Music These Days Sucks Balls

I’ve been travelling in a car quite a bit these days. While playing music on the stereo, we typically choose one of two channels. The first one has all the modern songs – latest billboard hits and the like. The second channel is devoted to older songs. I’ve spend a fair amount of time listening to both and the conclusion I’ve reached is this: English music these days is utter crap. I thought I might be biased, so I visited the official billboard page and listened to the hit numbers with an open mind. Turns out I was right.

Modern Music Sucks
Modern Music Sucks

The first thing that strikes me is the beat. It seems every English song today is made for dancing in a disc. No slow music. No melody. Everything has a sort of heavy beat. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – not at all. But there’s no variety. No blues, and no slow dance songs.

My second complaint is the subject of the songs. Without exception, they’re either about love, dancing, partying, or rap. Again, nothing wrong with those songs. Heck, love songs pretty much dominated my growing up years. But again, what pisses me off is that there’s nothing new. Not so long ago, there were songs which dealt with everything ranging from general angst and meaning in life (What if God was one of us), to how the radio is being replaced by TV (Radio Ga Ga.) Songs celebrating the life of artists (Vincent) and Enya’s awesome “Only time” are a few more examples of music dealing with a wide variety of issues.

And why do all the singers look like models? It seems to me that out of a sample of people who really have a talent for singing, only a very few will also have the gorgeous looks and pristine figures that almost every singer male or female seems to have these days. When I see every single artist looking like they stepped out of a magazine, I have to wonder at what criteria is being used to select them

What happened to all the songs for you know…adults? Those not meant for lovestruck teenagers or for those not in a partying mood? It seems they’ve gone the way of the dodo. One can’t even say that disco themed songs are inherently better – just look at the success of Metallica, Pink Floyd etc. There’s a space for all this type of music, but I just don’t seem to see any of it on the radio channels playing the latest songs. For that sort of thing I have to go to the “oldies” channel!

One possible reason I can think of for this state of affairs is that “dancy” songs make more money. They can be played and licensed out in discs and they have a certain native appeal that doesn’t require any effort to appreciate. Lazy music in other words. It doesn’t make you think. Like junk food. No nourishment, but sort of satisfies a need to fill the void with something. And of course, good looking singers sell well on album covers and in concerts. In the old days, if you could sing, that was it. Bands like Abba and Simon and Garfunkel weren’t reputed for their looks. Of course, some artists were icons like Madonna, Elvis and the Beatles. But they were rare. Most of the time there was no correlation between singing talent and good looks.

So is it just me? Is my observation flawed? Perhaps there really are different songs coming out these days which have melody instead of a dance beat and which address issues other than just love, partying and rap. But if so, I don’t hear them being played anywhere and that’s sad :(

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35 thoughts on “Music These Days Sucks Balls”

  1. Yeah! i was actually talking to one of my friends a while ago about this. Espicially, no “artists” don’t even have to sing. All they need is to look good, and all the company need is auto tune. It’s just disgusting…

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  2. This subject about no good modern music can be applied to almost everything these days. These days really are different. The list would fill 5000 pages of all that is different today. Our food that we eat is different. The weight of all sorts of packages is getting smaller and smaller. They don’t make 5 pound bags of sugar anymore, Most of them are now 4 pounds, and cost more! That’s just a small example of how things are different these days. I’m 55 years old and have always made a point to notice how the world is changing. In my opinion, things were better before. Before the Internet, NO ONE would have heard about the guy who burned the koran, Us humans are getting way way too much info these days. We are talking to each other WAY to much on cell phones, social networks etc. We know way too much about what others are doing in other countries. Because we have China make all our stuff, they will be the rulers of the world one day. When we only had 13 TV stations it caused us all to be on the same page as each other. And that was better! With 500 or more different channels these days, no one is on the same page. This commenting page is better than most, but have you ever noticed that most commenting pages always end up getting very rude by about the 5th comment? I used to really love the Internet, but its just so filled with mindless junk these days that i hardly want to go on it anymore. And there are so many intrusions on the Internet these days. I know I’m sounding all doom and gloom but the original commenter makes a very good point. Wherever i go, be it the supermarket or whatever, the new pop music all sounds like one long song. A Lot of the pop music today sounds just like so many other bands. Of Course there is still great music being made but as another commenter said, you have to make the time to find it. The radio will not give it to you. If your not a strong person, the trends today would leave you depressed constantly. The reason most young people don’t see this point of view is because they didn’t live through the years when life was better. They were born into this truly upside down world, to them all the crap is normal. When they read about the past its just not enough for them to realize the difference. You really have to be older like me to really see that life these days is much harder than the old days. It used to be that if you made what your rent is, in one weeks working, than you would always have enough money to live. That definitely no longer applies. We are all busting our asses off just to pay the stupid bills! Everything is all wrong these days. Only the super rich are living the old dream, the rest of us are struggling. We all try to do the best we can but greed from all angles is constantly pushing us down. Just take a good hard look at the state our country is in. Its a mess. I’m a renter, my rent is 1500 a month for a lousy 2 bedroom townhouse, in 1980 this same house was 180 a month. Thank God i make enough to cover my rent but its just ridiculous. Own a house? Ya right!! One or two missed mortgage payments and your credit is toast for years! I’m done with the credit world altogether! You probably cant tell by the words I’m writing, but for the most part i am a happy person. I just utterly hate the way the world has evolved over the last 10 years or more. The Internet in my opinion is the culprit. Its causing so many stores in the real world to close. Its destroying books, real music Cd’s. Were getting conned that mp3s are the way to go even though an mp3 cuts out half the sound quality of the music to keep the file size small. Man, I could go on and on about this subject. If we could cut the line to the Internet, throw our cell phones away, get rid of 487 TV channels and just have the original 13, we as humans would learn to love each other again. There might even be another Woodstock!! We dont need to know about all the bull crap going on in other countries, we need to focus on US, and America! Unfortunatly it doesnt appear as though thats going to happen anytime soon and i am now the odd one who doesnt fit in this changed world. If i didnt have my wife and son to come home to and who give me all that the current world cant anymore, well i would not be here to write this.

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  3. The argument can be made whether or not the purpose of recorded music is even to ‘address the deeper issues’. Musicians can certainly choose to do that with their work, or not. One difference now in music from decades ago is that tech progress has pushed the central hub of youth culture away from the billboard charts and into social media and communication tech. The songs on the radio often ARE empty nourishment in many ways. However more people actually are making and recording and releasing quality music that many age ranges can enjoy than ever before. The problem is that there’s just no central station or billboard chart to discover them, no record company support for artists, artists often have to work day jobs and can’t afford to even tour. So it’s all on the ‘consumer’ to track them down, and many adults are simply too pressed for time, overworked and overstressed to navigate Spotify for hours every night looking for that great band who only has 300 fans! In short: good music can be found today, but people have to work much harder to find it, and nobody has the time!

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