It's why I listen to talk radio more. I'm 57 so I get it

You're old bro.

I also grew up in the 70s and 80s. I go out of my way to listen to and support less mainstream artists who are writing excellent new music. The best part is that the lesser known ones play at smaller venues and it’s fun to get to meet them.

If all you listen to is radio, then yes. Try another more modern medium? I suggest https://daily.bandcamp.com

All comes down to subjectivity. You're from a generation that has a lot of great music. There is still a lot of great music today. For rap, check out NF. If you like uk hip hop, check out Verb T as well as The Four Owls.

Buy an iPod, it’s a game changer. You can store and listen to any song you want to anytime you want. And the cool thing is, it’s only songs you like.

Ah yes, classic r/Music post.

If only you used the same sort of energy to listen to/discover music that you actually enjoy, as you do to trash different music preferences.

You're not saying anything new. And like a quarter of my generation (born in 2001 so I'm a certified zoomer) agrees with you. But we also know how to turn the radio off and listen to artists that aren't on the charts. Some of the best music ever made is coming out right now, it's just not selling out arenas anymore like it used to in the 70s. Listen to some more niche stuff and I'm sure you'll find new music that you like. Or stick with your old records if that's what you like

You do realise that rap and hip hop began in the seventies…?

And that rhythmic spoken work precursors to rap abounded in jazz and blues since before music was recorded at all…

Liberate yourself from some of those gnarly old tropes you’ve imbibed sometime and try listening to, say Miles Davis, whose final album before his untimely passing was a hip hop album. De La Soul - whose stuff is now finally streaming - had nothing to do with the Gangsta Rap you seem to think encompasses all hip hop.

By all means stay in your time capsule but try not to spread those old, frankly racist, tropes to another generation…

Oh, btw, I’m pushing sixty, and I love Billie Eilish and Mo, Ju’s (formerly Mojo Juju) new album is a killer …

Hard not to when you can't go to the gym, walk your dog or go to a public park without being subjected to it

I am totally able to respect that there is great rap out there with artists who must rival or exceed the talents of anyone that I enjoy. I just do not enjoy the genre enough to appreciate them. Much in the same way that I have no desire to get into opera or country.

If it really causes you THAT much mental distress to have your ears subjected to music you don't like, then I apologize. My only advice is to ignore it. Like it or not, music is going to continue to evolve outside of your comfort zone. We're a long ways away from the 70s and 80s.

It's a cheap and lazy argument to tell someone who doesn't like rap they are racist. My favorite genre of music right now that I have been getting into heavily lately has been Jazz, and guess what the race of the majority of Jazz artists is? I've already said that many of my favorite artists are old Motown artists.

I'm also tired of people trying to tell me that I just haven't listened to the right kinds of rap and I should give it a chance. I have heard enough of opera and country music to respect that it takes talent but that it's not for me and I likely will never enjoy it no matter how much I try to. I grew up loving hard metal and I never tried to push that on anyone else or tried to tell them they weren't listening to enough variety of it

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Prolific, Eclectic, Multigenric, Amazingness. 23 albums in 12yrs. (5 last year!) So you won't get bored.

Start with Omnium Gatherum to get an idea of their eclecticness.

Then check out https://get-into-gizz.com/ to help you down the rabbit hole.

🐊🤘🔥

Troll

I don’t like rap and pop music either. I think it is overplayed and overrated. However I do like rap music with a metal melody. Such as Limp Bizkit.

>And like a quarter of my generation (born in 2001 so I'm a certified zoomer) agrees with you.

I really had no idea. Wow. I kind of notice this when I see the comment on YouTube songs where younger people say they really enjoy it. I just would not have guessed 1/4.

I'd be curious if you could recommend anything new!

...because god forbid some people don't enjoy what is currently popular

This is some room-temperature-IQ dogshit right here.

Complete with a “I like jazz so I can’t be racist” side dish.

We’ve had this thread a million times before. Go mow your lawn you absolute spoon.

