music

Revisiting this after sleeping more and yeah, sorry for the temp lock. I see people in my inbox saying to keep it up, so keep it up we will.

Me listening exclusively to top 40 radio in the 10's: Man all music just sounds like stomp-clap or imagine dragons.

Wow, OP really just came in with a lukewarm take and didn't respond to anyone

Boomer ass take and I'm nearly 40 lol

You: despairing that the top 5 tracks on Spotify are soulless garbage

Me: clicking random folders on random soulseek accounts and finding nothing but bangers

Be the change you wish to see in the world, I await your album drop

Every single generation has reached the age where they say "music was better in my day" and they're always wrong.

Chappel Roan is the best thing to happen to pop music since ABBA

Man some of the takes in this thread got me feelin like it's two types of people: people who claim they 'listen to a little bit of everything' when that 'little bit of everything' is 31 radio-approved, Top-40 flavors of Post Malone, Aubrey Graham, Taylor Swift, and Billie Eilish; and people who actually go looking for and listen to acts that aren't either white or gentrified

That and that one oldhead who apparently hasn't engaged with music since they were still pressin vinyls; man, don't you have 8-track tapes to be wheeling back up? Be kind, rewind headass

lol no? there's good music coming out all the time. you're just out of touch

Rock, country, indie, folk, hipster white rap, whatever you call home, is aggressively bad

So, did you want to say rap here but realize it could come off wrong, so you said white rap instead? OR did you not realize you can listen to nonwhite rappers? Because it's got to be one of those, right?

MUUUUSTAAAAAAAAARD

both kenny and tyler the creater released albums this year and they're both great so

When I see this I chuckle. You're your parents now. 'music was only good in my generation.'

Musics always been good and inventive if you look deep enough. They had king crimson, we had mars volta, and the kids have closures in Moscow. They had a tribe called quest, we had little brother, and the kids have Costa contra. Don't be stagnant.

GNX, Chromakopia, ALLIGATOR BITES NEVER HEAL, fym "music sucks so bad rn"

This just reads like ragebait lmao

I've been listening to a lot of good music this year, no idea what you're going on about.

Y'all just listening to the wrong music

Music has never been better. There's so much out there. If you're intentionally poisoning yourself with things you don't like like, that's sort of on you.

I disagree so full heartedly. Outside of what you hear on the radio, art and music is thriving in this burning dystopia. TikTok has tuned me into so many amazing artists, big and small who never would’ve had the chance to spread their art without it.

I originally deleted this, but im restoring it so OP can see the replies and ask questions to hopefully find something they like.

Sorry yall, tired and grumpy

"I listened to many songs from a genre of music I don't like, so clearly nobody is making good music. I'm so edgy!"

MUSTAAAAAARRRRRRRRRDDDDDD

You know there's other music than pop right? This is on par with people proclaiming gaming is dead after buying whatever the latest gaming fad shit and conveniently ignoring anything else

All I'm gonna say is that if this was in badposting it'd be a GOOD post.

I do think music has declined, but it has nothing to do with the songs themselves but our (well more specifically Western) relationship to music. If you travel back in time to the late 19th century, music was a communal activity. If there was any large family gathering like a holiday, there was the expectation that there was at least one person who could play the piano well, one person who could play the violin well, and so on, and they would put their musical skill within the family gathering to play music. And even for people who don't know how to play music, there was always singing, meaning that it wasn't just one pianist wowing their relatives, but everyone creating music together, whether it's some hymn or some festive song or some popular music of that time.

The first treatification of music, if you want to conceptualize it like that, was the separation between performers and the audience. You now have one group of people who played music and one group of people who passively consumed music. One consequence of this was the decline in music literacy among the general population. I'm not saying that most people knew how to read music way back in the day, but most people would've at least intuitively understand what a chord progression was or what transposing a melody meant. A lot of songs just hit differently when you actually know how to play a musical instrument or actually tried to create music before.

The second treatification of music, was the creation of pop music that displaced folk music. Parenti made this point that pop music isn't actually popular music in the etymological sense of music of the people. Actual popular music is something like folk music. Some folk song that is exclusively played in a rural village passed on from generations to generations within that rural community is popular music. Pop music is just music imposed on the masses from the top by capitalists. In that sense, pop music will always suck and is supposed to suck. It's one means in which capitalist realism gets cultivated and spread.

The third treatification of music, was streaming services in my opinion. Most people understand on a basic intuitive level that pop music is worthless slop. Since the impulse to create music, like all other artistic impulse, is inherent in humanity, people will naturally try to get around pop music slop through the creation of indies. Streaming services are a monkey paw because a consequence of these services is that it can cater to a person's idiosyncratic tastes so well that it leads to hyperspecificity. The end result is someone has a hyperspecific collection of indies that no one else has heard of, leading to further atomization. It also propagates more capitalist realism, or more specifically, faith in the infallibility of the market. "Music is now better than ever because you can find all these good indies." That's faith in the idea that if a commodity is being sold on the market, the inherent qualities of that commodity will eventually cause it to take its rightful share of the market (ie good commodities will float to the top while bad commodities will sink to the bottom).

Does pre-treatified music still exists in the West? Yes. There's basically two musical traditions: one is religious music and by religious music I mean shit like Gregorian chants and hymns. They come packaged with their own bullshit that is pretty self-evident. The other is sport chants. I would say that sport chants represent the only authentic form of pre-treatified music that currently exists in the West. Sport chants are very much music even if they aren't conceptualized this way (and the reason why they're aren't conceptualized this way is because precisely sport chants haven't been treatified). The basic definition for what constitutes music is that it's an audio experience where rhythm is important. And sport chants very much have rhythm to them.

Sport chants are a completely communal experience with chants being passed down from generation to generation, they belong to no single individual but the people themselves, they are an experience where the performers and audience are one, there's a huge degree of physicality to it like everyone stomping on the stadium at the same time to create rhythm. It's an authentically human experience and no amount of weird chord progression and time signature, quirky juxtaposition of musical instruments, or topical lyrics from some indie no one has ever heard of will change that.

This is real music, and music will be good again when the rest of music gets back to the level of sport chants.

reddit moment

This is as wrong as a take ever has been. More novel, vibrant, gorgeous, complex and engaging music is being produced today than at any time in history.

Banal, commercial pop music was inescapable throughout all decades of the last century. The classics of bygone eras are remembered in finite lists only as the uncountable middling efforts of thousands of shit acts fade from view. This is true of all art and media.

If you want to find current music that speaks to you, put in the effort. I mean that in an encouraging sense really, and don't want to dismiss your post out of hand.

In | that | spirit | of | encouragement | and | discovery | here | are | 31 | releases | from | the | last | decade | covering | a | wide | range | of | genres | many | of | which | have | enjoyed | critical | acclaim | and | commercial | success.

Listen to literally anything but top 40 then? I have almost exclusively listened to whacky obscure shit on soundcloud for the past decade, there’s so much creative and fun stuff dropping every single day. There are so many vibrant and unique scenes across the world, kinda wild to limit yourself to the most popular American stuff. You can absolutely find something you vibe with, just takes a modicum of effort to find things that aren’t heavily marketed and constantly shoved in your face. Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and drop any preconceptions of what music “should” be and you’ll have a much better time

The cure for this condition known as RBS (Rick Beato syndrome) is to let your playlist be dictated by the Transfem Soviet. Proletarian banjo music, modular generative ambient played by actual mushrooms and bouncy frenchcore remixes of lesbian singer-songwriter pop will heal your soul, turn you into a screaming opossum, or both. Anything else is counter-revolutionary and literally transphobic.