Oh my fucking god I just wanted to say how otherworldly bad music is right now (pop has always been stupid to varying levels but oh my fucking god they have raised the stakes). I just listened to a bunch of pop tracks from various genres and I literally think I’m about to die. Rock, country, indie, folk, hipster white rap, whatever you call home, is aggressively bad. It’s like Walmart made a gun that can shoot cum and blood and piss and shit and puke into your soul. We are so fucking fucked. I want to saw my own head off.
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Revisiting this after sleeping more and yeah, sorry for the temp lock. I see people in my inbox saying to keep it up, so keep it up we will.
Be the change you wish to see in the world, I await your album drop
Shoot cum piss blood shit puke? That’s a GWAR show
Wow, OP really just came in with a lukewarm take and didn’t respond to anyone
I disagree so full heartedly. Outside of what you hear on the radio, art and music is thriving in this burning dystopia. TikTok has tuned me into so many amazing artists, big and small who never would’ve had the chance to spread their art without it.
This just reads like ragebait lmao
Man some of the takes in this thread got me feelin like it’s two types of people: people who claim they ‘listen to a little bit of everything’ when that ‘little bit of everything’ is 31 radio-approved, Top-40 flavors of Post Malone, Aubrey Graham, Taylor Swift, and Billie Eilish; and people who actually go looking for and listen to acts that aren’t either white or gentrified
That and that one oldhead who apparently hasn’t engaged with music since they were still pressin vinyls; man, don’t you have 8-track tapes to be wheeling back up? Be kind, rewind headass
White people can make good music on occassion, at least earworms.
True! I do at least try to carve out spaces for the likes of John Darnielle, Aesop Rock, RA the Rugged Man, etc.-- it does happen; I’m just using ‘white or gentrified’ as shorthand for ‘watered down content for a stolen, watered down genre’ rly
We should probably stop doing that tbh
If you think someone’s skin colour affects their musical talent, you’re probably a bit racist
I think someone’s skin color predicts whether or not they’re an interloper in a stolen genre because that’s just what happens and what has happened with the western music industry since the fuckin forties. All your favorite rock n roll-- especially the British Invasion, since I see that .uk-- stole Black delta blues, popularized it, and typically didn’t pay a CENT to the progenitors of the licks and lyrics they ripped.
Shut the fuck up, man; take your piss elsewhere.
AND NOW THAT I’M THINKING ABOUT IT, you crackers built a WHOLE electronic genre off a stolen 8-bar drum loop that the progenitor of THAT drum loop took LITERAL FUCKING YEARS before ever saw a coin or a credit for it! But you wanna come here talm bout ‘racism’ when the only real difference between you and a “yank” is the accent you spit your bullshit with, and the quality of your teeth.
Also y’all need a quantize command to find a meter, you can’t cmv
Struggle Session: Wu Tang Clan stole from Asian culture and rap battles are just troubadour type shit.
LOL
MUUUUSTAAAAAAAAARD
both kenny and tyler the creater released albums this year and they’re both great so
Tyler’s album is gold, exactly how I wish to spend WW3
reddit moment
I do think music has declined, but it has nothing to do with the songs themselves but our (well more specifically Western) relationship to music. If you travel back in time to the late 19th century, music was a communal activity. If there was any large family gathering like a holiday, there was the expectation that there was at least one person who could play the piano well, one person who could play the violin well, and so on, and they would put their musical skill within the family gathering to play music. And even for people who don’t know how to play music, there was always singing, meaning that it wasn’t just one pianist wowing their relatives, but everyone creating music together, whether it’s some hymn or some festive song or some popular music of that time.
The first treatification of music, if you want to conceptualize it like that, was the separation between performers and the audience. You now have one group of people who played music and one group of people who passively consumed music. One consequence of this was the decline in music literacy among the general population. I’m not saying that most people knew how to read music way back in the day, but most people would’ve at least intuitively understand what a chord progression was or what transposing a melody meant. A lot of songs just hit differently when you actually know how to play a musical instrument or actually tried to create music before.
The second treatification of music, was the creation of pop music that displaced folk music. Parenti made this point that pop music isn’t actually popular music in the etymological sense of music of the people. Actual popular music is something like folk music. Some folk song that is exclusively played in a rural village passed on from generations to generations within that rural community is popular music. Pop music is just music imposed on the masses from the top by capitalists. In that sense, pop music will always suck and is supposed to suck. It’s one means in which capitalist realism gets cultivated and spread.
