Has new music gone down the tubes?

Of course it’s crap.

I think what we mean is the presence of good music in/around the mainstream.

Anyone can always say, “well, if you dig hard enough you’ll come up with something.”  Not everyone is a music nerd like me who is interested in taking on excavation projects to unearth good music. Folks with a more causal relationship with music are provided with a notable dearth of options at the top.  This wasn’t true 25 years ago, and it certainly wasn’t true in the preceding decades.

I am admittedly not the biggest rap guy around, but I consider good music to be good music, period. Plenty of music described as “rap” or “hip-hop” is good, some of it great.  I’m very unimpressed with willfully-narrowminded, tired, stupid, cliched, disrespectful dismissals of rap music as a whole.  Reggae’s the only sound I seem to be almost unable to enjoy as a matter of course.  I even thought I might “check in” with reggae a couple nights ago and listened to some. Yeah, nuthin’. Whatever, just because it does nothing for me doesn’t mean it’s inherently devoid of value or worth as a thing.  If there’s been any good stuff in the mainstream the last 25 years, a lot of it was rap.  

I also hope when people say, “y’all never never good music so quit complaining as well!!” immediately after listing Frank Sinatra and the “Beetles” (as though liking that music denotes ignorance or poor taste) is merely a poorly executed attempt at humor.

It’s painfully obvious to me that people, at one time, got to live in a world where the simple act of turning on the radio, or going to any movie theater, yielded a far greater likelihood of experiencing something good than the people of today experience doing the same stuff.

Money. That’ll do it.

Whether it’s,

A) some particular thing (Auto-Tune, comic book movies) showing corporate executives an opportunity for massive profits, thusly causing said corporations to exploit that thing ad nauseam to the great detriment of prioritizing new/innovative/challenging ideas, or 

B) a new/innovative/challenging idea that was funded ultimately yielding significant financial losses for a corporation, thusly causing corporations (the gatekeepers of the masses’ exposure to exciting popular art) to cease any further funding of new/innovative/challenging ideas and thusly reinforcing the purely-commercial motivations described in point A).

I’m fully aware that, in terms of popular music, there were inherent flaws in the system as far as artists were concerned in the past, and that, while streaming provides paltry remuneration for artists today, we are witnessing what may be a very positive change in how artists may gain exposure and commercial viability.

Nonetheless, a gross saturation of incredibly derivative and formulaic work is what defines mainstream popular music and film today, and I think it is obvious that this is of greater dominance in aggregate than ever before.

None of this means that there aren’t awesome artists out there representing the antithesis of everything stated above, merely that “rising to the top” seems to be harder than ever before.