Degredation of pop music industry

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As a "progressive reactionary" I've been looking for a way of objectively measuring if and how standards in mass culture have declined.

My view is that as a rule, the more industrialized and consumer-driven a culture becomes the more free it becomes, but at the same time the more overall individual and cultural standards decline, which is one negative aspect of excessive capitalism - too much unrestrained capitalism leads to too much social liberalism, and vice versa.

Some reactionary conservatives will take offense to things which are new even if there's not a lot of underlying principle (back in Shakespeare's time some of the prudes found his works too offensive) - which is why I'm looking for objective cross-cultural principles here.

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First of all, on the whole I'd say the music industry has degraded even moreso than other industries like film and TV (at least primetime TV) - most likely because people don't consume movies like kids with Iphones do pop songs. There's an inverse relation between quantity and quality.

On the flip side, let's compare things to a few centuries ago. Raunchy, lowbrow folk songs did exist throughout history, yeah (I can't post it here, but if you search for "Salty Dick: Uncensored Sailor songs" you can find an example of raunchy sea shanties from centuries ago).

On the flip side, it wasn't until fairly recent times that you would hear raunchy songs like "Stupid Hoe" by Nicki Minaj or "Shake That" by Eminem (to name a few) broadcast over the airwaves and via the internet with easy access to children; and even with the "dirty words" filtered out on the radio the messages are still pretty clear.

And there wasn't an Award Ceremony (the Grammies) which awarded out prestigious awards to artists of the likes of Miley Cyrus, etc for producing musical content of the same grain as some seedy sailor song.

On the other hand, the Oscars and Emmies still hand out awards to directors who make substantial "artistic" films, while on the flip side the average person could likely not name a single neo-classical musican or composer (despite the fact that classical or "art" music is still produced).

Basically the bar has been lowered in the name of consumerism - the highest official "standard" in the modern music industry is an objectively lower standard than what has existed before, and even if drunkards and seamen sang ranchy songs at the taverns circa 1700 AD, songs primarily about p*ssy, drugs, booze, and homicidal fantasies weren't being given awards by prestigious institutions over art composers like Mozart, nor were they being broadcast over the airwaves directly to children.

So as bad a track record as many of them have, the reactionaries win on this one. Even by cross-cultural objective standards of modesty which take into account variations (such as sociological mirroring and clashing) I'd say that modesty and substance in the mainstream music industry especially has declined quite a bit).

And while a sane adult isn't going to turn into a homicidal lunatic because he heard an Eminem song, I'd say that over-exposure could have a negative effect on the psychology of children, especially those without good role models in their lives.

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(Much of the same could be said of the porn industry, and the level of realism in media violence as well; even if the Southern Baptist minister in the 1950s would sneak off to a peep show on a seedy side of town behind his wife's back - back then a kid wasn't just a few mouse clicks away from fully uncensored sex scenes and seedy fetish websites.

And just because kids in the 1950s didn't turn into killers from watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, the level of perceived realism in that violence is quite a far-cry away from what you see in modern horror movies or websites which let you watch uncensored ISIS beheading videos, not to mention the constant bombardment of graphic textual violence on mainstream and online news violence - rapes, school shootings, mass murders, etc).

But while on a similar tangent, this is another story worthy of more research.

I knew this was going to be a 90'sAce thread.

Forget to mention, even disregarding the actual vulgarity and talent- I'd say the substantial content has declined on the whole as well. (ex. Even in non-raunchy songs you'll have artists literally making songs about "selling platinums", and the overall message and tone is more nihilistic and victim-minded rather than virtuous; ex. guys singing about wallowing in bad life situations rather than overcoming them with perseverance).

I love how instead of talking about the objective qualities of music you instead talked about morality and subject matter.

...because morality is objective and culturally universal, and transcends nations, cultures, borders, and deductive reasoning - that's the ideology which America was founded on, that's why we are a meritocracy (though lately we're becoming a mediocracy it seems).

The only thing which is subjective is cultural variations on the same universal moral principles; if it wasn't for our faulty deductive reasoning we'd probably see things eye to eye via moral intuition - so deduction is a gift and a curse.

And yeah, Stupid Hoe sucks... big time

Even if all of that were true, which it's not necessarily because you're entering a realm of philosophical debate, that still would only cover lyrical content. What about all of the other aspects of music? Are things like composition, prose, and melody in decline too?

That was one aspect I discussed. Films for example like Saw because they rely primarily on low-brow appeal versus talent, substance, etc (graphic violence in the case of horror movies) - this is why films like Saw aren't nominated for Oscars.

On the flip side low-brow entertainment isn't automatically "bad" to enjoy, but over-reliance on gratuity minus substance seems to be one objective metrics for measuring quality in films. This is why I believe critics don't consider films like Saw as "good" as films like Citizen Kane, even though some people still enjoy the former better and find the latter boring.

The problem with criticism in movies is that there's not a single "school" of criticism that all critics are going by, so no one is "playing the same game" - just like the NFL couldn't decide who "won" the superbowl if no one even agreed whether or not they were using American or Canadian football rules to begin with.

This is why critical debates suck since you can't have a "debate" if there's no formal rules even agreed on to start with.