The third treatification of music, was streaming services in my opinion. Most people understand on a basic intuitive level that pop music is worthless slop. Since the impulse to create music, like all other artistic impulse, is inherent in humanity, people will naturally try to get around pop music slop through the creation of indies. Streaming services are a monkey paw because a consequence of these services is that it can cater to a person’s idiosyncratic tastes so well that it leads to hyperspecificity. The end result is someone has a hyperspecific collection of indies that no one else has heard of, leading to further atomization. It also propagates more capitalist realism, or more specifically, faith in the infallibility of the market. “Music is now better than ever because you can find all these good indies.” That’s faith in the idea that if a commodity is being sold on the market, the inherent qualities of that commodity will eventually cause it to take its rightful share of the market (ie good commodities will float to the top while bad commodities will sink to the bottom).
Does pre-treatified music still exists in the West? Yes. There’s basically two musical traditions: one is religious music and by religious music I mean shit like Gregorian chants and hymns. They come packaged with their own bullshit that is pretty self-evident. The other is sport chants. I would say that sport chants represent the only authentic form of pre-treatified music that currently exists in the West. Sport chants are very much music even if they aren’t conceptualized this way (and the reason why they’re aren’t conceptualized this way is because precisely sport chants haven’t been treatified). The basic definition for what constitutes music is that it’s an audio experience where rhythm is important. And sport chants very much have rhythm to them.
Sport chants are a completely communal experience with chants being passed down from generation to generation, they belong to no single individual but the people themselves, they are an experience where the performers and audience are one, there’s a huge degree of physicality to it like everyone stomping on the stadium at the same time to create rhythm. It’s an authentically human experience and no amount of weird chord progression and time signature, quirky juxtaposition of musical instruments, or topical lyrics from some indie no one has ever heard of will change that.
This is real music, and music will be good again when the rest of music gets back to the level of sport chants.
Sports are half a step removed from facism
Doesn’t adequately factor in music made by subjects of empire, or non-pop forms of genres stolen from said subjects of empire. You fundamentally left out underground rap here, which tracks directly back to slave chants and hymns. Or are you going to tell me that the (admittedly manifold) fuckeries of mainstream ‘rappers’ represents all emcees, real and fraudulent from the dawn of the genre til now?
The truth is that I don’t know enough about how Black people experience music on a communal level vs an individual level to compare by virtue of well, not being Black. Speaking as someone who’s not Black looking from the outside, I would say that Black people have preserved the more communal aspects of music, which would push back against treatification, which is about turning a once communal artistic activity into a completely consumption-focused individual one. In general, Black people and most POC communities are more communal than white people who are thoroughly atomized.
There are certainly elements that plainly points to a more communal understanding like how the performer/audience divide is either non-existence or a lot blurrier. You can’t really DJ in a hermetically sealed bubble, club music exists within the context of a communal activity (ie dancing with others), and so on. This means that music isn’t exclusively conceived as a commodity to be consumed. The fact that Black music has a strong regional component to it is also clues to it preserving more communal aspects. Regionalism exists because (most) Black musicians aren’t fully pushing out commercial products tailored to the lowest common denominator nor are they completely atomized musicians producing music from their garage by themselves. They exist as a community of musicians within a locale, which leads to the music they produce having a particular sound and vibe. This regionalism is also reinforced by the (Black) audience gravitating towards music from their region.
Now that I think about it, hip hop in its original conception during the 70s was completely untreatified. It ultimately came from the Black grassroots, even if the final package was done by a particular Black DJ, and you couldn’t easily sell hip hop because hip hop as a cohesive whole constituted four elements, one of which was technically illegal. The treatification began when those four elements were split up into atomized parts, and those atomized parts were then further commodified so that they can be packaged and sold to white audiences who don’t understand the cultural context from where they came from anyways.
I guess my initial post failed to consider how Black musicians have tried to consciously create untreatified music, with hip hop being the most recent example, and how a lot of the drive towards treatification has a racial component as well, namely music being watered down for the sake of being sold to atomized white audiences.
I just listened to a bunch of pop tracks
The charts have literally never been reliably good, it is useful to remember this imo. I think “musics” generally is better now than it has been because there’s a very healthy amount of new music outside of the Billboard Hot 100 ass mainstream.
