not sure if this belongs in this forum (rant about modern music)

[RobertPlant]

I think that the music scene now has sold out. The worst thing is that people care more about voice quality than the actual substance of the lyrics. People listen to American Idol and say "OMG, she has a beautiful voice" rather than asking more important questions like "did he/she write their own music"? Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan weren't the best singers but they actually had meaning behind the lyrics instead of a "Moment Like This" crap. Not only that but they wrote their own music and played their own instruments, which is a prerequisite for my accepting musicians. My biggest pet peeve is this Justin Beiber kid. I wasn't alive then but what if this was 1975? For the people who were around then, would he have gotten accepted then?

[Posteritatis]

1. This is an ancient problem

Also, keep in mind that if you're talking about music of Back Then today, chances are you're only seeing the small percentage of it that lasted. For every Springsteen or Dylan there were a whole lot of flashes in the pans or bastions of mediocrity in any era of music, a lot of whom were liked for their voice or their lifestyle or something other to do than their creativity and musical talent.

I find it more annoying now, but that's because I'm around to witness it directly. It's definitely nothing new, though, not by a long shot.

[Oregone]

2. "I think that the music scene now has sold out"

I think that there aren't a shitload of alternatives.

Its controlled. Its probably difficult to break out if you don't sign your name on a contract, and thereby sign your art and ass away.

Whats an artist singer songwriter to do these days? Be suppressed basically

[TwilightGardener]

3. Their music is bad, and they should FEEL bad!

Sorry--yes, I agree that music is now more of a business and a product to sell, and less of an art or a form of self-expression.

[Oceansaway]

4. Donny Osmond & his purple

socks were accepted back then....just saying

[SoxFan]

6. Shaun Casssidy. Andy Gibb.

Et al...

[BurtWorm]

5. But people on American Idol don't have beautiful voices.

They all have the same voice. A soulless voice.

[Billy Burnett]

9. Why? Here.

http://www.antarestech.com/products/avp.shtml

Live or in the studio, the AVP lets you instantly select from a large library of sounds. From gorgeously mellow to seriously twisted, we've included factory presets for a wide variety of vocal styles

[maxsolomon]

7. You need to get out more

there is a cornucopia of music everywhere, of every possible subcategory - just don't expect it on AI. that is crap for the unwashed masses. flavor-of-the-month bieber is for tween girls - that will look back in 10 years and laugh about it like my daughter laughs about seeing britney spears 10 years ago.

besides, 1975 had PLENTY of shit. exhibit a: "more more more" by the andrea true connection. exhibit b: captain and tenille. exhibit c: led zeppelin (psyche!).

[Greyskye]

8. I understand you not caring about voice quality, being a Robert Plant fan...

:hide:

[RobertPlant]

10. you can blame Andy Williams

for introducing us all to the Osmond brothers. People only listened to Donny Osmond because of his four older brothers and because he looked and sounded cute. He had shaggy hair which was an attempt to make him look BA but instead made him look like even more of a tool. On top of that, he sang a lot of covers like "Deep Purple" or "Young Love" which were songs originally from the late 50s/early 60s that were bad to begin with.

[wyldwolf]

27. ... and Dylan fan, for that matter.

[bif]

11. You mean like Jason Mraz?

Nice voice. Embarrassing lyrics.

[Warpy]

12. There have always been people who preferred light, fizzy pop

to more nutritious fare and that applies to music, too. For every Dylan, there were Bachrach, Neil Diamond, Captain & Tenille, The Carpenters, and the strike up the bland list goes on and on. For every Rolling Stones, there were a dozen bubble gum groups.

The pop stuff is usually pretty forgettable. Unfortunately, biting topical music also ages poorly as new topics replace the old.

We all tend to cling to the music of our youth, whether good or bad, because it reminds of us a time when the world was brand new and chock full of possibilites and before we were limited by probabilities.

However, to deny great music is being produced now because Clear Channel radio is blatting out nothing but pop is to be incredibly myopic.

Discover net radio. That's where all the good stuff is.

[Speck Tater]

13. Tell me about it! They said the same thing about Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

Find some Old Time Radio mp3s on the net and listen to the music of the 30's and 40's as played on live radio shows of the day. You will hear VERY FEW classics that are still played today. The VAST, unbelievably HUGE MAJORITY is pure unadulterated CRAP that was current then, and utterly forgotten today because it was so incredibly bad.

