberately used to inject a permafrost in culture where nothing will ever change. And fresh voices can be shut down as soon as they say or do something different. Almost as if there already isn't an overwhelming glut of product already tailor made for this kind of audience.



In short, this kind of thing is one of the few irritants in the world that can still ignite a fire in these particular dead guts of mine. Any comment that brushes against the notion that artists need to stay within certain boundaries to remain legitimate, I will come after with a pitchfork every single time. Of course, for some the idea of 'what is art' thickens like a kind of cement when they get to a certain age, so I feel I probably am preaching to the choir, as you say. But to just give up and assume the world is just slowly going to shutter up and all art will eventually become some hugely boring monolothic slab of 'more of the same' just doesn't sit right with me. I've already given up on the rest of the the world, so I will at least keep this one little corner of the universe lit with the tiny candle of my neverending internet screaming.



In short, this kind of thing is one of the few irritants in the world that can still ignite a fire in these particular dead guts of mine. Any comment that brushes against the notion that artists need to stay within certain boundaries to remain legitimate, I will come after with a pitchfork every single time. Of course, for some the idea of 'what is art' thickens like a kind of cement when they get to a certain again, so I feel I probably am preaching to the choir, as you say. But to just give up and assume the world is just slowly going to shutter up and all art will eventually become some hugely boring monolothic slab of 'more of the same' just doesn't sit right with me. I've already given up on the rest of the the world, so I will at least keep this one little corner of the universe lit with the tiny candle of my neverending internet screaming.
Well said.




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I'm always hesitant to get into 'it was better back in the day' style complaints, but this makes a pretty good case as to why modern approaches to recording music have been detrimental to the art. Anytime any art form starts finding formulas to access the attention of as many people as possible (instead of allowing the eccentricities of an artist to naturally find their audience), it turns into a marketing project and not art. Call this the Robert McKee-ing of music production.



I still think there is always good music to be found when one digs. But there are probably legit complaints about the quality of what is now 'making the charts'. Not that I would know specifically, since I don't even know what is chart popular these days...but whenever I hear the latest mega smash, I almost never like it much.

There's a lot of electronic cheese out there now but it's better just to make music than to be concerned about this.



Here's an idea for "new" music - how about reviving older styles with new songs?

Or amalgamating various styles into a new style with new songs?
"Bubble Gum Thrash?"
"Techno Swing Dance?"
"Doo Wop Grunge?"
"Disco Metal Modal?"
"Punk Funk?"
"Island Cool Jazz?"
"Ballroom Acid Trance?"
"Reggae Retro Turbofolk?"
"Hardcore New Wave?"
"Folk Pop Polka?"
"Garage Band Easy Listening?"
"Western Rhythm & Blues"
"Country Ragtime"
"Rap Rock Opera"
"Gospel Bluegrass"
"Big Band Acapella!"


As an example of the first point, I will direct you to one of my favorite bands: The Stray Cats, who brought Rockabilly music to a new generation as they peaked in the early 1980's alongside the cusp of New Wave & early Rap music. And they did so with new flare quite successfully.



You ready? You look ready.
Making music has become far too accessible. I ain't getting into the "rap isn't music" debate because @crumbsroom already laid out why that's hogwash, but I will say that the ability for anyone to go buy a beat and then lay vocals over top of it in their bedroom has created an excess of mediocre content (yes, that includes my own horseshit music). There are thousands of songs being released every single day. There's more content being released than there has ever been, so in that regard music isn't dying. It's just getting beat like a dead horse.
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Re: "isn't music." I'm glad we agree it's hyperbole. Taken literally it's an absurd claim, but because of that I feel comfortable thinking it's almost never truly literal. Lots of things most of us would register as mere noise (hi Yoko!) can still technically be music, in the same philosophically banal sense that anything can be art. I think that kind of observation, while technically true, only enhances our understanding if we use it as the beginning of a discussion, rather than an end.

That said, I want to steel man this, because I think there's something here, in the criticism about harmony and melody, which holds together and matters, even if not everyone who expresses it could or would articulate it:

A work of art can be criticized because it fails to utilize the strengths of its chosen medium

Example: video games are sometimes described as "walking simulators" if they essentially only ask the player to move around and click on things and then be fed a story. You walk around, you see a note, you click on it and read it. You find a tape player, you click on it and an audio file plays. Some people suggest these games are not "real" games because they have no failure state and require no skill. "Walking simulator," therefore, has a negative connotation.

Some people respond to this by noting that those games are still games, and shouldn't be excluded from the category of "game," and doing so limits what games can be, etc. And note well, they often use the same language as in this thread, something orthogonal to the question: they say that the game is saying something important. Sometimes they go further and say these are "just as much games as any other game." I think that's where it starts to miss something.

The choice of medium is part of a work. This is obvious when we talk about someone painting with oil rather than sketching with charcoal, but it applies to music and games, too. The "walking simulator" is using a video game to essentially write a short story. Some music is using music to give a speech or advance a cause. That these things can be good or valuable is obvious, but it's equally obvious that people can have valuable things to express and still choose a form that is ill-suited to that expression. And I don't just mean picking a form that hinders that expression, but also picking a form that they aren't able to fully utilize.

