Call me a boomer, but I think music has genuinely gotten worse. (After all, neoliberalism makes everything worse.) Not worse in every way, but there is definitely some sense in which quality has been traded for quantity. You can have high production value and polish, or experimentation, but not both in the way you could in the 60s and 70s. Nobody now is doing what the Beatles or Led Zeppelin did. On the bright side though, there are way more musical niches to explore now.
Edit: Some music recs from the last five years so people don't think I'm a total philistine (in no particular order)
Nobody now is doing what the Beatles or Led Zeppelin did
nobody now is getting picked up by big labels and advertised to the moon and back? markets are just bigger and more complex now, you gotta remember that pop music wasn't very old, we're talking 30 years from the home radio to Beatlemania. Fewer channels (radio/TV), fewer entrypoints, less capital.
the most people the Beatles played for was 55000, lots of groups are doing numbers like that now. so the thing about modern music is theres a less hegemonic environment forcing everyone to hear about this or that band
and yeah im sidestepping the artistic side cause youre on some boomer shit there
Isn't that pretty close to my point though? As I said, there are more musical niches to explore. The number of options has exploded. But I think this has had the effect of emphasizing quantity and variety a bit more and quality and sophistication a bit less.
nobody now is getting picked up by big labels and advertised to the moon and back?
Nobody is getting picked up by big labels and supported in their long term musical development. Neoliberalism doesn't allow for companies to invest long term in new talent. They pretty much pick up and promote artists as-is now from what I understand. That's a huge departure from how the Beatles and Zeppelin happened, and no doubt it has had some kind of effect on music.
and yeah im sidestepping the artistic side cause youre on some boomer shit there
Nah, I'm very open minded about music. I like a wide variety of stuff, including tons of contemporary things. I'm not even really talking about the subjective aspects of art when I say there is some sense in which music has gotten worse. Singer-songwriters for example are writing objectively simpler melodies and chord progressions. I think people overstate the extent to which that is merely a change of subjective generational preference.
number of options has exploded. But I think this has had the effect of emphasizing quantity and variety a bit more and quality and sophistication a bit less.
well, no. within the much larger pot, way more artists than the beatles and led zeppelin are getting the same or more money, and having bigger tours. and this def translates into a lot of quality.
supported in their long term musical development
this is a bit euphemistic for the shitty way studios behave. Big cash cows being allowed to release whatever dumb shit they want =/= 'long term support'. everyone else who wasn't printing money was and still is subject to what studios think is worth releasing. i'd say the highest level of support from studios ever conceived would be like, archetypical K-pop and its a labor nightmare---which by the way pumps out some serious quality
Singer-songwriters for example are writing objectively simpler melodies and chord progressions
:citations-needed: no seriously. no one's quantified that, only cherrypicked. and this literally encodes the subjective importance of 'melody complexity' over many other aspects of songwriting.
Money and tours aren't what make a quality band though. The Beatles actually stopped playing shows so they could focus on studio work. Their label set them up with an absolutely incredible classically-trained producer who was essential to their development. He was basically a personal tutor for them to learn time-tested techniques, which is critical if you want to reach a level of competency where you can experiment in ways that aren't basically just esoteric. (I love experimental, esoteric music, btw. Not knocking it.) The Beatles mastered an incredible number of genres and styles before entering their really innovative phase. From what I understand, the music industry does not provide much music education anymore. I think you could accurately call the current musical landscape a collection of talented amateurs and some "corporate" acts with songs ghost written by a committee of marketing specialists. We're seeing a lot of variety and clever experimentation from random talented people, but a much lower level of refinement, and a lot of time wasted reinventing the wheel. A lot of songs frankly sound unfinished, or way overproduced.
The Beatles wrote like 200 extremely varied songs, many of which alone would have made another band's career. Interesting but concise melodies with incredible, distinct arrangements. I don't think they could have done that today.
