AWKWARD ZOMBIE

It wasnt made when the Baby Boomers or Generation X were in their younger days, which makes it garbage apparently.

Honestly, not to be "that guy", but in my opinion music these days, while it can be good and catchy, is lacking a lot of the edge and authenticity that more classic music had. Between the phasing out of real instruments, intense vocal modulation and over editing, and just the corporate, pre-packaged feeling of a lot of it, it lacks great deal of soul. Not to say there wasn't fucking garbage back in the day that wasn't just as cynically capitalist and bland. I think a lot of people forget that we now have a pretty different perspective on music of yesteryear, considering only the exceptionally good stuff as survived the test of time.

Also I feel there just aren't as many genuine artists any more. People like Michael Jackson or Elvis or Leonard Cohen or any number of the great musical innovators have been replaced with more of the chart topping, lowest common denominator musicians we have today.

I don't want this to be taken like I think people are wrong for liking what they like. If you like something it don't fuckin matter when it was made or who made it to me. It's all subjective really. People like what they like and that's just fine with me! I just wish there were more innovators and "self made" musicians today to point to and say "Yeah, they're doing something awesome."

I listen to Susumu Hirasawa, myself. I can't understand a word of it, but most of his songs are so soothing.

There's something I can't quiiiite place my finger on about the Classics that makes me unable to really enjoy them.

I need new headphones since, unlike Mom, I'm not fond of everyone in the next state over being forced to listen to my choice in music.


Mom made me listen to metal and grunge while growing up. It was loud.



I am so annoyed that I didn't make a consistent paragraph in this post.

People have been calling modern music shit while praising older stuff for literal decades and I don't think that's going to be stopping any time soon, honestly. My dad and stepmum tend to put on music channels playing stuff from their youth before they go to bed and there are all these classics playing that they said their parents thought was terrible back in the day. Hell, my dad even said he barely knew anyone who actually liked Queen in his youth. It's pretty interesting to sit with them during it actually, one time my dad was telling me about when people started using synthesisers in music and he'd listen to it in his room with his headphones on having his mind completely blown because it was stuff people had never heard before and he had no idea how they were making those sounds. Neat stuff.

Anyways, on topic: I'm visiting my brother for the weekend and he has not one, but two flatmates who set alarms for the morning but never seem to actually be around to turn them off. One of them's ignorable enough, it's just a phone alarm, but the other one? It's so loud I could hear it from the bathroom and I legit thought it was a fire alarm or something at first. It wasn't until I started heading back to my brother's room that I realised that nope, it's coming from some other guy's room and it's really freakin' loud. And it's been going off for the past half hour with no sign of stopping.

Skype decidin' that it ain't wanna let me talk at no friends.

You do realize that artists like Michael Jackson and Elvis were just as much corporate cheddar plays as anything you might see today, right? Even bands who are considered extremely anti-establishment like Sex Pistols were really just cynical marketing experiments. The true innovators are never the ones who become famous, the famous ones are the musicians who are good at marketing and building on what other obscurer artists have made.

Oh god by no means am I suggesting that people like MJ and Elvis weren't literal cheddar machines for corporations. While that's entirely true, you can still look at MJ and see that he was still the creative mind behind his own music. His songs referenced his life experience and he wrote and performed them himself. He was a true talent and was frequently (and to this day) taken advantage of by people who want to use them for their own purposes. Elvis was a bit less of an innovator, and made his way up honestly on the back of other people's songs (like "Hound-Dog"), but he was still a very unique stage presence, and had a lot of his own art and ideas on display. He was still, in my opinion, more of a musician than a lot of the bands and musicians today.

If you really want to talk about an uncompromising musician then still I mentioned Leonard Cohen, but there's also Freddie Mercury who attained quite a bit of acclaim (despite Queen never being the highest tier band and he had an uncompromising belief in peace and love that showed through his music. He's just a great musical figure. I just feel like I haven't seen any true innovators in the mainstream in recent years, especially because of the shift of the business from competition between individuals to competitions between businesses. Due to this a lot of singers and songwriters can get quite derivative and music as a whole becomes a bit too bland and hook-focused. There aren't a lot of unique messages or styles anymore.

A lot of this is probably the same reason that Macklemore exploded in popularity for a year or so (at least, on the U.S. west coast. I wasn't anywhere else in that time frame, so I am unsure.) Sure, most of it may not be particularly inspired (re: song about buying random shit in a goodwill store), but it's a different kind of not-particularly-inspired than what the radio standard has been for a few years.
It's the same reason that dweeby kids insist east Asian pop/rock is so much better than the U.S. radio. It's not that it's any less overproduced or overplayed or manufactured a lot of the time, it's that the tropes of that music are just different enough from the "normal" radio sounds (from our perspective) that it seems much more cool and novel to people who crave a wider variety of patterns in their music. The same thing applies to young people who listen to what are currently called classics (although the fact that usually only the good ones are still played also helps, as Vax said.)

However, then you have older people who are beyond their horizon-widening mental stage, and they don't necessarily want patterns other than what's familiar (why old people seem to never change their preferred genre). They dislike the new radio music because it doesn't follow the mental and auditory patterns that their brains have been trained to respond to. And the change that triggers this can be anything from different harmonic structure, more complicated rhythm and heavier percussion, or a different preferred vocal timbre.

When it comes to criticizing Top 40 stations/styles, people have to remember that while the vast majority of people enjoy music, a much, much smaller portion of those people have any real aptitude for music. That means that they are going to enjoy what is easily digestible, which is dictated by the more familiar sounds of their demographic.

Of course, all of this is only relevant if the disgruntled people in question are actually criticizing music, and not just falling to the ever-popular first world passtime of pretending to hate anything that's popular.

I am dying.
It is the only explanation.
Like, I have this odd soreness in my throat, and my sinuses are, like, stuffed up with this strange stuff that I can only temporarily clear with the aid of a box of tissues.
I also seem to have a strange increase in face temperature.
And there are these aches and pains in my head that don't want to go away.

I am also slightly affected by chill.

I am dying.

I had tonsillitis once that kinda felt like all that.
Though all of those things seem to be common ailments among various things.

The forum software has banned the IPs we have at work

Common?
Nope. Totally dying.
I had a good run.
Goodbye, beautiful world.

When all you want is a decent playthrough of a game, and all you can find are wannabe Lets Play idiots who thinks everyone wants to hear their inane running commentary. I'm here to see the fucking GAME, you slackjawed dullard, I dont care about what you think about it.

From January to April, I look at all these interesting new things being released and say "Gee, I want that for my birthday"

Then, I try to make up a birthday list, and my mind goes completely blank.

It never fails.

Same. Either that or I think of everyone's budget