A small rant on todays music...
 

For some reason I watched about six or seven "Teens React To..." videos on 90s and 00's music. And it's seriously depressing seeing so many teens are completely unaware of songs that were straight up legendary in my day.

I also noticed a trend: If its Hip-Hop or Rap, they know it. If its anything else, hell, anything with a guitar they just go catatonic and shrug. Is Hip-Hop considered timeless to the point where the youth can sing along with every word yet when Oasis or Nirvana comes on they find it lame and dated? I'm so confused...

I know I'm going to come off as an old man here but seriously, what the hell is wrong with todays music? What happened to teen angst?

It feels like there's no variety anymore. Everything is either hip hop/pop/pop rock or some kind of combination of it. When I was in high school there were boy bands, punk, ska, metal, numetal, grunge(though on it's way out), rap, hip-hop, pop-punk, pop... variety out the wazoo.

Now it's all crap. It's allllll crap.

(Yeah, slow day at work and my coffee hasn't hit me yet.)

I'm willing to wager this "all music" you're hearing has more to do with where you get your music, than it does with all music.

As for where the angst went, good gravy am I glad that Daddy Doesn't Love Me crap has gone the way of the dodo.

Basically the only time I hear anything playing today is when I'm at a nephews, or at the mall, or I'm curious enough to turn on the radio.

And whining about how so-and-so doesn't love you is part of teenage life.

Hell, Linkin Park basically built a career off it.

Ahhh places where you're no longer the target demographic.
Welcome to the outskirts of popular culture.

But it doesn't have to be, and I think maybe kids have realized that you can get more satisfaction from the things you have, rather than whining about the things you wish you had.

Again, could NOT be happier.
G'bye Daddy Doesn't Love Me music.

Hip Hop is what's in today. I'm a big fan of the genre, but I listen to tons of other stuff as well. Looking down on "today's music" is cliche and stupid.

lol dude I'm well aware I'm not the target demo; that wasn't my point.
That's a fair point, and one I agree with. I'm generally a glass half full person. But teenage attitudes are all over the place; they're not always going to want to think of just the good things. It feels so limiting when everything sounds the same, singing about the same stuff. Why not have both?
Oh c'mooooon... :lol: I know NuMetal wasn't for everybody but who in their youth didn't love to rock out to One Step Closer or Down With The Sickness :P

There's still great punk, metal, rap, etc. You just aren't gonna hear it on the radio. And awful music has always been around lol.

Country has really gone to **** though. Some of the old singers still make albums, but everything else thinks it's ****ing club music. Save for very few exceptions.

Ya, it's just chart music that sucks, & chart music always phases in & out of total suckage. I do think that certain genres have hit an all-time low, but otherwise, garbage music has always been a thing. Really sick of mumble rap, for example, but just 'cause that's what's popular doesn't mean there aren't genuine MC's out there doing their thing. Rock is kinda dead, yeah, but only commercially. Not too surprising, really. It dominated for decades.

If you need new music that doesn't suck, you just gotta dig a little deeper.

Yeah I didn't mean to over generalize as much as I did. I was mainly speaking about mainstream music that's actively being pandered and marketed towards teens today.

I know there's still plenty of good music being churned out there if you look for it, but I guess I'm just surprised how narrow the mainstream has become with providing alternatives.

See, that's where your problem began. I personally stay far away from those videos, as it's just depressing seeing how idiotic the teens of today are.

One of the few benefits of being old: I don't have to worry about videos of me being an idiotic teen making it to the internet nearly as much as you young'uns..

Not to get all conspiracy-drunk on y'all, but you gotta realize that the powers that be use media to shape collective thought. The music biz is one of the most powerful/influential ones out there, subverting entire demographics of people. It does not benefit the order to make millions of able bodied people wanna rebel against authority or think freely (barring manufactured outrage that serves to facilitate an agenda), & that sort of ideology has always been the soul of good music. That, & love, which not only brings people together, but helps them be greater than themselves. Narcissism is a BIG industry, so they no longer promote love or fighting the power but instead shill music that sells you on lifestyle choices which make you hedonistic, complacent, & otherwise apathetic. You don't hear nearly as much about heartbreak & chasing "the one" these days 'cause everybody is (or should be) having casual sex. Love is lame now. & why complain? You can get a chick to show you her tits for free with the push of a button in the palm of your hands.

