If that’s the song I think it is, I can’t play it right now, then lyrically it would be at the level of most rap. Just add in some n words and you’ve got a hit.
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I love Buddy Holly.
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Its an odd choice to kill nazis to, thats for sure.
Prolly the last time popular music was good.
I notice lots of young people walking around in the streets or the beach blasting this shit.
I didn’t even know what it was, it’s so shitty that at some point I asked some of them what that shit they were listening was called.
Reggaeton.
I heard the name before, but never knew what it really was.
The only style of music I can think of that is equally as shit is Brazilian ‘‘Funk’’.
You need zero talent to come up with this crap. Sid Vicious and his unplugged bass was Mozart compared to this.
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It’s completely derivative and most of it sounds the same. When the “music” is digitally created and not made by human musicians, this is what happens. The lyrics to this song are retard level. It has the incredibly creative line, because of your ass, I like to watch you leave. This kind of music is cheap to make and easy to create. It’s only successful because of how music is marketed and sold: digital downloading. It’s like ordering fast food and lasts just as long. Kids will download it because it’s new, accessible (no record store, it goes straight to your phone) and affordable. They will listen to it until the next shiny thing comes around. No one will be playing it a year later, let alone decades. It’s just a continuous assembly line of “music” which really makes these people content creators more than artists.
I don’t know about dumber. 80’s hair metal was pretty dumb. But less talented for sure. Popular music complexity and skill started declining in the 90’s with grunge and all three of its chords landing on top charts consistently.
I like 90’s grunge, but those guys couldn’t hold a candle to Eddie Van Halen, Metallica, Stevie Ray Vaughan and many of the musicians before them, who could never write or perform anything as complex as Beethoven or Wagner.
And I may take the Beethoven comment back as many of the pre-grunge musicians were classically trained and playing “down” for commercial viability.
Now it seems like everything is synthesized and quality controlled via computers. In a tale of two concerts, I went to back to back shows, granted this was years ago. One was a music festival someone gave me tickets for and the lineup was a bunch of currently popular bands. It was alright. High energy, people were in to it et cetera, but the performances just seemed off. Notably “live”.
The following weekend I saw ZZ Top and Willie Nelson.
Willie was fucking terrible, I hate to say it. Guy was ancient even 10-15 years ago.
ZZ Top was phenomenal. Also old, and you could hear it their voices as they worked through some of the signature ZZ vocal sounds, but their timing and talent could’ve easily been a studio recording (it wasn’t. There were a couple missed notes that made it obvious). Metallica is the same way live.
I don’t really identify with a lot of the songs out now so I guess they’re “dumb”, but my parents hated Nirvana too, so. But talent is definitely on the decline.
Hit a blues bar in New Orleans or Houston and you’ll hear better talent than top artists out there.
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Believe me, most younger people can’t identify with any of these songs. Taylor Swift is a billionaire in her 30s dating a football player. She’s the prom and homecoming queen at No Ass High. Beyonce is in her 40s. None of their fans can identify with them.
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“When we started the band, it was more like a guitar solo was a mark of the old guard. I was a virtuoso player, so it was very frustrating for me”: Andy Summers wishes he’d let loose on more solos in The Police – and blames punk for holding them back’’
My father didn’t like Nirvana either but he was/is a bit of a guitar snob and a fan of 70s/80s guitarists like Ritchie Blackmore or Yngwie. Cobain’s guitar chops just didn’t do it for him.
On the other hand he appreciated Linkin Park for their melodies (not Shinoda’s rapping though) so go figure.
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My first concert in 1986 was Deep Purple. Blackmore was awesome. That was an era of really solid bands, where the whole line up was just bonkers. There must have been a coordination of sorts because a ton of guys from Dio, Rainbow, Ozzy, Sabbath and Deep Purple all played interchangeably among each other, and a ridiculous studio/farm team.
I never really like the virtuoso types like Malmstein or Satriani. They’re guitar players guitarists. Like a couple levels deeper into playing than the average listener can really dig.
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Love the 50s
This keeps popping up. Not sure when she said this so… not sure music getting dumber is anything new.
“I’ve never been to a strip club but I turn on MTV and see in every single video what it must look like… if you have to work so hard at appearing sexy, then perhaps you weren’t that sexy after all, perhaps your music has no sensuality, perhaps your music is dull, indeed, that you have no choice but to pelvic thrust your way through a pop video in a leather bikini in order to detract from its mediocrity… it might be advisable to do something else.”