Regarding simpler melodies, I'm not sure what you mean by "quantify". I'm just pointing to a general trend in music. I can't nail it down very specifically, but something along these lines is definitely happening. Melodies are either really simple as with many popular artists, or they're really complex for the sake of being complex, as in the case of wanky technical / experimental bands. There's not much of a middle ground anymore where you can find artists who writes complex but tasteful melodies done in a variety of styles, while not just solely rehashing previous bands' work.
this literally encodes the subjective importance of ‘melody complexity’ over many other aspects of songwriting.
I'm not saying complex melodies are the most important thing in music, just that I'd like to see some part of the music industry still prioritize it in the way it apparently used to.
Nobody now is doing what the Beatles or Led Zeppelin did
U mean ripping off black artists to sell to white middle-class audiences? Lmaoooo
Seriously though, there is way more great music than you think, but you can't expect any band now to have the same impact as those guys. The scene has become far too fractured. Stairway has been played on American radio something like 5 million times; no one will be able to beat that now, because no one cares about radio enough to push a song that hard anymore.
U mean ripping off black artists to sell to white middle-class audiences? Lmaoooo
Well, yeah. I'm not saying music used to be better ethically. We're talking about America in the 60s and 70s after all.
Anyway, what contemporary songs do you think rival Stairway in terms of quality, complexity, sophistication, whatever you want to call it? I don't think it's just the marketing that makes that song incredible. It's genuinely a masterpiece.
Here's a bunch of brilliant albums that came out only last year (I can do only rock music if you'd prefer as well)
Black Midi - Cavalcade
Black Country, New Road - For the First Time
Spellling - The Turning Wheel
Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
Armand Hammer & The Alchemist - Haram
Floating Points and Pharaoh Sanders - Promises
Erika de Casier - Sensational
Lingua Ignota - Sinner Get Ready
There's genuinely brilliant music coming out every year. The problem is of course that music streaming platforms, the same as video ones like Netflix, both push endless amounts of crap down peoples throats and their convenience and algorithms mean people seek out the stuff they're know and comfortable with.
My last reply was rude so I deleted it. I apologise. Also, I couldn't explain myself because I was at work.
I can't answer your question, because I don't know enough about "contemporary" music. For one thing I don't really keep up with the newest releases: I tend to drag behind by a decade or two! At the same time however, how contemporary? 1 year? 2 years? 10? One problem is that what's new today will be old tomorrow.
If you're looking for complex music, I'd argue that a song like 'Flesh and the Power it Holds' by Death is far more complex than Stairway, but it's a Death Metal song, so it'll never get played on mainstrem radio. It's also 24 years old now, so I guess that means it's not contemporary... but Led Zep IV is 52 years old, so we run into the problem again. What was new (some of it, anyway) in '98 was more complex in pretty much every way, but it's not new now so therefore it must be old. Therefore it gets grouped in with the other "oldies". For what it's worth, I've also heard local bands in my city play songs with crazy compound time signatures, which there is none of in 'Stairway'.
I could choose any song with polyphony in- let's say 'Give Me a Reason' by Pink- and compare it to a Gregorian chant from the early medieval period, and it would be more complex purely because it has polyphony in it, and Gregorian chants are by definition monophonic; therefore music produced in the 21st century is more complex than music produced in the 13th century, right? And that means that there has been a clear linear progression in the level of complexity from the 13th century to now, with no peaks or troughs, right? No! The level of harmonic complexity in the music of J.S. Bach dwarfs any pop music made in the 20th or 21st centuries because of his use of counterpoint, so legendary was it that it's still hailed 300 years later as genius. You could say the same of any number of classical composers too, but that is kind of unfair as we're talking about pop music, not classical. But you can't really compare a 70s prog rock song with a club banger from (for example) 2016 either, can you?