[Wickerman]

14. There is a ton of music out there that is great

You just have to seek it out. Don't be spoonfed by corporate-owned radio, American Idol, etc. Yes, its a sellout. They sell product, not music. Some, of course, as a disclaimer, may actually like it as music and I guess that is their prerogative.

Find artists you like and respect and plug them into a music matching system like Pandora or the like. You'll, with an open mind, come up with all kinds of new stuff to listen to. People who have new and fresh lyrics, interesting voices and ideas, and music that is worth listening to.

I've been thinking the music industry "sold out" from about the time you were born, it sounds. You can bitch and moan about it or you can do something about it. I'm in the do something about it camp. Support those who make music out of the mainstream.

[Berry Cool]

15. There's a long, long history of people singing and playing music who don't write it.

Composers who write great music and musicians who interpret great music are not always the same people, nor should they necessarily be expected to be. In the days of pop music before the 1960s and '70s, they seldom were. Composers wrote songs, then tried to get them performed by well-known musicians and singers so that they would "sell"--initially not recordings of the song, but copies of the sheet music so people could play and sing the song at home. Later, the recording industry came along and sales of recordings of a song became more important than sheet-music sales. People largely stopped learning to play music themselves and became content to spin records of other people performing it. At that time, though, the artists and the songs were on a more even standing in terms of popularity. If someone wrote a song that several singers or musical ensembles caught on to and liked, they'd each release their own recording of it, and numerous recordings of the same song, interpreted by different performers, would be played on the radio and hit the pop charts at the same time.

It wasn't really until the rock era that the singer-songwriter became a big force on the pop scene. Of course, the Beatles really popularized the idea of writing one's own songs because Lennon and McCartney were so prolific and proved that if artists not only performed a song but actually wrote it, they could make a heck of a lot more money. Royalties were where it was at. But today, kids not old enough to even remember the 1960s look back at the "good old days" of singer-songwriters and think that's the way it always was, and that the matter of "voice trumping songwriting skill" is some new phenomenon.

Oh, and if anyone thinks songs of the 1970s always had more profound lyrics than they do today, I got two words for ya: Disc. O. And when my mom used to complain about the silliness of some pop lyrics back then, we'd say to her, "OK, but you're the one who told us that when you were young there was a hit song that went "Mairzy doats and doezy doats and little lamzey divey, a kidlleydivey too, wouldn't you?"

[Onceuponalife]

25. Um, isn't it..

"Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy"?

Hey, if it's good enough for Laura Palmer's dad...

[Lochloosa]

16. Have you ever heard Jerry Garcia sing?

I tell my wife he's a "crooner". I won't tell you what she thinks.

[Berry Cool]

17. And another thing: there have always been young pop idols who make girls swoon.

Justin Bieber is nothing new. Frank Sinatra was the Justin Bieber of his day. Of course, he turned out not to be just another good-looking crooner but to have gifts of interpretation that withstood the test of time, but the parents of the 1940s had no way of knowing he would do that. When their teenage daughters went crazy over him and pronounced him "real gone," their parents shook their heads and said they didn't get it, as far as they were concerned that skinny Italian kid from Jersey was just a schlub.

And of course many followed in his footsteps, especially guys who also had their own TV shows. Eddie Fisher, Elvis, Ricky Nelson, the Beatles, the Monkees, David Cassidy (and later his half-bro Shaun), Bobby Sherman, the Osmonds, the Jackson Five, the list goes on. All of them were initially derided as just teenybopper fare for silly girls. It didn't matter whether they wrote their own songs or not, plenty of people thought they were just nonsense. Some of them were able to stand the test of time because they had genuine talent, or find ways to at least extend their careers beyond just being teenybopper stars. Others could not.

Only time will tell whether the acts the girls are screaming over today will have a lasting legacy in music. Most won't, but the mere fact that a guy looks cute and sings well doesn't mean he is doomed to fade into obscurity. Neither does it mean he's headed for lasting fame (especially because the music business tends to chew up such guys and spit 'em out the second they stop making teen hearts beat and the girls move on to someone else).

One thing's for sure: cute boys and young men who can sing will always have at least a temporary place in the music business, because girls will always be an important part of the music-buying public. And prepubescent and teenage girls (the straight ones, anyway) kind of need to have a crush on a cute, almost girlish-looking famous guy as a part of their psychosexual development process. It's a way to dip their toe into the waters of romance and love without having to actually yet have a boyfriend and deal with all those issues. They can crush on someone far away and "safe" before they get into the real thing. It's the same reason adolescent boys look at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue (before they graduate to harder stuff).

