Music Generational Appeal

Mvsic
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Your welcome to skip this whole unformatted long paragraph as to how I get to my fairly simple question.

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of generational appeals when it comes to music. In high school Philosophy I was introduced to the idea of young people especially those into counter culture have a tendency to be rebellious to the generation prior to them. A way my teacher introduced this Idea to us is by using punk rock. As before the introduction to punk rock in rock the popular stuff was generally on the softer side of the the persuasion with bands like the Eagles and Journey being extremely popular in America and overseas. the generation of musicians following them were loud noisy broke sonic rules with bands like Sex pistols leading the charge of course with sex pistols influence we then get bands like the clash. One other example in the same way I can think of in rock is the transition of the 80s rock sound and aesthetic ( a lot of hair) and the explosion of Nirvana on the scene. One that gets over looked often when exploring the subject is Hip hop’s movements going from simple fun rhymes like on the well known song the Breaks to DJ and Emcee culture to Gangster rap of the 90’s to bling rap of the 2000’s to what I consider to be the alternative experimental phase of hip hop where you start seeing all the branching sub genres popping up starting in the 2010’s with stuff like cloud rap , mumble rap and even dividing how rappers wrote lyrics into conscious rap. In a very similar fashion as to how rock I feel around the 90’s to 2000’s really starts to divide itself beyond soft rock , punk , rock and roll, classic rock to the point where we get categories like Midwestern Emo where if you ask me I would just categorize it to alternative rock due to its general aesthetic sonically.

My exploration and interest of how genres transform and change lead me to look for many nuances in music especially the new music I listen to. what makes it different, and what influences does this song have that I can pick out are big questions I ask. but I had a recent memory come from deep inside was one of my best friend’s mom in high school throwing out a comment that I guess to this day bothered me is that " all rap music sounds the same" or " RAP stands for Ret*rds attempting Poetry". And I never understood people’s ability to think a genre all sounds the same. only time I got a glimpse of it was listening to Greta van fleet. and all the sudden I kinda understood where the viewpoints come from.

I ask this question knowing the general demographic in this community as I feel we have a decent spread.
My question is what music trend or Genre do you not understand? and whether you think its a generational thing or something else Regardless of the reason I would love to read about it.

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I like to think that I have a varied taste in music with everything from rock and metal to classical, as long as it was done with emotion and some bit of talent I can usually get behind it. However there are two genres that I do not get.

The first is country / country and western. To me all this music sounds the same and I cannot discern any differences between the songs or understand why people like this. I am also aware that people looking at my library might think the same thing, which is fair enough but I was just never able to get into this genre.

The second genre is modern pop music. While this category is very broad I’m talking more about dance and modern day RnB (older RnB is not included, there is a lot of great music there). The kind of music I’m talking about is songs where the lyrics are talking about going to the club or dancing. To me this music does not have enough emotion in it, it seems like it is all made to generate money instead of for the love of music and to me this genre seems entirely pointless and replaceable. This could be a generational thing as well, because I don’t mind 80s pop or even some 90s alternative pop music.

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I mean honestly to me this one is fairly easy to understand why it exists and does what it does, it’s just music to appeal to as most people as possible and generate the most money as possible. So it’s just a genre that will follow whatever ends up gaining traction, and the bar of quality is very low, it’s more appropriate to judge the quality of a pop song on how much money and attention/popularity it generates than anything regarding to the actual subjective quality of the music. I do think this does carry through to even older stuff, but just in the recent few decades the quality has dropped a fair bit more vs the past imo with a larger focus on profits (for why that is it depends, there’s many potential reasons but speculating about those is beyond this discussion lol). As long as it’s still profitable, it will continue in current state, and when it’s not anymore, it will change to become profitable again

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There are Genres I don’t listen to for various reasons, but I can appreciate what’s in a genre even if I don’t like it. I’m not about to poo poo what someone else enjoys, unless they are going to force me to listen to it.

I don’t listen to Country, but some of the guitarists in that space are WOW! I mostly just don’t like the droning vocals in most of it.
I don’t list to a lot of club electronic music, just doesn’t appeal, and while it doesn’t all sound the same, the incessant thump thump thump really doesn’t do it for me.
And finally I don’t really listen to RAP and the many subgenres there of, some of it is clever, but I don’t enjoy it.
I don’t really care for Opera or Classical Choral music either.