Certainly, capitalism has a role to play in the simplification of top 40 pop. Adorno said as much in the 50s. But my point is that you could pick any two points in time and it wouldn't tell you anything about the scene, and moreover, you can't judge the complexity of a scene by a handful of songs, especially today when there is so much on offer.
Here are some cool "contemporary" things I like, anyway.
In the Long Run by the Staves. Love this song. I played it at an open mic recently. I've been meaning to check out the rest of their back catalogue too.
It's all good, thanks for the recs! Regarding the bands you've seen playing in compound time signatures, what genre were they? I love that kind of stuff in metal and some contemporary jazz
Generally, if you hear a compound time sig in a song by a local band, it was put in to make them sound clever and weird, but so many bands do it that it's kind of a meme for me at this point.
Either way, I'm in a sort of Punk/Grunge/Indie band and our current set has songs in 5/8 and 7/8. A lot that I've seen haven't really sounded like you'd expect them to. Most bands locally that use wacky time sigs are kind of indie or "rock"; most of the Jazz and Funky groups I see about prefer 4/4 or 6/8 because it's all about groove with them.
I rarely see "metal" locally, partly because my city is all about punk/ hardcore and jazz (there's an electronic scene too but I don't know much about it), and also because it's tricky to define. Many of the bands I've seen would have been called metal in the 80s, but are referred to as Hard Rock now. I've seen a Doom metal band here who were okay too.
I think another reason I don't see metal as much is to do with technical ability- very few people can shred, or make a double kick sound good (I've never even seen a double kick setup live), or growl and scream well. Either way, all of the Hard Rock and otherwise Heavy bands I've seen mostly stick to simple time.
At the same time. if you look at early Beatles or "culturally appropriated white boy blooz"-era Zeppelin, pop music was always pretty bad. But yeah, around the Sergeant Pepper's/Pet Sounds/Zeppelin IV era, you started getting some wild studio experimentation. You do still see this stuff pop up from time to time with other genres/niches; for instance, in the death metal world, there's stuff like how Carcass recorded the guitar tracks for the Heartwork album, or the cabinet double-miking technique used by Studio Fredman when In Flames recorded the original version of Clayman. I wouldn't call either of those very experimental musically, though -- I don't think we've had a major shake-up in the metal scene since Faith No More stumbled ass-backwards into accidentally birthing nu metal.
All of that being said, I think Gojira's "Amazonia" at least gets a nod for including a jaw harp part and later doubling it with the guitar.
Edit:
Nobody now is doing what ... Led Zeppelin did.
I know what you meant, but I gotta drop Greta Van Fleet here to be a jackass before someone really does call you a boomer.
I think the Beatles and Zeppelin were able to do that because the music industry actually invested their musical development, which apparently doesn't really happen anymore. As capital has become more and more narrowly focused on next-quarter profits, investing in promising artists and nurturing their musical development has become impossible. Basically, everyone is permanently trapped in the early Beatles stages and never get to progress to the highly innovative stage.
I know what you meant, but I gotta drop Greta Van Fleet here to be a jackass before someone really does call you a boomer.
Lol, thanks, I'll check them out. Also, I agree about metal. It feels like the genre has stagnated a bit.
i agree to an extent here? music has gotten worse, or at least stagnated: but only rock and its many, many subgenres. id say, as a whole: rap and electronic are definitely like at their peak at least in terms of innovation, sampling techniques, etc or will be at some point soon, in the next decade or so.
i mean dont get me wrong theres still some good rock out there but its certainly less common........actually fuck me i tried so hard to think of a "modern" rock band just now (as in founded no earlier than a decade or so ago) and all i could think of that wasnt a meme or just fuckin overall mediocre at best, was car seat headrest
Its extremely difficult to actually gauge how much good music is being made in the moment that it is being made, looking at the top 100s for decades past theres gonna be so much bullshit that is completely forgotten now.
The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are absolute garbage, and the prog rock and arena shit that came after was even worse. The Smiths blow them out of the water.
