Popular music today stinks any rebuttals…?
Exhibit A: James Brown’s ‘Sex Machine’ vs ‘Birthday Sex’
Exhibit B: Britney Speares/Madonna lip synching through most of their shows because dancing and singing is hard vs Broadway where people dance and sang without mics!
Exhibit C: Stevie Wonder who on his first album played all the instruments vs. the Jonas Brothers who as far as I have heard have no musical talent.
Exhibit D: Parental advisory which helped make crass music popular vs censorship laws of say the 50s that forced better songwriting because artists had to be craftier in how they said what musicians today seem to just put on repeat in every song. Exhibit D1: ‘Think Twice Version X’ by Jackie Wilson and Lavern Baker, they knew how to get just as filthy back then but they did so sparingly. Not all the time and still did it classier.
Exhibit E: Technology that allows for fixing every musical flaw and killing dynamic vs. being classically trained, knowledgeable about music past, and actually having to be able to sing on your records.
Popular music to day stinks!
I am not some crotchety greybeard, I spent my childhood with MTV yet somehow, maybe my DNA, I knew there was better stuff around.
So here is what happened I run The 10 Songs Blog on Mixpod and Monday I am celebrating black history month and so in preparing my mix I was listening to Fats Waller, Ella Fitgerald (live in paris) and James Brown etc…
You DO NOT have talent like that in popular music today. Nothing even close! I just feel like saying that is a fact, cause it is! Considering that popular music in this country started with blues and jazz makes this decline all the more perplexing. And equally perplexing is why jazz and blues stopped being chart topping music. I guess it’s too hard to do well so with the short attention span of today’s youth my generation included I guess it ain’t going to be popular.
Popular music today stinks!
February 21st, 2010 at 2:30 am
Ya, I agree man,
As a musical sciences (Theory) scholar
I can say 99% of today’s music could be composed
and performed by 13 year olds
Jazz is definitely to complicated for our generation,
What happened is pop music over the last
few decades has become increasingly rhythmic
that is, the rhythm is more important than the sonorities,
Eventually, harmony become obsolete, and homophony
has become the norm
Kids today can’t appreciate more than 2 note simultaneously.