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She just doesn’t understand the struggle that people in the music industry with no talent face.
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Bah Baah Baaah
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I recently heard Beyonce’s cover of Jolenne. Swing and a miss IMO, but a lot of people seemed to like it. To me, it misses what made the song great, which is vulnerability. She changed the lyrics to make it a bad bitch type song about herself, which is a complete opposite of the original.
If Eddie were alive I bet he’d disagree with you. He was pretty good friends with Jerry Cantrell from AiC. They learned from each other. Grunge wasn’t a great platform for shredding on the guitar, but I think if you listen to AiC, you’d find some phenomenal guitar licks. It is like blues metal.
I don’t see grunge as the start of the decline, it was the supernova in music before it went to shit. The lyrics from the grunge bands were a huge improvement over bands like Motley Crue and the other hair metal bands.
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You always had dumb music but there was “smart” music too, and it was popular. You had the Archies and Monkees, dumb. But you also had the Beatles and Stones, not dumb.
In the 70s you had disco but you also had Pink Floyd and Steely Dan. You had prog rock which isn’t everyone’s taste but they were virtuoso musicians. I personally think that as talented as Kansas or Journey were musically, the songs, though listenable were lame. I can appreciate the talent but the songs say nothing (you could say the same about Zeppelin). Black Sabbath, who were supposedly satanic weirdos, were really like hippies who became cynical or even nihilistic with how they approached political and social issues. I don’t see this new crop of performers putting out anything like War Pigs or Hand of Doom. You also had Talking Heads, Elvis Costello and Patti Smith. Then punk came around and they had something to say. And some of what they said, today’s performers would be afraid to say.
In the 80s you had Madonna, dumb and contrived (anything she did that was controversial was planned), but you also had Peter Gabriel selling millions of albums. And let’s not forget Prince. Springsteen was also popular into the 80s.
I’m leaving out a lot of talented artists but there have been so many. A good number are before my time but I heard them on the radio, back when you didn’t get to choose what was played so you got exposed to a variety of bands. I also, like many, went through the record collections of older relatives. Younger listeners only listen to what is coming out now, because that’s where the money is so that is what is emphasized. They have nothing to compare it to. They have no frame of reference. But when it comes to sampling, they choose older music because they can’t come up with something new, let alone better. Bonham might be the most sampled drummer ever, why? Because a so called producer with a computer couldn’t come up with a beat that’s half as good. If they had the talent to be creative, they wouldn’t sample others since they wouldn’t need to pay royalties.
Like I said, none of her fans can relate to her. When Hendrix did Machine Gun, many of his fans were facing the possibility of going to Vietnam. Think of the songs about drug addiction and the consequences of it from the Stones, or a less known group like the Velvet Underground. How many fans suffered addiction or knew an addict? How many knew someone who died of an overdose? How many young people connected with Ohio by Neil Young? They probably thought, it’s bad enough they’re sending us to die overseas, but now they’re killing us here as well.
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Very well said
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I have to disagree. Again I like grunge, and especially Alice In Chains and Cantrell’s solo stuff, but the vast majority of them couldn’t play at the technical level of predecessors. The schemes and progressions are arithmetic vs calculus.
The influences on Nirvana were the post punk bands of the 80s like Husker Du. Punk was never big on virtuosity. It was garage band music. Volume and dissonance were more important than precision. The last thing they wanted was to sound like Rush. The Clash responded to the criticism that they were straying from the heart of the punk sound by saying they couldn’t play as poorly anymore as they had gotten better as musicians.
Grunge never really got flashy. It was about stripping things down and making good songs with relatable / deeper lyrics. Metallica who you listed as a predecessor doesn’t do much for me lyrically (and I really like Metallica). Down in a hole, Rooster, or Nutshell are like calculus lyrics compared to most of Metallica’s arithmetic lyrics (aside from perhaps a few songs like One).
The big 4 bands in grunge had two of the best rock singer of all time in Layne and Chris. One of the all time greats on guitar with Jerry. One of the all time greatest drummers with Dave, but Dave, Matt Cameron, and Sean Kinney are arguably (easily) better than Metallica’s Lars (no hate from me for Lars). It astounds me how much talent all came out of 4 bands from Seattle at around the same time.
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