70s music was a complete wasteland outside of some new emerging genres like House/Disco, Punk and New Wave, which everyone in the US mocked. Music peaked in the 1990s, which you can tell from the wide variety of genres and the huge number of "one hit wonders", which implies a diverse range of popular styles.
Call me a boomer, but I think music has genuinely gotten worse. (After all, neoliberalism makes everything worse.) Not worse in every way, but there is definitely some sense in which quality has been traded for quantity. You can have high production value and polish, or experimentation, but not both in the way you could in the 60s and 70s. Nobody now is doing what the Beatles or Led Zeppelin did. On the bright side though, there are way more musical niches to explore now.
Edit: Some music recs from the last five years so people don't think I'm a total philistine (in no particular order)
nobody now is getting picked up by big labels and advertised to the moon and back? markets are just bigger and more complex now, you gotta remember that pop music wasn't very old, we're talking 30 years from the home radio to Beatlemania. Fewer channels (radio/TV), fewer entrypoints, less capital.
the most people the Beatles played for was 55000, lots of groups are doing numbers like that now. so the thing about modern music is theres a less hegemonic environment forcing everyone to hear about this or that band
and yeah im sidestepping the artistic side cause youre on some boomer shit there
Isn't that pretty close to my point though? As I said, there are more musical niches to explore. The number of options has exploded. But I think this has had the effect of emphasizing quantity and variety a bit more and quality and sophistication a bit less.
Nobody is getting picked up by big labels and supported in their long term musical development. Neoliberalism doesn't allow for companies to invest long term in new talent. They pretty much pick up and promote artists as-is now from what I understand. That's a huge departure from how the Beatles and Zeppelin happened, and no doubt it has had some kind of effect on music.
Nah, I'm very open minded about music. I like a wide variety of stuff, including tons of contemporary things. I'm not even really talking about the subjective aspects of art when I say there is some sense in which music has gotten worse. Singer-songwriters for example are writing objectively simpler melodies and chord progressions. I think people overstate the extent to which that is merely a change of subjective generational preference.
well, no. within the much larger pot, way more artists than the beatles and led zeppelin are getting the same or more money, and having bigger tours. and this def translates into a lot of quality.
this is a bit euphemistic for the shitty way studios behave. Big cash cows being allowed to release whatever dumb shit they want =/= 'long term support'. everyone else who wasn't printing money was and still is subject to what studios think is worth releasing. i'd say the highest level of support from studios ever conceived would be like, archetypical K-pop and its a labor nightmare---which by the way pumps out some serious quality
:citations-needed: no seriously. no one's quantified that, only cherrypicked. and this literally encodes the subjective importance of 'melody complexity' over many other aspects of songwriting.
Money and tours aren't what make a quality band though. The Beatles actually stopped playing shows so they could focus on studio work. Their label set them up with an absolutely incredible classically-trained producer who was essential to their development. He was basically a personal tutor for them to learn time-tested techniques, which is critical if you want to reach a level of competency where you can experiment in ways that aren't basically just esoteric. (I love experimental, esoteric music, btw. Not knocking it.) The Beatles mastered an incredible number of genres and styles before entering their really innovative phase. From what I understand, the music industry does not provide much music education anymore. I think you could accurately call the current musical landscape a collection of talented amateurs and some "corporate" acts with songs ghost written by a committee of marketing specialists. We're seeing a lot of variety and clever experimentation from random talented people, but a much lower level of refinement, and a lot of time wasted reinventing the wheel. A lot of songs frankly sound unfinished, or way overproduced.
The Beatles wrote like 200 extremely varied songs, many of which alone would have made another band's career. Interesting but concise melodies with incredible, distinct arrangements. I don't think they could have done that today.