In the case of most of the music which tops the charts it is overall. Web 2.0 has helped to bring it down since it's more about image marketing than it used to be, and less about musicianship.

As I mentioned I don't think you see this as much in film or primetime/premium TV shows, since industries don't crank these out at the rate they do popular music, and people don't normally watch 100s of movies a year.

Can you please just stick with the topic at hand and not go off on a tangent about movies?

You're so all over the place it's really hard to tell what you're talking about. And you seem to use a lot of layman terms without defining them so it comes across like you don't know what you're talking about.

Anyway, I don't really have much interest in the topic of pop music. It's an industry that I could care less for. I think a big part of the awards are related to how artists conform to the industry standards. Pop chart music wins pop chart industry awards, but that is only the superficial surface of music, artists, and awards. There are lots of other music award ceremonies, and you haven't talked about them. You also haven't given historical examples, but made very broad vague generalisations about the history of music.

Instead of talking about such a broad topic, why don't you try narrowing in on one central point? I feel like the discussion could make more progress that way.

Yeah I'm aware that other music and award shows exist for those who care to look for it. I'm talking about changes in the mainstream commercial music industry primarily.

The good thing (and bad thing) about the internet is that it make it easier to learn about all of the music, films, etc out there that you might never know of otherwise.

Well you haven't really said much about the industry.

So is your whole point that the industry is in moral decline along with our society?

I was talking about net quality decline, which in some ways crosses over with morals - since favoring entertainment over substance can have negative moral effects and "dumb people down" if they don't have better interest than what's on the radio.

I googled "net quality" and got no hits. So you're going to have to define you're term there. I get the feeling you mean overall quality or something like that, and if that's the case then it's too vague. What has this quality declined from and to?

It's an entertainment industry, so saying that it favors entertainment over substance seems completely redundant to me. Do you think it should favor substance, and why? Substance won't sell records, and the main concern of any industry is to make profits, so why would they care about substance? I mean substance in the sense that I think you mean it, that is meaningful content. If I'm wrong and you mean something else, please specify what you mean. The entertainment industry is a form of mass media, so it also goes without saying that it shapes the general public over time in at least some way.

You've talked about the morals of America (I think) from the time the country was founded. I don't see what that has to do with the music industry since there was no music industry back then. At best you can only go back about a hundred years, but yes morality has declined a lot since then. I don't think the other qualities of music have declined though. I think some qualities have probably improved, especially with the invention of computers and what they have enabled people to do with music. I'm still talking about just the industry though, not great artists. In terms of great artists I don't think anything has changed. True art is rarely appreciated, and that has always been true throughout history.

Ohhh, I knew this was an Ace thread before I even looked at it Carry on.

Even though I over-complicated it, my general point minus all of the philosophical babble is that lower quality music has always been around, but I feel that today it's being more aggressively marketed to the exclusion of better artists.

To me the current state of the music industry and the Grammies would be like if actors from movies like "Freddy Got Fingered" were being considered for Oscar nominees. The Grammies IMO seems more like a popularity contest with artists being nominated based on how many singles they've sold more than anything else.

The Oscars OTOH still end up selecting movies which are just the ones that everyone knows about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...gs_film_series

I'd say the film industry is just as bad as the music industry.

Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present... the name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one's living in - it's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.

Who can forget the high brow 80s?

Grew up in the 90s. Discovered "old music" during the 2000s. Strongly prefer 80s and before to most of everything made after 1991. Grunge is the beginning of the decline.

The raunch factor definitely didn't hit full force until the 2000s, once the media corporations were able to market directly to kids via digital downloads, and anyone with a computer and a social media profile could get a single on the radio.

Beatlemania was an entire generation of teenage girls propelling them to stardom. The biggest single of the 60s was "The Twist". Who do you think was doing that dance and supporting that single? Popular music has gotten more "raunchy" because social norms have relaxed enough for it to happen. Eminem was the highest selling artist of the 2000s for that reason. Hip-hop shook up the mainstream in the same way that punk and metal did before it, Comparatively, Elvis was also controversial for his sexual dance moves. You have to think in relativistic terms. The deterioration of culture is something that old, grumpy people whine about on Facebook. Even Picasso faced similar adversity for throwing away the conventions of art. It's a consistent theme throughout mankind's history. The fall from grace in the Bible is another big example.

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If you objectively compare it, the level of explicitness and overall tone is pretty different between an Elvis song and an Eminem song.

Just because some Puritans were offended who also think Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is too pornographic doesn't mean there isn't any legitimacy in talking about the issues from a critical POV instead of a reactionary one.

I don't typically trust old people who hate anything new just because it's new.

On the flip side there if you read economics then there is a positive between capitalist consumerism and declining social standards - so the "moral panic" really isn't all just hot air. The economic boom after WWII plus other novelties such as the internet plays a big role in it, since we have a level of abundance and consumption that's pretty unprecedented; at the same time demand for quality drops. People's attitudes didn't just "relax overnight", it happened for a reason.

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For example, sex attitudes relaxed after the advent of birth control... but even with birth control and condom access we still have tons of unadopted kids in foster care, and generations of single moms and kids growing up on welfare on taxpayer's dime with no dad around - so one might say the attitudes relaxed a little too much.