Dude I mean no disrespect but is your go-to example of rap with metal elements that’s better than most rap and pop now actually fucking Limp Bizkit

Well, I remember being at a public park for a jog with families and young children playing... with some teenagers blasting rap that was literally rapping about what the rapper's girlfriend's p***y smelled like.

Or the time I was waiting in line at a local food place with my young niece that had gangster rap playing on their speakers with a rapper rapping about beating women who got out of line

That's because you have big music publishing and labeling companies who need to promise more to their investors. They are a business first and have fiduciary responsibilities to the people invested in them. They have to make projections, and a company doesn't get invested in if they don't keep growing. Like any company, they adhere to the most secure methods to ensure continuous growth, so they base their growth & the amount of investment money they've attained on what music has worked before. And that's when they've reached the point where the music they make has become less about, "What emotions do I feel right now that I think can connect with different people?", and more about, "What music is going to appeal to the most people that an algorithm can share with as many listeners as possible?" And having algorithms that can do that is a big game changer in the present world of streaming digital music. The music is safe & easy, so it's low risk to the investors. And that's why today's pop music is incredibly shallow & stale, and the level of creativity is as dry as dirt. Reduce the risks to guarantee success. It's all about money and business growth. They do not care about how creative music can be. Not one iota.

Most people who aren't children who listen to this music are either A: Simply not that into music and will just listen to whatever's popular to pass the time (Turning on the radio during their commutes, playing "accessible" music playlists at parties, etc.), B: Care less about musical ingenuity and more about whether or not the music is trendy and if they can dance or get laid to it, or C: Just really like it and don't feel the need to delve deeper into the music genres, even though they definitely should do that because it would help broaden their horizons and augment their appreciation for the genres they listen to instead of just listening to whatever the record labels and radio broadcasters shove down their throats.

The pop music industry has trained the masses to expect less from how far creative minds can stretch. In the world of art, music can sustain our minds and emotions like nothing else, so when big industries are steadfast in selling the most basic & least inspiring music they can because it's easy to make and will guarantee financial success, they're straight-up deceiving you. They know they don't have to try hard or push creative boundaries because the music they've been selling for so long has worked, especially in recent decades since growing populations have developed short attention spans (Great job Tiktok) and could care less about deeper, innovative, and instrumentally & lyrically challenging music.

To escape this, I listen to modern prog rock & prog metal, where the level of writing and musicianship is god-tier, and takes actual attentiveness to absorb & enjoy, and I genuinely love it.

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Rap has been shoved down people's throats for so long, it's all anyone knows anymore. What if people in the 70's or 80's could have jumped 40 years into the future to hear our music? They'd come back irreversibly infected with the kind of cancerous shame anyone with a shred of self-respect feels hearing even one note of Cotton-Eyed Joe in a bar.

Most people have a smartphone and Bluetooth headphones have become somewhat socially tolerable if you're not talking on them.

Since I don't see it addressed in the top comments, I'll explain the survivorship bias. In survivorship bias you associate good qualities to the things that have survived the longest and assign those qualities to that class of things as a whole. A great example is construction, only the old buildings that were well built and well maintained survived. All the bad construction doesnt.

Same applies for music. The hits from previous eras of music have been filtered and separated from the chaff. If you bought a bunch of random albums from the 70s, most people probably wouldnt like most of the music. My favorite example of this is Elton John. The man is a wonderful composer and performer across multiple decades. But he makes great singles, but not great albums. Everyone has a copy of Queens Greatest hits, but few people have their entire discography. Some bigger mainstream artist did produce great albums, but they still would have iffy albums now and then, and their popularity is partly because the music was good and evolutionary.

The bigger problem you face isn't the quality of music, but being forced to listen to it, which is annoying in most cases. My friends and I were in a diner getting breakfast recently and I realized the country song that was playing was just not a good song. It would be like 8 or 9 on a track listing of a decent artist, but since the Playlist was playing hits from the 70s to today there was nothing good ear catching to the song. The next few songs were different hits and it was self evident why they were good. But this one country song was so much filler noise it annoyed me the rest of the day.