Regarding simpler melodies, I'm not sure what you mean by "quantify". I'm just pointing to a general trend in music. I can't nail it down very specifically, but something along these lines is definitely happening. Melodies are either really simple as with many popular artists, or they're really complex for the sake of being complex, as in the case of wanky technical / experimental bands. There's not much of a middle ground anymore where you can find artists who writes complex but tasteful melodies done in a variety of styles, while not just solely rehashing previous bands' work.
I'm not saying complex melodies are the most important thing in music, just that I'd like to see some part of the music industry still prioritize it in the way it apparently used to.
U mean ripping off black artists to sell to white middle-class audiences? Lmaoooo
Seriously though, there is way more great music than you think, but you can't expect any band now to have the same impact as those guys. The scene has become far too fractured. Stairway has been played on American radio something like 5 million times; no one will be able to beat that now, because no one cares about radio enough to push a song that hard anymore.
Well, yeah. I'm not saying music used to be better ethically. We're talking about America in the 60s and 70s after all.
Anyway, what contemporary songs do you think rival Stairway in terms of quality, complexity, sophistication, whatever you want to call it? I don't think it's just the marketing that makes that song incredible. It's genuinely a masterpiece.
Here's a bunch of brilliant albums that came out only last year (I can do only rock music if you'd prefer as well)
Black Midi - Cavalcade
Black Country, New Road - For the First Time
Spellling - The Turning Wheel
Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
Armand Hammer & The Alchemist - Haram
Floating Points and Pharaoh Sanders - Promises
Erika de Casier - Sensational
Lingua Ignota - Sinner Get Ready
There's genuinely brilliant music coming out every year. The problem is of course that music streaming platforms, the same as video ones like Netflix, both push endless amounts of crap down peoples throats and their convenience and algorithms mean people seek out the stuff they're know and comfortable with.
deleted by creator
My last reply was rude so I deleted it. I apologise. Also, I couldn't explain myself because I was at work.
I can't answer your question, because I don't know enough about "contemporary" music. For one thing I don't really keep up with the newest releases: I tend to drag behind by a decade or two! At the same time however, how contemporary? 1 year? 2 years? 10? One problem is that what's new today will be old tomorrow.
If you're looking for complex music, I'd argue that a song like 'Flesh and the Power it Holds' by Death is far more complex than Stairway, but it's a Death Metal song, so it'll never get played on mainstrem radio. It's also 24 years old now, so I guess that means it's not contemporary... but Led Zep IV is 52 years old, so we run into the problem again. What was new (some of it, anyway) in '98 was more complex in pretty much every way, but it's not new now so therefore it must be old. Therefore it gets grouped in with the other "oldies". For what it's worth, I've also heard local bands in my city play songs with crazy compound time signatures, which there is none of in 'Stairway'.
I could choose any song with polyphony in- let's say 'Give Me a Reason' by Pink- and compare it to a Gregorian chant from the early medieval period, and it would be more complex purely because it has polyphony in it, and Gregorian chants are by definition monophonic; therefore music produced in the 21st century is more complex than music produced in the 13th century, right? And that means that there has been a clear linear progression in the level of complexity from the 13th century to now, with no peaks or troughs, right? No! The level of harmonic complexity in the music of J.S. Bach dwarfs any pop music made in the 20th or 21st centuries because of his use of counterpoint, so legendary was it that it's still hailed 300 years later as genius. You could say the same of any number of classical composers too, but that is kind of unfair as we're talking about pop music, not classical. But you can't really compare a 70s prog rock song with a club banger from (for example) 2016 either, can you?
Certainly, capitalism has a role to play in the simplification of top 40 pop. Adorno said as much in the 50s. But my point is that you could pick any two points in time and it wouldn't tell you anything about the scene, and moreover, you can't judge the complexity of a scene by a handful of songs, especially today when there is so much on offer.
Here are some cool "contemporary" things I like, anyway.
Nakamarra by Hiatus Kaiyote (I dare you to tell me this is less complex than Stairway)
Spectres of the Blood Moon Sabbath by Hellripper. I only found these guys because they were in my recommended videos on YT. I guess the algorithm throws up some good stuff occasionally!
