I've always been curious about the changes in music, some people are like 'I was born in the wrong generation' in regards to songs.

I know that music definitely changes as time passes: Music from 1900 to 2019, it's pretty easy to see the changes in what's popular.

Obviously it evolves, but does it 'objectively' get better or worse, or is it just a matter of preference?

 

There's always good and bad music in every generation. The reason everyone gets on about "Back then it was better" is because only the good songs survive long enough for us to hear 'em.

 

I once saw a quote that really resonated with me, and I can't for the life of me remember who said it: "There's no such thing as bad music, there's just music you don't like." Preference is everything when it comes to any art form.

Top 5 movie for me, and such a good parallel to this.

 

Untrue, there is bad music.

There are in fact two kinds of people. People who like good music, and people with no taste.

 

I think we're in a golden age of music that could be seldom rivaled. The availability of musical knowledge and tools has never been larger, nor has it ever been easier to find the audience that does enjoy the work you create. Whatever genre you enjoy, there is modern music being made in that style.

If you like swing music, Gregorian chants, classical, baroque, OG rap, whatever it may be, there are fellow fans helping you curate. Popular music goes through trends, sure, but as a body of art it has never been better to be a music fan or creator.*

*Exceptions being made for some other areas such as prolificity and availability of live shows, etc.

 

Yeah there’s really no such thing as objectively bad music, you’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise.

Sure, music might not fit to your tastes as it evolves, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad, just outside of your own tastes.

Arguments that music has become worse because of its decrease in complexity are bullshit. Because even if that were the case, complexity doesn’t define what constitutes good music.

I like bringing up that four chords video a lot because the type of people that share it are the worst kinds of people when it comes to unnecessary musical pretentiousness.



People often look at this video as proof that “all pop music is the same” and therefore it’s all bad. But really it just comes down to the fact that these four chords sound nice and are easy to work with.

And nothing’s wrong with that.

Because if you take the four chords by themselves and play them in order without anything else: major 1, major 5, minor 6, major 4 it sounds like nothing.

Why?

Because they’re just a convenient way of harmonising that fits with most melodies and doesn’t exactly define the song.

Most songs don’t use these four specific chords, but use the same idea. They use repeating chord progressions because it’s in the nature of that kind of music, and it has been for quite a while.

And if you use that as your metric popular music pretty much hasn’t changed at all over the last century, so the argument falls flat that the music from fifty years ago is better than that of today if you use that as your justification.

As Johnny said, music can’t really be objectively bad. There’s music you like, and there’s music you don’t like. But there’s others that like the music you don’t like and there’s others that don’t like the music you like. Music hasn’t gotten worse, it’s just changed as tastes have changed, and will continue to do so. But the essence of it is still there. Maybe your specific tastes might be for music from decades ago, but it doesn’t mean that today’s music is objectively worse, just that it’s different.

Saying that music in general is deteriorating in quality is just way to vent your insecurities and feel special by liking different things than other people.

So fucking what?

 

Oh really. Modernist classical music is uniformly terrible.

 

cos schoenberg and stravinsky were complete idiots who had no idea what they were doing?

 

I had a rant about this on discord a while ago. I know plenty of people who will disagree with this but MCR's The Black Parade is comparable with 'Queen'.

Stay with me.

I hated My Chemical Romance growing up because it was cool to hate them. That's what happens these days, it becomes cool to hate music so you can fit in.

A lot of what people call "classic" is simply music they listened to over and over when they were young and they slam anything after that.

Because I liked 2000s pop punk my kneejerk reaction was to hate Post Malone. Turns out Post Malone isn't bad at all.

Recently I listened to The Black Parade for the first time in around ten years with far more practical experience in reviewing music and that album is nothing short of a masterpiece.

There's no such thing as bad music, just your own pretentiousness.

 

Point of order: There is most definitely objectively bad music. For example, the shit played by amateur musicians in their garage on a mistuned guitar that they're making up on the spot, which is all discordant and janky as shit.

There's most definitely subjectivity when it comes to what music is better than others, but claiming that all music is objectively good is just a flat out lie.

 

On a mostly related point I saw an advert for that Beatles film a couple months ago (where only 1 guy remembers the Beatles and releases the whole back catalogue) and it got me thinking on how that might actually go down in the real world.

Suffice to say, my version was way less optimistic than the film.

I reckon that if someone did get exclusive knowledge of some band that everyone else forgot, be it Queen, or The Beatles or whatever and started to launch the song today... no one would really notice and even fewer would care.

It's not that the music is any worse, but the timing isn't right. It doesn't fit modern tastes, some of it is a bit less polished than modern takes, nothing would push the boundaries and critics would have a field day lampooning the 'tragic nostaglia trip' 'a throwback album to a great period of musical history best left unmolested etc.'

This being my conclusion lead to some interesting leaps of logic on music as a whole.

Music is no worse with age. Modern stuff is not objectively better than older songs, but, and this is a big but, in order to get the full emotional connection and experience from a song, you need to understand the context.

Why is it new, what's groundbreaking, does it make commentary on issues of the day you care about, does it resonate with your own life experiences etc.

This is easy for music of the moment, but harder for older stuff or stuff from other cultures. Further to this, I'd posit that whilst someone of my generation can appreciate bands like The Who etc, there is a degree of generational disconnect that means they'll never resonate with me in the way they did, and do, with my father.

 

Speaking of the Beatles, they're a good case study. Some of their music is really great. Some of it is truly terrible (namely their 'stoned out of their goddamn minds' phase).