Anyone blasting their music in a shared public space is an asshole. But that has nothing to do with the music.

>Rap to me is mostly people shouting about either how tough they are or how materialistic they are.

Ridiculous. Like calling ballet "just a bunch of twirling around."

I really don't get the "music must be really difficult to make" crowd. Something incredibly simple can be absolutely fantastic, and really difficult music can be absolutely trash. There's no correlation between difficulty and whether it's good or not. None.

I get it's the natural progression of most people, to like what they knew as a young adult and dismiss everything thereafter as trash. But it's amazing ppl can't see that trend and just recognize they're being old curmudgeons. You know the people prior to you thought that your music was trash and their was the best, right?

There's a lot of music I don't like, past and present, and a lot I do like from each era. I think that the democratization of music (amongst many other things) have watered down music in many ways. Everyone can "make it" to some degree. There are literally millions of bands that have their music readily available to us on Spotify or YT Music or whatever. So overall, yes music is worse b/c we're exposed to more bands that could not have made it through the old traditional way. But that old traditional way was so broken, you missed out on so much music that you would undoubtedly have liked had it been more available to you. So many great musicians were shunned by the industry for many different reasons b/c very few people controlled the entire industry in all reality. That's just a broken way to do it so even though it leads to it being watered down the way bands can produce and put music into the stratosphere on their own with relative easy is far superior.

Okay to be fair I'm probably exaggerating for the sake of my own optimism, but I think it's probably safe to say that more young people aren't satisfied with popular music today than in past generations

>I'd be curious if you could recommend anything new!

I dwell primarily in Prog circles so here's a short list of (almost exclusively prog) albums that came out within the last few years that I think are great:

Lightworker by Devin Townsend

Fauna by Haken

Aphelion by Leprous

Fear Inoculum by Tool

Rise Radiant by Caligula's Horse

Closure / Continuation by Porcupine Tree

I Don't Know What I Am by Reliqa

Witness by VOLA

In Cauda Venenum by Opeth

Shadow of My Future Self by Ross Jennings

The Wind by Balmorhea

Niratias by Chevelle

BILO IV by David Maxim Micic

Hushed and Grim by Mastodon

The Work by Rivers of Nihil

Fortitude by Gojira

Phanerazoic II by The Ocean

I'll admit that some of these bands have been around since the 90s but some of them are as new as 2018. I'll also admit that a couple of them might be too heavy for your taste, particularly Gojira, The Ocean and Rivers of Nihil. If you'd prefer song recommendations, I could recommend a song or two from each of these albums

I feel like every generation does this back in my day shit. News flash there was some really terrible music made in the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s....and today. We remember the greats and seem to forget some of the garbage that came out at the same time that was actually getting radio play when the greats weren't.

As for rap/hip-hop for the non-fans open to suggestions...2 of my top artists.....atmosphere has been making amazing music for decades. Logic is an incredible story teller, with musical complexity.

Any recommendations for prog rock?

What's funny is that many of the songs I didn't like back in the 80s sound much better today, comparitively

Old or new prog?

>Can you recommend some bands who play "modern prog rock & prog metal"? I'm a boomer who's into bands like Nightwish, Epica, Imperial Age, Beyond Creation and Dragonforce. I'm always looking for more good music in that genre.

Check these bands/artists out, starting with the albums listed. They're a mix of prog metal & prog rock:

Steven Wilson - Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015) *One of my all-time favorites.

Haken - The Mountain (2013) *From this album, their song Falling Back to Earth will be one of the most fun and epic songs you will ever hear. Band's name is pronounced "Hay-ken."

Leprous - Malina (2017)

Thank You Scientist - Terraformer (2019)

Vulkan - Technatura (2020)

Caligula's Horse - In Contact (2017)

So yeah, cheap lazy and generally accurate…

just wanna preface this, not trying to hate on u or anything, i just wanna give u some stuff to broaden your horizons a bit

i could go over a bunch of stuff in ur argument that i strongly disagree with, but instead i'll give u a few suggestions of modern music (most of which is very popular) that i think you might, at the very least, appreciate

1. "currents" by tame impala
2. "to pimp a butterfly" by kendrick lamar
3. "random access memories" by daft punk
4. "plastic beach" by the gorillaz
5. "igor" by tyler, the creator
6. "awaken, my love!" by childish gambino
7. "year of the snitch" by death grips
8. "untrue" by burial

all of this music appeals to me personally and i hope you'll find something that u like c:

...you do realize they probably said the exact same thing about punk rock in the 90s, right?

