d32123
Banned
So you honestly think that modern music has less quality and dynamism?
And even if that were somehow true (it isn't), why would it even matter? Why should other people conform to what you think they should and shouldn't like?
AHC: Keep Music Good
- Thread starter Armored Diplomacy
- Start date
So you honestly think that modern music has less quality and dynamism?
And even if that were somehow true (it isn't), why would it even matter? Why should other people conform to what you think they should and shouldn't like?
Nirvana? Jane's Addiction? Tribe Called Quest? Biggie Smalls? Sound Garden? Sonic Youth? Pearl Jam? Good early Weezer and Greenday? REM? Rage Against the Machine? Dream Theater?
Yeah, 90's music sucked.
I said began to stink. I'm not talking about those guys, and I made room for them in the context of what I was saying because I don't mean them. The 90s seemed to be like a last hurrah for quality, but things began to degrade as the decade wore on and seemed to have gotten to a disheartening point throughout this millenial period up to our 2010's era. I don't know where to point out when it began. It may have been when grunge faded away, or when the boy bands broke out, or when Red Hot Chile Pepper's started compressing their records (I think they were the first ones to really do that and to start the trend). Those good groups seemed to end (as it was with Nirvana), or if they still went, they were being surrounded by a less likable music culture on many fronts, and the new good bands that broke out seem to have been outnumbered by yuck.
Music today isn't dead or a total pile of junk junk, but it's not the quality it could be. And it's troubled.
d32123
Banned
People have probably been saying this since the stone age if not earlier. It's a neverending cycle. Older people in the 50's and 60's thought rock was horrible. Older people in the 70's thought disco was an abomination. Older people in the 80's and 90's thought metal was awful. Older people in the 2000's and 2010's now think the latest music is lacking in quality. I can already see my peers berating how awful the music and culture of people three or four years younger than us is. We glorify our music, our TV shows, etc. while vilifying the stuff that younger people watch and listen to. In 50 years I guarantee you that there will be some new form music that people from my generation will absolutely hate. We'll go on about how it isn't as quality as our hip hop and electronica was. We'll go on about how "well-tuned" human ears should view our taste in music as objectively better than theirs. We'll be just as wrong as you are right now.
Don't lie to yourself. There was not a 40-year period of continuous musical quality far from it. There was disco, and probably a hundred other things that we, born after they ended, have not ever heard of. It's just that nostalgic radio shows would rather forget that they exist. And there's still good music around, if you know where to look. If you honestly can't find any, here are some suggestions-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU4GXgaCFTI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NnCg4lSKVM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9zZus_1_ag
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVYQtv6uwDU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVYQtv6uwDU
As for how to improve the mainstream, my suggestion is to either have the music video either never be invented or never take off as they did. It removes a way to gain praise that is not being good, and an avenue for by which fame may be bought rather than earned.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU4GXgaCFTI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NnCg4lSKVM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9zZus_1_ag
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVYQtv6uwDU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVYQtv6uwDU
As for how to improve the mainstream, my suggestion is to either have the music video either never be invented or never take off as they did. It removes a way to gain praise that is not being good, and an avenue for by which fame may be bought rather than earned.
You can change music into something more similar to that of the past. Avoid Reagan's War on Drugs, which totally redefined black culture to that of the criminal. Like "Black is Beautiful" and the Black Power! slogans of the past, the oppressed minority embraced what they were stigmatized. Hip-hop and rap were originally a lot closer to rock, but with the War on Drugs they evolved in a very different direction.
You can't change survivor-selection bias though.
You can't change survivor-selection bias though.
Macragge1
Banned
You don't have a particularly strong grasp on how popular music worked back in the 'good old days'.
It does have less quality and dynamism. I linked to two video to briefly summarize that. That is a fact. That is due to artificial compression and limiting and loudness level increase in post-production.
And you shouldn't like it because you gain nothing from it. It is factually worse sounding than if they gave you the recording as high quality as when it was recorded to the studio tape. It's the equivalent of getting knock off Chinese bootleg brakes for your car. The quality of it is far below what the properly made version is.
I think that's a fair point, but I disagree with it here. It's the argument that something has quality, but you dislike it because it's not something you like and/or you're older. I disagree with it here because people who aren't fans of something will still admit it has a quality, but it's not for them. For example, older people who didn't care for the Beatles' music readily admitted they were good at what they did, they played well, had good harmony, and so on, even if it wasn't their type of music. I think all the problems I mentioned previously are totally valid. There are a lot of groups that are still good, but it seems like the they're getting outnumbered by this corporate cobbled concoction and not very good groups. For example, Big from Big and Rich can't sing a damn note, but they process his voice through a computer and sell a billion records. He's not good, but the industry forces him artificially to be good. The girl from Lady Antebellum is the same (or I think that's the group the girl I'm thinking of is part of). Again, can't sing well, but they modulate her voice with a computer. What that does too is drain the soul of the voice. If you're not a traditionally pretty voiced person, that can still lead you to have soul and force and feeling in your singing. Tom Waits has that, as does Dylan (even now when his voice is totally ripped to pieces from decades of smoking). So where it is good, it many times feels good artificially, like a high fructose groove. And I frankly think that's the biggest problem in music period. No matter what, it doesn't sound good anymore just from a production standpoint because they artificialize it. They autotune, compress, and do all these other things. And if you autotune as a style, like T-Pain or Cher when she did "Do You Believe", that's fine. But when you autotune because your singer can't even sing a note, that's not right.