In this day & age, there's plenty to take issue with regarding the government/citizen relationship, smart TV's recording your conversations, NSA, etc. but people are either too comfortable to care, or wrapped up in doing the thought policing for them because they've been convinced it's cool to virtue signal. Punk & other genres of a similar foundation cannot exist in any remotely commercial capacity anymore (one might argue that defeats the purpose in the first place but I digress) when it would be shedding light on this kinda thing. Punk was okay in the 80's & 90's when the veil was still over people's eyes, & the worst things we knew about were on the nightly news, but with the internet making truth a lot easier to find & subsequently spread, they run a much greater risk allowing "rebel music" to flourish. They don't want the masses to be enlightened or empowered in a context that could force a change that they weren't soliciting themselves from behind closed doors.

Oh the poor young people of today, they'll never experience classics like, "We are FAMILY!" and, "I've got all my brothers and sisters and ME!"

Yeeeeeeaaaah.

Is this really true, Powder? What have I been doing wrong all these years?

It's funny how it used to be that old people were the ones who were all "back in MYYY day". But now the age of people who complain about that is younger and younger.

You're missing his point, but yeah, Snapchat, man.

They're not idiotic for not knowing about stuff before their time. If someone showed me whatever came before cassettes I wouldn't know what it was or what to do with it. I barely know how records work and how to use the needle thing. Why do people let this stuff get to them? Different people of different ages know about and like different things, surprise surprise.

To be fair, good, guitar-driven Rock has gone the way of the dodo, and I'm not particularly happy about that. An example used in this thread is Linkin Park. I'm not really fond of their earlier stuff, but once they touched alternative rock with "Breaking the Habit" and "From the Inside," they never came back. Minutes to Midnight is no masterpiece, but it imo has some of the best songs Linkin Park had made up to that point (see: Valentine's Day, In Pieces, The Little Things Give You Away).

Then there was A Thousand Suns, which used up-and-coming electronics in a unique and thoughtful way (not Kid A thoughtful, but still some good stuff). Then there was 2014's The Hunting Party, a return to form, but with lyrics miles better than earlier on. One of the members mentioned that "this is what we think mainstream music should sound like." The percussion-driven Final Masquerade is probably my favorite highlight on that album.

I say all that to get to present-day, when the band is preparing to release One More Light. So far, we've gotten two full songs: Heavy and Battle Symphony. Heavy sounds and feels like every single pop song of today (and uses similar structure to this). It's pathetically inhuman, there's lazy, if any, instrumentation, with sounds coming from the producer's Dell laptop as the main instruments. Battle Symphony is essentially all that but instead sounds like every single pop song from the late-2000's.

What I'm getting at here is that the music industry is becoming a hivemind. I'm not saying the 80's, 90's or 00's were these perfect times when every song that came out was a masterpiece, but for most years in those decades, you can point out more than one influential, great album. In the 2010's, I can maybe think of one album that is adventurous, interesting, and can attract a large audience without over-usage of electronics: Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool. That's one album, and we're 7 years into the 2010's. I get that's my opinion, but I'd be damned if someone can find a soft rock album that doesn't have an overbearing use of electronics. Because I've looked.

Basically, everything now seems to have to sound the same, at least in Alternative and Soft Rock. I get that most Pop is going to sound largely the same, that's a constant with every decade, but it flat-out f*cking pains me to see bands that were once reputable, great guitar-driven bands cling to their FL Studio 10's and throw their amps out a window and make unintelligible sounds into music that doesn't try to explore the magnitude of possibilities you can explore with electronica. Coldplay did it with Midnight, which got me excited, but then we get sh*t from the same band like "Hymn for the Weekend" and "Something Just Like This."

I mean, I'm cool with Pop for Pop's sake, but a return of Rock with actual instruments instead of some dude's Apple laptop would be appreciated. Also, sorry if this comes off as not very well-thought-out, wrote this in a hurry.

I am in my 30s and I find today's radio a lot more listenable than the stuff that was on when I was in highschool, personally. And I'm usually mr only likes obscure ******** too, if that matters.

I agree that there doesn't seem to be much variety in chart music nowadays, but I always thought a lot of songs sounded the same or had similar lyrics anyway; it's just on a larger scale today.