Rap is a new type of music, the artist that's right for you hasn't come along yet, stay tuned, you never know what you'll find! Exciting really

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Looking for new prog artists.

I also found your post to be a very well written and though provoking take on why music is the way it that it is lately

Check these bands/artists out, starting with the albums listed:

Steven Wilson - Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015) *One of my all-time favorite albums. A true compelling and well-written musical marvel.

Thank You Scientist - Terraformer (2019) *The most fun and energetic prog album I know of. This band will blow you away.

Haken - The Mountain (2013) *Haken (Pronounced "Hay-ken") are my favorite band. They're more prog metal, but they incorporate a lot of rock elements in their music, with this album standing out the most in their discography in that regard.

Wobbler - Dwellers of the Deep (2020) *These guys are basically the lovechild of Yes & Jethro Tull. Highly influenced by 70s prog, but they're outstanding.

Leprous - Malina (2017)

Vulkan - Mask of Air (2011)

>Women are treated as sexual objects to abuse at will.
>
>Led Zep

Bro you can't talk about sexual objectification and abuse and then list Zeppelin as a band you like...Everyone knows Jimmy Page raped a 14 year old and that's the tip of the iceberg with the groupie culture that surrounded Zep and the Stones.

>I truly feel bad for kids thinking what they are listening to is music.

This is the most get-off-my lawn sentence I've ever read on here. Wow.

i don't think you actually live in 2023 because it's almost impossible to even find a place that still sells ipods. they're dead. the ipod touch has even been officially discontinued.

You reeeaaally want to compare the private lives and arrest records of rap stars versus old rock stars? I don't think that's an argument that will go very far in your favor. Even putting aside sexual abuse, there is a rapper related shooting nearly every time I look at the news and you never had the old English Invasion dudes gunning each other down.

"Get off my lawn"? How am I actually WRONG though? Are you seriously going to pretend modern music has not gone down in quality overall?

Are you going to pretend that things like file sharing that started with Napster has not changed the music industry and caused it to become more profit driven and risk averse? There are no A&R execs out scouting new talent anymore, they take whatever is safe, trendy and profitable and get it down to a formula so that anything you hear on the radio today doesn't sound much different than anything else.

Just look at the music itself, in the 60s and 70s bands took chances and did things that were never heard before. The timbre of music, which is the texture, color, and quality peaked in the 60s-70s and has been declining ever since. Hardly anyone is experimenting with new instrumentation or recording techniques, the vast majority of pop music today is a a keyboard, drum machine, sampler and computer software that's engineered to be as safe as possible (as in not challenging the listener musically) and designed or our low attention span, tik tok culture.

>Everyone has a copy of Queens Greatest hits, but few people have their entire discography.

I disagree. my favorite queen songs are the ones hardly ever played

• '39'
• It's late
• Father to son and almost all of Queen II
• Gimme the prize - Kurgan's theme

Your whole argument discounts the deep cuts which are arguably an even larger pool of quality songs.

The majority of the songs I love the most were never top 40 hits

So stop listening to it. Pretty simple. I've pretty much stopped listening to hip hop entirely because I feel the genre has gotten stale and the heavy misogynistic lyrics really are off-putting to me. Other people are free to listen to it but I'll just go listen to something else.

Well you gotta figure the people that actually enjoy modern rap and pop music don't exactly have a high musical IQ in the first place. Of course you still see gen z-ers and some millennials try to defend modern music as being as good as the classics, but they're really just deluding themselves.

You must be gen z lol. Those artists are pretty bad!

Ok gen z.