And again, by well tuned, stop misquoting me. Well tuned means you can hear the basic dynamism of sound and quality of sound. And everyone can. It's not about whether you like Techno, Disco, Dubstep, Punk, Metal, Classical, or anything in between. It's about when they compress those, flatten then, cut off the dynamic tips of the mountains and depths of the valleys, and remove the vibrancy of the sound, which you don't need to do because everyone has the ability to turn up the sound on their own and, if they wanted to, compress it on their own. So they can offer you a pure form which sounds great, but they don't.
Again, video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do1FJ5BcqSY
And another:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcKDMBuGodU
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d32123
Banned
Have you ever wondered if some people actually enjoy "compressed music"? I happen to think that autotone is good when used in moderation. It's not factually worse. It's just different. You can choose to like it or not.
Why would someone enjoy compressed music in comparison to the music as uncompressed?
I'm not talking about the music itself. I'm talking about the production quality of the music, whatever it may be.
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d32123
Banned
For the same reason why you enjoy uncompressed music over compressed music, perhaps? It just sounds better to them. The diversity of cultural music around the world shows that no type of music or any sort of dynamism is inherently superior to another type.
I'm just thankful to have a chance to hear so many different kinds of music. I'm happy to have a lot of choices. Things were very different, when I was young (I was born in 1963). You didn't have so many choices. If there was some new style of music, made by people on the other side of the world, chances are, you'd never get to hear it, unless you could travel there. Today, there's something for everyone, no matter what you like. You don't have to listen to something just because everyone else happens to like it.
You confuse me, young Padawan.
It's doesn't sound better based on opinion. It sounds better because the quality is better as a pure fact. I can understand not caring either way, but I cannot understand being actively for worse sound production quality. I mean, I can if you're into old 78 shellac records or Edison Cylinders, where lesser quality comes with the territory, since that's a niche and something you consider cool and you're not going to get crystal clear quality. But these are modern recordings, made to sound modern, but compressed to all heck based on no limits of their medium (as CD's can store ungodly quality) but purely on a silly corporate notion which turns into a audio malevolence.
I mean, I have MP3s and MPEG-4s, which are fine for portable, and the latter is the highest you can get with portable music with our technology so far. But, for one thing, those are still of a higher quality that loudness war altered recordings because while there is compression to limit file size given the limits of those, there is not that artificial loudness level increase, so it's more of a more less full version of the original recording rather than a screaming and mumbling fat man version punching you in the ear. And that's fine for portable music (the less full version, not the fat man).
For another thing, though, I also have CDs and Vinyl, because I like to have a better quality version that I can use. And my CD's are quality and dynamic where I can find them as not part of the loudness war. My Led Zeppelin Mothership CD makes me sad because it is loudness war flattened and limited, which, along with my want to have the whole discography, made me go out and start buying the 1994 remasters.
If there were a way to get purest quality on an iPod, I'd do it. I don't think it'll be too many years until that is possible either. So I think it's perfectly reasonable to compress the sound for iPod. But, even when that is done, you still avoid the loudness war syndrome as I stated before because you're not actively artificially raising the levels to make it flatter and louder. You're just making a bonier version of the song. And the record labels have no reason to do that for a CD because the CD does not need to be compressed, and it certainly doesn't need that loudness increase and thus killing of the dynamism because people are either going to be listening to that CD or they're going to put it on their iPod, where they themselves can compress it it via their iTunes natural conversion process. And even then, they aren't doing what the labels are doing where they're bolstering loudness levels, and doing so massively. I can't fathom anyone who would not prefer the best sound possible, even if they can't get it.
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d32123
Banned
Case in point my taste for soca music and prog house. In the past, I never would have been able to even hear of yet alone acquire music like this. Now I can access it with a click of a button. Technology's not destroying music. It's helping promote it.
With the exception of Indigo Swing and a few others, there hasn't been anything worth listening to since the '80s. Never mind keeping good music, how about just keeping music period. Rap isn't music, it's just angry poetry. Hip-hop? <shudder> Pop? That's just as bad. I miss rock and roll!
I wonder how music would sound if disco didn't die so young. Come to think of it, aren't fads suppose to run in cycles? So when is disco coming back? Well if the undead ever riot, I'll be there with a flamethrower and a little radio blaring out Disco Inferno.
I wonder how music would sound if disco didn't die so young. Come to think of it, aren't fads suppose to run in cycles? So when is disco coming back? Well if the undead ever riot, I'll be there with a flamethrower and a little radio blaring out Disco Inferno.
d32123
Banned
It's funny because I feel the exact opposite. I don't like anything made before the 90's.
It's pretty cliche to say, but there's still plenty of good music out there, you just have to search for it. Not many people were listening to The Velvet Underground, Love, The Stooges, etc. in the 60's, punk was mostly under the radar (at least in the U.S.) in the 70's, I shouldn't even have to describe how ignored the alternative scene of the 80's was, etc. And that's just rock, there's too much good rap and electronic stuff out there (both mainstream and under the radar) to suggest that they're seriously responsible for any decline in music quality.
It's not like everything good goes unnoticed by the mainstream, either. Otherwise Arcade Fire wouldn't be winning a Grammy, Kanye's albums wouldn't be constantly debuting at #1 (let's not forget that as recently as 12 years ago, Kid A debuted at #1).
Of course everything that I'm defining as good music above is completely subjective and just my opinion, feel free to dismiss it as I'm very likely wrong.
It's not like everything good goes unnoticed by the mainstream, either. Otherwise Arcade Fire wouldn't be winning a Grammy, Kanye's albums wouldn't be constantly debuting at #1 (let's not forget that as recently as 12 years ago, Kid A debuted at #1).
Of course everything that I'm defining as good music above is completely subjective and just my opinion, feel free to dismiss it as I'm very likely wrong.