Outside of that my active collection is pretty broad.

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I only listen to Neo New Post Pre Progressive Melodic Wizard Emo Metalcore Everything elseis full of posers.

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don’t yuck someone else’s yum.

I’ve always been one to just enjoy music I enjoy regardless of the genre label it’s attached or associated with. If I don’t like it, that’s on me not on anything else. There’s a lot of multi platinum hits out there that I’ve skipped out on so me not liking it is not because it’s not popular. lol

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I think something that English native speakers don’t realise - and until I moved abroad I had no clue either - is how much music there is in the world and also how many world famous musicians there are they often have never heard of.

One of the most interesting things I’ve ever been asked living abroad is “what’s it like when all the music you hear is in your own language?” I think this is less true these days as music in general is more and more widely accessible but I do think that the anglophone world is more insular than many cultures. Mostly just because there is so so much English language music and it includes several of the richest countries.

Even amongst the English speaking countries there is a lot that passes people by. For example, we are all more familiar with US musicians than we are with the other countries and the US is generally less aware of non US English language music. There are whole musical subgenres and genres that just exist in the UK, for example. Some are unique and some are local variations. If we are particularly talking counter cultural UK then I can name rave (the late 80s style rather than the better known later variants), jungle, big beat, hard house, grime for the period of the 80s and 90s which I am best aware of.

All of this is a long winded way of saying that I think cultural barriers are often more significant than generational within the same culture. Some US music just does not speak to me. Some Dutch language music that is well loved here in Belgium to me sounds pretty silly because it doesn’t have the meaning or cultural history for me at all.

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I’ve given up a long time ago on trying to understand and actually look at things from a genre perspective lol, good music is good music regardless of whatever genre it lies in. To me it’s just a waste to try and take the effort to try and make things fit into genre, and it also is something that I think if you focus too much on you will miss out on music

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Auto tuning is a trend I’ll never understand…if you can’t carry a tune, by all means write and produce, but let somebody else sing it.

Modern country is also just pop with a little twang and steel guitar mixed in. My tastes don’t exactly go back to Hank Sr, but they also largely end before artists like Luke Bryan.

Most modern Broadway/show music largely has the same feel and almost all grates my nerves.

I guess it’s no worse now than growing up, but I notice it more now that I just can’t listen to most rap because I’m more sensitive to the lyrics as I’ve gotten older.

Oddly, I was never really into it as a kid, but classic rock now makes up most of what I listen to.

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Yes that and time aligning are things I wish producers would stay away from.
It’s extremely audible and quite off-putting.
I worked with a music producer in the 90’s who’d worked with some quite famous artists, he always said there were so many bands in the club scene that could play that they really just picked them based on whether they though they were saleable, and I suspect some of that has led to prolific use of autotune and time alignment, when they can’t get what they want out of the artists in the studio.

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I’m a longtime rocker, born in 1965. Was raised on rock and roll, and it always will fulfill me.

But I get the appeal of rap and hip-hop. It is the music of the streets; it is the counterculture. Rock bands lost their balls and their desire to say anything meaningful at least a decade ago, and that’s one of the reasons the art form has lost all momentum. I will contend to my dying day that if The Clash emerged on the scene today, it would be a hip-hop group or a rapper.

There’s also nothing dangerous anymore at all about mainstream rock. When’s the last time we’ve seen a “don’t give a f*ck, balls-out” rock band like Van Halen or AC/DC burst into the rock scene? Bands now sing about “their pain” or “their feelings” – where are the kick-ass rock bands singing about girls and partying your face off?

Pop always has been syrupy and sweet, with no nutritional value. Musical cotton candy. It’s no different today.

But the one genre that is completely lost is country. Modern country, bro country, hit country – whatever you want to call it – is godawful. It’s such a far cry from everything good about the pre-2000s, even the Urban Cowboy-inspired neon country of the 1980s.

The rise of modern country has nothing to do with generations. It has everything to do with the decline of rock and roll, the rise of hip-hop and the continued resilience of pop.