Thank you, I'm glad to hear you appreciated my post. I made some edits to it 'cause I forgot to add a few annotations.

So much amazing music out there! When you get in that "let's catch this unknown band for 10 bucks" mentality, not only are you getting to see a new act in their prime, you never know when you're doing the equivalent of getting to catch the next Nirvana before they get discovered.

I saw all the best 70s and 80s bands in their prime and I'd much rather go catch 20 new bands for the price it costs to get nose bleed seats for a Metallica concert now.

Check out my spotify link on my profile. I'm probably the same age as you and I've been working on playlists (year by year) of new, under ground artists that shows what the kids have been doing for the past decade.

King Gizzard is supremely underrated, they were performing near me recently and I didn't realise until it was too late :(

Please don't try to argue this, you'll just make a fool of yourself. Musicians from pre 2000s did some of the most disgusting things. The victims would be told to keep quiet and it's unlikely people would've listened to them back then anyway. The Police literally made 'Every Breath You Take' which was in the 80s, no?

Music quality has gone down? That's definitely a tunnel-visioned opinion. What do you want? These 80s bands to make more music? Listen to Bon Jovi, Metallica, Def Leppard, etc, and compare their new stuff to their old stuff. Music evolves.

Modern music doesn't take chances? It's just the genre which is popular on the radio at the moment. So many artists from the 80s used samples and loops so that argument is rubbish. The music you hear might contain a more minimal texture, but there are thousands of artists making an extremely wide variety of music. A few examples:

Wet Leg
Nothing But Thieves
Sam Fender
The Technicolors
Mt. Joy
Sir Sly

And these are all reasonably popular artists. Go on spotify and look for good music instead of whining that we didn't receive 93 renditions of an overrated 'Stairway to Heaven'

ok boomer

You must not like black people

>The timbre of music, which is the texture, color, and quality peaked in the 60s-70s and has been declining ever since.

You're so absolutely wrong here and excluding the 80s and 90s just makes you sound ridiculous. Do you know how much further the sonic colour palette expanded as the tech grew over that 30-40 years?

Like have you even listened to Radiohead? I feel so bad for you man. Your brain is frozen in amber.

I am talking about what is popular and what most people listen to currently. There is no comparison at all. You are completely and utterly wrong.

You are either being obtuse or a troll.

you must not like thinking

Gen X ,thank you. But coming from the generation that eats tide pods and has to be told not to drink the contents of the battery in modern car manuals, that's a complement ;)

I am talking about what is popular, that most people listen to. The stuff that you are forced to listen to if you are out in public. I'm sure there is plenty of obscure things that are very good. Take random songs off the top 40 from the 70s and 80s compared to now and the point you just made makes you look ridiculous.

You are the one making an utter fool of yourself. Most artists in the 80s actually played their own instruments, wrote their own music and could sing without auto-tune.

I mean you're clearly the troll here. Your other latest post is "I hate selfies".

Get offf my lawwwwn, kids!

Ah yeah, nothing like trolling through someone's post history because you are functionally incapable of engaging in a debate otherwise. I notice you haven't refuted any of my points either.

Thanks for the heads up. I've never heard of any of these bands.

I'm listening to the Steve Wilson album right now. Sounds great! SW remastered five of the best Yes albums from the 1970's. Yes is my favorite band. I didn't know that SW had a solo career. I'll try to listen to everything that you've listed here. Thanks again!

Hope you enjoy the rest! You're gonna have a blast with these albums, I just know it.

if you wouldn't mind saying, which ones? and i'd love to hear why you think that

Just whenever I hear names that include gambino, lamar and tyler the creator it's always people under 30 that haven't really listened to anything else. I think those artists are all super over rated....but that's just my opinion!

i mean... anthony fantano's under 30 and enjoys those 3, and he's listened to a lot

same with bradtasteinmusic even though i don't know his opinions on gambino

your opinion is your opinion about whether they're overrated or not, but i've met people in real life under 30 that listen to those 3 and a bunch of other stuff

plus it was literally in a list where i mentioned like 5 other bands/artists who i'm also fans of