One thing I'll add is that we're at our greatest point of exposure to the worst music of our era. Every era has a surplus of low-quality, unoriginal, or maddeningly trend-focused music that gets a lot of exposure. In time these lackluster records will be filtered out and mostly forgotten. In time people will look back on this period with a fondness for the great songs of the era that have endured and forget about the works that failed to differentiate themselves.
As such, it's easy for us to look back on the music of the last 70 years and think that things were better then because we don't have daily exposure to the lackluster songs of those past decades.
Perhaps there's a case to be made that these older songs are still listened so much today, even by those who weren't alive back then, because by some abstract measure of soul satisfaction they were better? I'm careful with this hypothesis as I don't want to be unfair with newer generations of artists, but I don't think it's so crazy to consider either.
For example, the last 10 years or so have been greatly influenced by social media and fear of saying the wrong thing and being "cancelled". Of voluntarily silencing ourselves. How wouldn't that impact the artistic output of this generation? Couldn't this be a reason for a lot of modern music "lacking a sense of personality"?
I feel with social media we have gone pretty far into investing in appearances alone, and I think I'm not alone in this belief. Maybe the next years will be marked by more and more people sharing a wish to return to the overlooked authenticity which we used to call "art with a soul".
This is not a knock on rap rather a nod that it appears so influential that it has a mandatory bridge in the middle of almost every "new release". In the end everything that I listen to seems to blend together.
https://www.discogs.com/release/930684-Various-Grind-2-All-N...
to realize how excellent it is if you heard the beginning of the first track and thought "this sounds exactly the same as every other 'House' track".
I wonder how much of that is just lack of familiarity with the new artists/songs. My own music taste is kind of stuck in the Prog rock, early electronic, and Krautrock eras, and I can easily tell you within 5 seconds or so whether I'm listening to Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, Jethro Tull, or Rush.
But, if you were to hand me 20 songs from modern day pop or rap artists, let me listen and study them for as long as I wanted, I probably couldn't correctly identify any set of other songs by the same artists. Some of their voices literally (in the actual meaning of literally) sound the same to me. I'm not sure how much of it is just a lack of an ear for modern pop singers, and how much of it is autotune actually making everyone's voices sound identical.
I think autotune and Top 40 charts are too often used as a scapegoat by people that simply became too lazy to seek out stuff on their own without first being filtered through a marketing campaign. The radio or the front page of any given streaming service is designed to appeal to the mass audience, so why would you be surprised as a fan of more outsider sensibilities when it doesn’t immediately represent your niche tastes? You’d be more likely to find that type of stuff in a music store, printed review, or some random blog not too long ago. Now, that may as well be discogs or wikipedia, and the internet is much more powerful today as a resource than the record store of old. I feel like many people are more bitter over their music taste not being socially validated by the mainstream rather than just enjoying what they like and being content with the circumstance that it’s “not for everybody.” TBH I feel like it’s more desirable as an artist to have a dedicated following of fewer number than being one that’s involuntarily shoved down everyone’s throat. Most modern pop and rap is as ubiquitous as it is because of enormous label astroturfing and marketing, just as genres like New Jack Swing or Nu-Metal or whatever was dominating MTV back when that was a 'relevant' source of music discovery. It's always been commercial! So it doesn't do much good to bemoan the corporate machine's aggressive shoveling of its corporate properties, just tailor your sources of discovery to places that better suit your interests if the lowest effort option isn't doing it for you.
To me, people that have a chip on their shoulder about autotune are frankly just projecting some other abstract frustrations and nostalgia over a nonexistent time where all music culture was contained to TV and radio. It wasn’t! Do some old fashioned digging and go deeper than just the surface, you’ll find plenty of good new stuff and a thriving music community if you actually try.
It's easier for someone to be say, a fan of folk punk while located somewhere without a scene. Why does that person care about background music in a random place? Why should they?
Some bleeding edge zoomer culture hyper pop, 100 gecs, for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PWMiy4RysI
If you go to a gas station or similar place that has background music you can get people into conversations about 70s, 80s, even 90s music but for people on the street modern music is a cipher. They can't tell you who is singing, they even struggle to tell if it is country music or rap.