Green Day put out a new album and it’s pretty good
That’s a surprise, their recent stuff has been tough
The secret is that no one listens to new music anymore, just what pops up in their feed.
You: despairing that the top 5 tracks on Spotify are soulless garbage
Me: clicking random folders on random soulseek accounts and finding nothing but bangers
GNX, Chromakopia, ALLIGATOR BITES NEVER HEAL, fym “music sucks so bad rn”
RIGHT??? I’ve had the best year for music in a while. I’m eating so good. All my favorite artists have released amazing work this year. Megan is glowing (i saw her live this year, i love her with all my heart) , Doechii dropped a life-changing album, Glorilla is having her moment, and Kendrick has cemented his dominance, oh i am blessed!!
All my favorite projects been dropping. Doechii, Kendrick, Tyler continuing his run of growth and evolution, Zeal and Ardor even blessed us with a new tape this year and that’s where I’ve been at when I need a metal fix. I fundamentally can’t take anybody whining about the state of music serious this year; like either you livin under a rock or you whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite
Oooo oooo zeal and ardor mentioned holy shit. My bf showed me them and I’m into them more now lol. Erghhhdjekdmwmxmwmdkwkdw Come on Down and all three parts of Sacriligium are bangersssss but my fav is Built on Ashes omg it’s so good.
Oh I fuckin LOVE THEM, shamefully it was a white homie of mine who put me onto them in the first place with the beckoning statement of “what do you think would’ve happened if escaped slaves turned to the antagonist of the slavemaster’s religion, instead of the slavemaster’s god?” and I been here ever since
For me, I think my faves are “Ship On Fire” and “Death to the Holy”, but Come On Down is such an infectious track. Like, it makes me want to intone with a crowd, and it’s rare metal gets me in that mood anymore
I think your homie and my bf read the same something because that’s almost word for word what I got told lol.
Ship on fire is fire fr fr!! The bit where its goes “we gotta seven different letters in seven rows” but it’s the second time and it does like a mini rise and drop/kicks back in (I dunno) at 1:23 kfdkwkdkwkdkw I wait all song for that bit.
I think I’ve grown to love it so much cos it comes on right after row row which has the sickest breakdown omfg.
Mmmm all the metal i like I’ve gotten mostly from him at the start of our friendship way before our relationship became a thing and like I know what I like so it really takes something special to make me listen to metal again and these guys kinda did it cos it was so new and fresh and not just angry cringe ass white dudes crying about the man and women while playing the saaaaame song again and again.
it really takes something special to make me listen to metal again
Real as fuck, ion’t fuck with metal or its listeners like I used to anymore for fear of running face-first into Varg-adjacency(ironically, this is how JPEGMAFIA fell out of my top five) out of them and losing all my respect for the people who put me on to smth; so Zeal and Ardor was a refreshing change of pace for when I was put onto em
Can you speak on the jpegmafia thing a bit? I like his music but don’t really follow him as a person.
Saaaaammmeee my bf insists it’s not all metal heads and I shouldn’t tarnish everyone with the same brush which is absolutely fair and true but in terms of metal heads you meet at gigs and out and about its like never a normal person.
It’s like there’s always one form of bigotry if not multiple. I’m sure a lot of them think they inclusive but it’s always “we don’t care who or what you are” milquetoast shit and when that’s coming from predominantly cis white straight men it’s always feels like a smokescreen to hide the fact they’ll have some vile ass take on one type of minority.
Thats how it always feels to me, even if your more qualified, more successful, more literate and more educated than a white male metal head, your always a little girl to them in a man’s world that thinks she gets how it all works and it boils my brain I swear.
Aaaaa I’m venting lmao. Does any of that track from your experience?
Loads are lovely so obviously I don’t wanna just slam metal fans since I’m technically one maybe I guess but like erghhhhh
Zeal and Ardor even blessed us with a new tape this year
I’ve been meaning to get into metal, I mostly listen to rap and like sad queer pop music. also since I’ve been less of a shut-in I’ve been invited to all sorts of local music scenes, like if you’re out in the community you’re gonna get invites to cool stuff all the time right away. (i have to limit how often i can go out due to over stimulation from autism though.) its very easy to find local music and theres always something im not even that social. i can’t even begin to relate to this take there so much good music both local and popular.
And that’s in the second half of the year like…
Boomer ass take and I’m nearly 40 lol
👆👆👆👆