In the Long Run by the Staves. Love this song. I played it at an open mic recently. I've been meaning to check out the rest of their back catalogue too.
It's all good, thanks for the recs! Regarding the bands you've seen playing in compound time signatures, what genre were they? I love that kind of stuff in metal and some contemporary jazz
Generally, if you hear a compound time sig in a song by a local band, it was put in to make them sound clever and weird, but so many bands do it that it's kind of a meme for me at this point.
Either way, I'm in a sort of Punk/Grunge/Indie band and our current set has songs in 5/8 and 7/8. A lot that I've seen haven't really sounded like you'd expect them to. Most bands locally that use wacky time sigs are kind of indie or "rock"; most of the Jazz and Funky groups I see about prefer 4/4 or 6/8 because it's all about groove with them.
I rarely see "metal" locally, partly because my city is all about punk/ hardcore and jazz (there's an electronic scene too but I don't know much about it), and also because it's tricky to define. Many of the bands I've seen would have been called metal in the 80s, but are referred to as Hard Rock now. I've seen a Doom metal band here who were okay too.
I think another reason I don't see metal as much is to do with technical ability- very few people can shred, or make a double kick sound good (I've never even seen a double kick setup live), or growl and scream well. Either way, all of the Hard Rock and otherwise Heavy bands I've seen mostly stick to simple time.
At the same time. if you look at early Beatles or "culturally appropriated white boy blooz"-era Zeppelin, pop music was always pretty bad. But yeah, around the Sergeant Pepper's/Pet Sounds/Zeppelin IV era, you started getting some wild studio experimentation. You do still see this stuff pop up from time to time with other genres/niches; for instance, in the death metal world, there's stuff like how Carcass recorded the guitar tracks for the Heartwork album, or the cabinet double-miking technique used by Studio Fredman when In Flames recorded the original version of Clayman. I wouldn't call either of those very experimental musically, though -- I don't think we've had a major shake-up in the metal scene since Faith No More stumbled ass-backwards into accidentally birthing nu metal.
All of that being said, I think Gojira's "Amazonia" at least gets a nod for including a jaw harp part and later doubling it with the guitar.
Edit:
I know what you meant, but I gotta drop Greta Van Fleet here to be a jackass before someone really does call you a boomer.
deleted by creator
I think the Beatles and Zeppelin were able to do that because the music industry actually invested their musical development, which apparently doesn't really happen anymore. As capital has become more and more narrowly focused on next-quarter profits, investing in promising artists and nurturing their musical development has become impossible. Basically, everyone is permanently trapped in the early Beatles stages and never get to progress to the highly innovative stage.
Lol, thanks, I'll check them out. Also, I agree about metal. It feels like the genre has stagnated a bit.
i agree to an extent here? music has gotten worse, or at least stagnated: but only rock and its many, many subgenres. id say, as a whole: rap and electronic are definitely like at their peak at least in terms of innovation, sampling techniques, etc or will be at some point soon, in the next decade or so.
i mean dont get me wrong theres still some good rock out there but its certainly less common........actually fuck me i tried so hard to think of a "modern" rock band just now (as in founded no earlier than a decade or so ago) and all i could think of that wasnt a meme or just fuckin overall mediocre at best, was car seat headrest
Its extremely difficult to actually gauge how much good music is being made in the moment that it is being made, looking at the top 100s for decades past theres gonna be so much bullshit that is completely forgotten now.
The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are absolute garbage, and the prog rock and arena shit that came after was even worse. The Smiths blow them out of the water.
70s music was a complete wasteland outside of some new emerging genres like House/Disco, Punk and New Wave, which everyone in the US mocked. Music peaked in the 1990s, which you can tell from the wide variety of genres and the huge number of "one hit wonders", which implies a diverse range of popular styles.