Music does not need harmony and melody (though I really wanna second what was said earlier about how a lot of--most? Almost all?--rap music has plenty of harmony and melody), but those are some of the things that separate music from, say, poetry. You can make a movie that's just text scrolling by on a screen, but there is no reason for it to be a movie instead of a book. Defending an art form means preserving its borders from both contraction and expansion, lest it become stale and predictable or muddled and meaningless.

So yes, talking over a beat is music, if we insist on thinking of each art form as a binary. But within that binary there is a sliding scale, with works and messages that would be annihilated without some components, and others that would mostly survive. It can all be music, but it can be more or less musical, and I think that matters.



It's merely a matter of opinion and semantics. One man's music is another man's noise (and vice versa). Thus is the way with anything considered "art" by anyone... or by those who can't believe what others might consider "art".

Take the guy in the subway station who plays a white bucket as a drum. His talent is unmistakable, but is he making music? It's percussion so it's certainly an element of music (add one or two more instruments and you'd have all of the elements of music working together). To some the rhythm and tones created by the sticks hitting different parts of the bucket has its own melody, so they'd call it fully a musical style in and of itself.
Others would say it's just a beat which is enjoyable based on the energy & skill of the artist.
While some others would say its noise that is disturbing their peace and should not be allowed in public, but rather regulated to venues designated for loud performances.



Unfortunate timing, I just heard one of those guys on the sidewalk the other day and he was killing it. Not just hitting buckets, he had some glass in there to mix it up and it was



I think it may not be music that is dying but the radio that has ossified.
I listened to pop music from 1968 to 2010 and found stuff to enjoy. But now the pop music stations are awful!!!!!
Now new stuff worth listening too maybe out there on the internet but it seems to be hidden from the likes of me.
Sometimes I hear new rock music on a radio station that includes some newer stuff in their rotation.
I know there is new stuff out there that is good (at least to my friend who works for the Hard Rock Cafe.
He actually gets exposed to new artists at work.)



You ready? You look ready.
Most radio stations are, by and large, run the same regardless of their regional demographics. It's why they never play the shit you wanna hear even if you get lucky enough to get someone on the phone when they're taking requests. If your request ain't already on their playlist, which like 80% of radio stations share, then it ain't getting played.



Defending an art form means preserving its borders from both contraction and expansion, lest it become stale and predictable or muddled and meaningless.

Here is a couple of fairly famous example of 'expansion' for you.









Is it Music?


While in theory I get what you are saying about preserving borders, otherwise music (or any other art form) hazards becoming meaningless. But, at the same time, any serious expansion of any musical form has to at times bring us to the precipice of the question 'is it still music'. It's what gives us new modes of expressing ourselves in that form, otherwise stagnation is imminent.



An awful lot of art that is now completely accepted as the norm, was at one time an outlier to the point of also having its legitimacy questioned. Simply because it dared to poke holes in the notion of what art can be. And all of us I'm sure have examples of pushing back on these things. At some point, all of us will begin to wonder when does the work of an artist stop expressing anything to us? At what point does it stop having meaning? At what point do we stop enjoying it? These are all fair questions, but over time, they will all have different answers as the art form evolves. And this happens through artists delivering a shock to the system from time to time. Usually through what will initially be dismissed as avant-garde egg-headism.



Ultimately though, even these extreme cases often will seep into the general aesthetic of what is considered basic and acceptable. Is anything more commercial these days than Andy Warhol's 'Soup Cans'? Even though when they initially arrived they sent shock waves with their intent to make us see the commercial world we are surrounded by as being ready for the gallery, this is now asically the stance of a whole lot of pop culture these days. Warhol was a prophet when it comes to this.



Now, when it comes to the two above examples, I think they are both important in how they force us to look at the very essence of music (sound) in a mostly non-abstracted form. Now, maybe if you find both of them grating with their pretensions, or silly with their aspirations to be considered music, you might still be willing to grant them the position of being 'art' for this particular purpose of challenging norms. But maybe you don't see any need to see them as examples of 'music' as this might lead to that problem of ultimate meaninglessness if we keep expanding our definitions.



And, fair enough, to a point. But simply leaving it being defined solely under the nebulous term of 'art' really isn't enough because I would argue we need this pointed confrontation of whether or not we want to still call it music. This is what forces us to contemplate the sounds of a bicycle being tinkered with on a stage, or a man pouring water from a jug in a more direct way. It is through this specific definition which can potentially change how we think about these sounds. This is because we all know what music is supposed to sound like. We have a bunch of rules from it we've learned simply from even the most passive of listening. And it is only through placing these pieces inside of the context of this known thing, and its understood rules, that we can begin to think differently about what we are hearing. Someone like John Cage, wants us to understand the sound of running water on its own terms, and to him it is as beautiful as any composed piece of classical music. But without the confrontation, this collision between or expectations of what music is and what he is delivering to us in the audience, it is simply a man filling a jug of water. We need the friction between what we accept and what we don't want to accept, to open our eyes to what he is showing us.



And as broadly as these questions Zappa or Cage present to us are, I don't think they have remotely chipped away at the integrity of music. They have emboldened it to take on different shapes and do different things and have it affect us in many different ways, even if we don't actually like what these particular artists are doing (personally, both of those videos leave me pretty cold with what is being performed)