As rock clearly started to die on the vine, country acts adopted rock-like song structures and stage presence. Garth Brooks was instrumental and way ahead of his time in this insidious trend with his arena rock-style country shows in the early 90s. But at least Brooks respected the classics by banging out some gorgeous ballads and slower songs.

Bro country bands today borrow liberally from rock, pop and hip-hop because that’s what kids want to hear. Kids these days don’t give a shit about lyrics - they just want a good beat and some dopey sing-along chorus. Remember, this is the generation that doesn’t read because it has an attention span of three seconds addled by multiple social media apps on their phones.

So, modern/bro country has devolved into a paint-by-number melange of really shitty music matched with even worse lyrics. It’s all pre-packaged junk food like musical Lunchables by an industry in Nashville that permits no outsiders, nothing to veer from the template.

Modern/bro country is THE worst, most plagiaristic genre of music on this planet.

I long for the days when country will return to its roots. I’m not holding my breath. At least there are a lot of good real country bands that don’t work in the Nashville ecosystem, and alt-country remains a cool genre.

But anything you hear on country hit radio is pathetic. It’s designed as a dopamine fix for musical dopes, and it sells like crazy.

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Such danger. Such f*ck…balls

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It seems weird to complain about the current generation of music just because it’s so fragmented these days. Back when people bought cassette tapes and played radio stations in their cars, it made more sense to think of certain music as being the music of a particular generation, but every young person I know who’s into music these days listens to Spotify and Apple Music and watches random whatever music on YouTube and TikTok. And yeah, all these platforms have some kind of curation, but they don’t have nearly the influence on listening that radio did.

It feels like the current generation lives in an era where two people of the same age with the same taste in music can potentially have never heard of each other’s favorite artists.

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This is honestly very true especially in the age of Spotify algorithms where people end up getting pushed different artists over time.

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Yeah I feel this is a fairly unique thing to anglophone countries as well. Being a person from Asia and having heard plenty of music from Asia the north American musical influences is by far the most obvious proof of successful cultural exchange the western world has committed. But aside from the obvious kpop or reggaeton from most people I talk to there tends to be this odd adversity to listening to music with foreign lyrics. It’s odd Cato me that the lyrics all the sudden matter to most of these people .

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I think it is a cultural thing. Some countries are fine with it, some are not. For example France, Spain, Turkey are all countries that dub all foreign films. Belgium and the Netherlands will always use subtitles so you get used to hearing things in multiple languages. The UK does do subtitles but because there is so much to watch that does not have them it is an extra hurdle so people just don’t get around to it.

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I listen to a lot of French club EDM cause French is irresistibly sexy.

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Interesting hearing opinions from the old heads. Some of these opinions sound like they could’ve been said 20 years ago! Since everyone’s making observations, here’s mine: do not assume a “genre” of music will only talk about the same topics. Love, partying, politics, etc. You can find that in every genre, just look! “Oh this genre only talks about x”. I get it if you wanna feel like you have a “proper” reason to hate Blink 182 but I assure you that one of your favorite songs has lyrics with “that thing you hate”. You might as well have said “oh I just don’t watch movies, they all have climaxes.” And of course this applies outside of just lyrics.

Like mentioned above, music has been fractured and mixed, smashed, and screwed in a million ways over the years. And since the internet picked up, everyone knows about it! You should too!

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Way to cherry-pick. That also was from VH’s SIXTH album, when Eddie and Dave were moving the band in more of a pop direction.

But if you were around in 1978 and heard this tune for the first time, you knew this was a kick-ass band:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtwBFz6lfrY

Or this gem, from “Fair Warning:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2R2KXNQR1M

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I feel what ends up happening a lot is people end up getting stuck on what they know. When curious enough to venture out to the newer stuff what ends up happening is the new stuff that individuals stumble on end up being the most popular stuff. And for the most part in any genre what is most popular ends up being the processed most lowest common denominator content which is what is on the surface and creating an opinion on that.everyine does it. Happens a lot with other forms of media. I just wanted to see wnot arguments but what opinions people have on specific genres. I myself find it difficult to listen to a lot of the classics especially classic rock. My opinion on it is me feeling like the vast majority of the music made feels very derivative. While excellent music to play during karaoke. Just actually sitting down and listening to it it gives me the general feeling of eating stale junk food it’s old and unchallenging to consume.