music

It goes both ways, mainstream music has achieved the production rate to pump out so much shit that it can overshadow everything, but at the same time access to instruments and recording software and music repositories has improved too so really small musicians are putting out gems out there that can hardly be found, but they still exist

nah squabble up

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.

reddit moment

Lol you're wrong

This just reads like ragebait lmao

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.

Nah. A decade or two ago people were literally listening to pop punk. Before that bands like Rolling Stones had a fanbase. Awful stuff.

In many ways I think modern pop is better. Phoebe Bridgers puts out some solid music, and hyperpop is just a treat.

For country even the mainstream lets Chris Stapleton get a place on the radio, though I do prefer his bluegrass stuff. If you want more obscure stuff give Mama's Broke a listen.

Comrade, listen to DPRK music now.

Music the past few years has genuinely been really good. Expand your tastes, go look for new music, and don't base everything off what's popular or on the radio.

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.

Stay strong OP, you're only a couple years away from AI fully ruining music and you can tell those "everything was better back in your day, sure grandma" people to fuck off

Green Day put out a new album and it's pretty good

Me listening exclusively to top 40 radio in the 10's: Man all music just sounds like stomp-clap or imagine dragons.

I'll just leave this thread open and trawl through it later to get all the juicy reccs ty to everyone in advance

A lot of commercially produced pop music is shit. I kind of see it like complaining you can't get good food from McDonald's when there are so many other options out there, but you need to find them yourself.

I am loving Absolute Elsewhere from Blood Incantation this year. That album goes from death metal to pink Floyd and back again.

Earlier in the year Lord Dying released an album that's great too. Better Lovers has Greg Puciato from Dillinger and sounds like them in a good way. Tides From Nebular put out a great instrumental album, as did Kiko Loureiro, formerly of Megadeth. Same with Nock Johnston again in the instrumental guitar space.

A surprise one for me was Planetoid by Terrapath. They're a small band and I came across them on a torrent website, loved the album so I picked it up on a band camp Friday.

Rivers of Nihil have singles out, so they're teasing a new album I'm excited for.

And I just opened my music app to see Opeth, Distant, Body Count, Jinjer, Worm Shepherd, Gilipojazz, and First Fragment have all put out new music I haven't listened to yet.

I like prog and death metal, but it will be the same in whatever genres you're into. Dig a bit deeper and look into the sub-genres and you'll find stuff you like there. No one is going to serve you good music on a silver platter

https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/album/2024/

A lot of good records to listen to on there

I bet you haven't even listened to the new lil xan album huh?