[RobertPlant]

20. I wasn't alive in the 70s so answer this question

was Led Zeppelin popular among preteen girls?

[lazarus]

21. Led Zeppelin

wasn't that big a chart topper ever, as far as singles go. Sure, the albums sold well, but they only had one top 10 single, as far as I can tell. Stairway To Heaven never charted, for all the love the classic rock stations give it. (Granted, it was never released as a single.)

[wyldwolf]

24. Zeppelin was only popular with teen boys

Look, seriously, why the hate for music pre-teen girls like? Fluff artists either mature with their audience or they have short careers.

[Jamastiene]

31. I wasn't a teen boy and I liked them.

:wow:

[Still Blue in PDX]

28. I thought Robert Plant was totally sexy. nt

[wilt the stilt]

18. Market segmented

Luckily I grew up in the sixties. In those days radio played everything. We were luckily exposed to Sinatra, Dean Martin, Getz and Gilberto and the Beatles on one station. This gave us the opportunity to hear and appreciate all types of music.

Radio today is market segmented and exposure is limited. Because we had this exposure we went back and listened to Django reinhardt, Stephane Grapelli, Billie holiday, Robert Johnson.

What I find most disturbing is that most music feels like it is a sellout.
University of Rochester used to have a course they taught Music 1964- 1971- This is the era where the artist controlled the output and producers were in the background.
FM radio was commercial free and concerts were on college campuses.

Lucky me.

[MilesColtrane]

19. Two words:

Leif Garrett


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SalKckTsswc&feature=related

[mackerel]

22. There's a lot of good alternative music out there.

That's the great thing about myspace it was a good way for the alternative crowd to spread their music around.

[wyldwolf]

23. 'today's music sux' threads are always a hoot on DU

Or should I say 'Coot' and in 'Old coot.'

I think that the music scene now has sold out.

As REM said when they signed their multi-million dollar contract with Warner Brothers: (paraphrased)"If this selling out, we sold out the first time we accepted money for our music.

The worst thing is that people care more about voice quality than the actual substance of the lyrics.

Lyrics is writing. No one ever made music with just lyrics. Yes a great voice can make a simple set of lyrics sound beautiful.

People listen to American Idol and say "OMG, she has a beautiful voice" rather than asking more important questions like "did he/she write their own music"?

People watch movies and say "OMG, he is an awesome actor" rather than asking the more important question "did he/she write their own scripts"?

My biggest pet peeve is this Justin Beiber kid. I wasn't alive then but what if this was 1975? For the people who were around then, would he have gotten accepted then?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3gjqlApqHQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RowY1ZpwWB0

[Onceuponalife]

26. +1

I agree with you 100%

I stopped listening to the radio about 15 years ago. When I was a kid Casey Kasem's top 40 countdown was weekly must-listening for me. Now it's about 90% crap. I actually got into a fight with my girlfriend (she's a singer) one time because I said that singers who don't play instruments aren't musicians.

That why I love punk music so much. It's all about love of the music. Most punks don't give a damn about making money. They play for gas money to get to the gig and then have to rely on some nice fans to put them up for the night or sleep in their van.

[Forkboy]

29. Music has never been better.

More variety, easier access. I've been a music junkie since I was 7 (1975 to be exact), and I think there's more good music out there now than ever before.

[Jamastiene]

30. They can't all be as great a singer as you, Robert.

:applause:

(I actually agree with your rant. A lot passes for good when it is not all that good, really)

[dmallind]

32. Yeah Verdi was an incredible baritone and Mozart could hit high C ;)

Since when did writing good music necessitate being able to perform it well? Don't you want the best composers writing and the best singers singing as it works in serious music?

[HooptieWagon]

33. Some thoughts...

I appreciate a well-done original song, just as I appreciate a creatively interpreted cover. There is room for both.

"Commercial" music (that being fed to the masses by big record labels, commercial radio and TV) is just crap pablum. There is no message because the "artists" and labels don't want to risk offending anyone with a message.

There is TONS of great music out there, but it takes a little effort to find. Start with getting out and hearing some local bands. If you hear one you like, strike up a conversation with them and find out their influences and what they listen to. That will turn you on to a lot of great music. Check out alternative radio - listener sponsored, college stations, webcasts, etc... might likely hear something you like. Also, develop a network of fans of similar music to what you like, and turn each other on to new/undiscovered/rediscovered music (swap CDs and such). Word of mouth generally works better than the internet - there are so many artists on MySpace, etc, they tend to get lost in the crowd.