What I really hate about some music
When I listen to music, there are four things that I really bothers me and was wondering if there are others who feel the same way about songs just as strongly as I do. I don't like feeling this way but when I hear these things, I just want to turn the music off and I'm not sure why the song writer doesn't realize he probably has a dud and not a hit. Here they are:
1. When a song writer finds a catchy phrase and the singer repeats the line three times in a row and then a stanza later, here it comes again repeated all three times and this just keeps going on and on.
2. Very similar to the above, a writer writes a real good line of music and then makes the whole song a repeat or variation of this line of music and has no imagination to add a little something in-between.
3. Singers who can't really sing well and think they can but get such really great score of music behind them that if a really good singer sang the song it would be wonderful to listen to. Please understand that carrying a tune to me doesn't make a good singer and I'm not talking about karoke singers here either.
4. Rhyming in a melody.... Please you can predict what the next line of the song is going to be before it is sang because it rhymes with the last line just sang...
@frankmc195 I share none of your complaints. Your #3 grievance I can’t make heads or tails of. You say “carrying a tune to me doesn’t make a good singer” immediately after saying you hate “singers who can’t sing well but think they can.” I don’t follow. I’m curious as to which songs you find antithetical to these transgressions. |
@moonwatcher Uh, man, amen. I’ll raise ya with a ANY USE OF AUTOTUNE. It’s never once made anything better, only demonstrably worse. |
@emrofsemanon I find that track tedious as all hell. I wouldn’t hold the “I knows” necessarily responsible, though. I just didn’t find it a remotely interesting or satisfying song the first time, let alone the 756,921st time. The fact that every no-talent hack on Earth seems to cover it with the same ubiquity as it’s presence on FM radio for 50 years doesn’t help, either. |
Repetition doesn’t bother me in the least. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. No one here seems to be lamenting I-IV-V chord progressions or the I-VI-IV-V chord progressions or the several chord progressions we’ve heard a trillion times over, countless songs that not only regurgitate those beyond-cliched chord progressions but base their entire songs, start-to-finish, on this primitive sequence. I like Hank Williams just as much as I like Trout Mask Replica, just for different reasons. Lyrically, not everybody can be Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. Not every song’s value is based exclusively on either the lyrics or exclusively the music. If I song’s music is satisfying, I don’t care if they say the same thing over and over again. |
Not sure how many people here have actually written or attempted to write a song, but one may be surprised how difficult it is to write a “simple” song. Simplicity often overlaps with vulnerability. It can be (certainly not always) a daunting proposition to present a simple, emotionally vulnerable song to an audience, be it a record-listener or a live audience. It’s quite a comfortable place to be to issue dense, obtuse lyrics or music to an audience. As someone who’s written songs that others have called, “obtuse” or “intelligent,” or “sophisticated,” and as someone who’s performed live some 1000 times in his life, I can say the very simple songs (be it musically or lyrically) are the most daunting, because it’s so much easier and more comfortable to lean bank on “complexity.” The ones that get my teeth chattering are the super-simple, vulnerable ones. Tons of songwriters, from Elton John to Billy Joe Shaver, have spoken of the challenges of writing simple songs. |
@tony1954 When one says Neil Young can “barely hold a tune,” and has “no vocal range,” it makes me wonder if they’ve ever heard Neil Young before. I’m a huge fan, from his best songs with Buffalo Springfield to today, and, funnily enough, I’ve been scouring YouTube these last few days for live Neil Young performances, just for fun. This charge could be legitimately leveled at, say, Bryan Ferry or Ian Curtis (to name a couple off the top of my head) but not Neil. Range is not an issue for Neil either. He’s comfortable in a lower register on a song like “Motion Pictures,” and, just the other day, I was shocked as to his ability to hit that high A note on the chorus of “Old Man” in a live performance. Not sure if you’ve ever tried to sing that chorus without resorting to falsetto. Suffice to say, many cannot. A 67-year old Neil Young sang Old Man (original key of D, no detuned guitar to help hit those notes) at Farm Aid in 2013. Unsurprisingly, those notes were a tad difficult for him at that age, but even at 67, after almost 50 years of touring, he acquitted himself nicely as a wide-range vocalist for those lucky audience members. |
