For example, look at the current top of the Billboard Hot 100.
1.) Easy On Me - Adele. Adele's music is always far from empty. She is a true artist.
2.) Stay - Kid Laroi. This may not be your type of music and there are certainly a lot vocal effect here, but there's a lot going on here rhythmically and melodically. The chord structure is also pretty unusual.
3.) We Don't Talk About Bruno - Lin-Manuel Miranda. LMM is a genius, but it's a Disney song, so let's skip this one.
4.) Glass Animals - A rare indie hit to make it to make it to the top, this one is arguable the "simplest" song on this list. It still feels like it has character and that the artist has put their stamp on it.
5.) Shivers - Ed Sheeran. If Sheeran's music feels tedious now, it might just be because his music has been at the top of the charts virtually non-stop for more than a decade. Still it's hard to deny his talent or argue that his songs are simple musical drivel.
It's fair to say that MOST of what is produced is derivative drivel, but I would say that's probably true of pretty much any era. There were tedious grunge artists, tedious metal artists, tedius disco artists, tedious arena rock artists, etc.
Funnily enough, there is an '80s revival going on with some modern pop right now, but again then you would have to compare the original '80s new wave, synth-pop music to it and not '80s rock.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-52109397
As far as why there isn't as many modern rock top hits to compare to '80s ones... well, this decade didn't kill rock. That's a historical phenomenon that dates back to the 2000s or so.
Should have picked something more synthy like "I Ran" A Flock of Seagulls or A-Ha. Those are at least similar, and worth conceding their superiority to. But even that's still incomplete. The Ed Sheeran song has certain R&B beats and a sound that wasn't really present until like the late '90s imo. The Glass Animals song is even more R&B and is literally about loss and longing, so would be flattened by any song that's upbeat, completely incongruous from "Jump". Not too dissimilar, "Stay" is a mopey teenage relationship song, and thus would have a certain angsty lower energy.
So, not even the wrong genres, but wrong emotional beats entirely.
There are probably better, higher-energy, modern songs to compare with "Jump." Here are #19 and #20 in the current top 40.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVaG6adE2mA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Oq4heYOdQ0 (an actual rock band, from Italy)
But again, because rock has ceased to be the influential force it used to be, comparisons are going to be very imprecise. And Top 40 itself is a snapshot, not necessarily the best an era has to offer. For reference, here are some pop songs in the past couple years that have been bigger hits both in terms of the charts and the critics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NRXx6U8ABQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUVcZfQe-Kw
It's most ironic that this discussion began with you touting "Jump", yet your reluctance to continue the discussion betrays the spirit of the song: "You've got to roll / With the punches to get to what's real." Eddie would be most disappointed.
There has never been a time in history when more great music was being created and made accessible to the masses than today. And I say that as a crotchety jazz nerd.
Going through those 100 songs, pop music doesn't seem to be noticeably worse than 20 years ago - except when it comes to the sheer volume of mumble rap. It stands out to me as uncharacteristically bad/monotonous/derivative/etc (and I say this as someone who was a big hip-hop fan all through the 80s/90s/2000s).
I don't think it's just a matter of taste, either, because I definitely don't like most of the chart (Adele/country/indie/etc), but I would never say it's lacking in musicality. Mumble rap is just irredeemably bad.
I listen to old music because it bangs and it’s real. I feel like this article posits a perceived problem and then makes no attempt to read between the lines to understand why no one is listening to a garbage product.
Forget complexity or originality, just use the same patterns as the last 10 years.
Modern production can be good some people pull it off, but not without singers who sing in a similar cadence and timbre. People who want to sound like someone else rather than being influenced by other people's sounds.
Out with the new back to tye new-old?
> Some people—especially baby boomers—tell me that this decline in music is simply the result of lousy new songs. Music used to be better, or so they say. The old songs had better melodies, more interesting harmonies, and demonstrated genuine musicianship, not just software loops, Auto-Tuned vocals, and regurgitated samples.
In fact the second part of the article (after that paragraph) is much more interesting than the first. It argues that the music industry tries very hard to bury and hide genuinely new music (and ways of making it), by fear of cannibalizing the old (?), and that it is killing itself in the process.
There is no particular reason for that except that the 20 yo artists have to try something new and they are the models of the 10 / 15 yo.
What's interesting is that the new models don't seem so hugely more interesting than the best of the old ones. Maybe young people got wiser, maybe the music industry got enough material to play safe, minimize costs and keep advertising and selling the old tunes.
I read it a bit more nuanced: that the industry is failing to discover and promote new music because it's too preoccupied with making "safe bets" to profit from old music, and part of that is using lawsuits to defend it against plagiarism, which has the side effect of actively stifling new music.
For reference check this: https://youtu.be/jzgLavD4vD4 vs this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFDOSIecALU
> September 29, 1961 / 20-Year-Old Singer Is Bright New Face at Gerde’s Club / By ROBERT SHELTON / https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/r...
> Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.
To be absolutely clear, more people preferred Dylan's songs as a cover because, from that same 1961 review, "Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the “husk and bark” are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs." Or from his Wikipedia entry: 'Many early songs reached the public through more palatable versions by other performers, such as Joan Baez'
That you don't recognize it as talent seems therefore more a matter of personal taste. That same review ends with "But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth."
Your reference is to a 2016 recording of 'All Along the Watchtower'?? Surely you should juxtapose Dylan's performance with that of Hendrix, recorded only 6 months later than Dylan's.
But even then, when I think of "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", I think of Dylan, not The Byrds or another cover.
In any case, the comparison seems rather pointless. I like Disturbed's cover of "The Sound of Silence" better than the original. That doesn't mean Simon and Garfunkel didn't have a shred of musical talent.
Bob Dylan couldn’t make proper songs. That’s enough HN for me today.
Their definition of "new music" is to blame. Most of this "new music" is cookie-cutter junk that is artificial, derivative, simplistic, on-the-grid, auto-tuned, four-chord (or less) drivel. The labels intentionally manipulate the "top 200 tracks" so that this is nearly the only thing that makes it to the charts.
The young audience has had enough of it. They have streaming. They don't listen to the "top 200" anymore. Their tastes have broadened not only into new music which is not being tracked by the "top 200" but they are mining the music of older eras which is, by almost any measure, superior. It's not auto-tuned. It has a dynamic tempo because it's not beat-matched in a DAW. It often has complex chord progressions and key changes. This is also true of a lot of the "new music" the charts don't track.
And this is why the Grammys are also irrelevant. No one cares. We don't listen to that crap.