There has been a stigma for the past few years, a decade or so. If you want to be technical, I suppose this argument has always existed for some, the idea that something must be better because it came first. This is not inherently true for certain things, certain pieces of technology or genres of art inarguably grow as people experiment with them. Of course, with art in mind, you will instead have people who argue on when the form peaked, or when it slowed down. One of the biggest ones would be music.
As far back as my high school days, I heard a lot of support over older music being much better than the current state of music. For those respective time frames, I mean music from the seventies, eighties, and even early nineties, versus the music brought upon the two-thousands and two-thousand tens. With the chosen headline, there is no point in pretending I disagree with this. I like disco, I love Motown, and I miss ballads. Now, I have no personal hate for modern music. I quite like Lady Gaga, I find Miley Cyrus can be a non-guilty pleasure, and in general I think Pop music is going mostly in the right direction for it's genre, even with the duds I've heard.
That doesn't change my opinion on older music. I do highly prefer everything older music did better. There is no better way for the comparison than to compare all of those aspects.
-Story-Telling-
If the detractors are to be believed, musicians today no longer write their own songs. I don't think this changes everything, however, there is a closer connection when it is your own words. I would say more, but I'm not going to pretend I know every song that was written by the person or band who performed it. I can easily tell you why Queen is still considered by many to be one of the greatest bands of all time, and how they wrote every song. I can't tell you how many Motown singers wrote their own songs, because I'm not even aware of how many Motown singers existed. Honestly, I have a bigger problem with modern lyrics. Two, to be specific.
The first of which is story-telling. Music used to tell grand stories. There were five to seven minute ballads that we don't get much of anymore. Stories are still told today, but a lot of them tend to be about a fictional version of the singer. These existed before, but they are everywhere today. For some of you, you may think I'm only talking about rap music. A genre where the singer is always a gangster, some unlikable anti-hero boasting about their accomplishments. I may agree with liking older music, but this stance on rap is a little far for me. I agree it happens, but I have enjoyed several rap songs that both subverted and completely absorbed this trend. I unironically enjoy Kanye West's Power, for both being about that kind of person as well as practically an essay on why they are not ideal people. Personally, I think that negative connotation fits better for country music, both old and new.
But on the subject of country, a great example of story-telling and lyrics is folk music. This has slowly disappeared, and that saddens me. Allow me to tell you the tale of one such singer, Jim Croce.
I outright have a tattoo on my left arm due to one of his songs. Funfact I guess.
-http://jimcroce.com/?page_id=773
Jim wrote songs about other people. Sometimes they were in first person, often he was recounting this fiction person's exploits. Usually, they weren't good people, and he treated them as such. Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown is about a local brute, Working at the Car Wash Blues is about a narcissist who isn't happy because he's not on top of the world like he believes he deserves. The nicest I can remember him being to a horrible person is Roller Derby Queen, where the main character admits to have fallen in love with an ugly and cantankerous woman he saw in the audience of a roller derby. Jim also wrote break-up songs. He could tell you the entire love story of these two people, and how it fell into shambles. Usually these were sad, although One Less Set of Footsteps is a wonderful subversion, the entire song is someone boasting how happy they are to be done with the other and how bad everything was.
Sometimes simple is good enough. These were all one sentence apiece for a three or four minute song. I can do that for many other great songs. The Devil Went Down to Georgia is about a boy beating the devil in a contest. If you want a more modern song, Girlfriend is about a jealous teenager who thinks the boy she likes is wasting his time by dating someone else.
I said earlier I like Lady Gaga, yet I'll be honest, I don't know what most of her songs are about. Bad Romance is straight-forward, as is Poker Face. My favorite song she's made, however, is Judas, and I've tried but I really don't know what that song is about. I've heard the lyrics, they don't make sense. I hear something about loving Judas, but somehow I don’t know enough to fully know how she feels. It could be lust, it could be legitimate love. As I really like the song, I can obviously overlook it, but I have to end up admitting I most like it because of her voice and beat. In the case of a lot of other songs, the story just isn't interesting. It goes back to many inflated egos, as it reflects the times, I assume. I miss hearing about people. Likable, lovable, hateable, determined people. I feel we used to get fully-fleshed out characters and their life-story. I truly miss that.
There's something else about Judas that shows a point. It's the other thing I feel about today's lyrics.
-Gibberish-
The real reason I don't understand the story of Lady Gaga's Judas, is the same problem I have with both some of her songs and modern music in general. Not the existence of gibberish, the outright love of gibberish.
For those sitting there, smugly assuming the old songs never used gibberish, here is my counter-point. There was gibberish, it was just used a lot less.
Here are some lyrics from the aforementioned Judas:
In the most Biblical sense,
I am beyond repentance
Fame hooker, prostitute wench, vomits her mind
But in the cultural sense
I just speak in future tense
Judas kiss me if offensed,
Or wear an ear condom next time
I supposed I could make sense of this, seeing them in front of me. I've never known what these words were until I looked them up, because she sings them so fast it becomes garbled. Yet, even after taking some time with it, some of it is still random words to rhyme or sound interesting.
Now, for comparison. Here are two of the continuous lines from the famous song, Harry Chapin's Cats In the Cradle:
And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man in the moon
Yes, it is gibberish, but I can still hear it when I listen to the song. I never had to look up the lyrics to understand them. I even have an opinion; the singer is recalling the stories he regrets never telling his kid. Who knows if I'm right, but at least I can form an opinion the second I heard the lyrics for the first time.
I've been hard on Gaga, so I will be more than kind and say that the reason she uses gibberish is clearly from her Queen influence. Queen loved gibberish.
I see a little silhouetto of a man
Scaramouch, scaramouch will you do the fandango
Thunderbolt and lightning very very frightening me
Gallileo, Gallileo,
Gallileo, Gallileo,
Gallileo Figaro - magnifico
That is Bohemian Rhapsody, and I don't think I had to tell you for you to know that. Like the last example, you hear it from the first time. Unlike the last example, you don't have a clue what it means. I assume that the main character is going crazy, the song seemed to be heading that way from lyric 1. Of course, that helps my earlier point. Even with complete gibberish, this older song makes sense story-wise; It's about a man who may or may not regret killing a man, and is apologizing to his mother for becoming the kind of person he is.
Nonsense can work easily, but today I am hearing more use of nonsense than regular words. If I may just be mishearing, than the problem is that modern songs have a tendency to sound like gibberish and are muffling their words too much. Sure, sometimes a song is fine just for it's beat. However, lyrics matter, in more than one way.
-Lack of Variation-
I said earlier that pop is mostly headed in the right direction. I've noticed this mostly because pop and country and rap are all I hear for new songs. Pop is simply "popular music", I wish this was a joke, but I took a Popular Cultural Studies class and the professor flat-out told us this is what it meant from day one.
Again, I want to say out of all of these genres I only dislike country. This isn't just new country either, that's the reason I specifically chose The Devil Went Down to Georgia, just so I could be a little nice to lovers of the genre. It's a perfect song, I'll always go out of my way to praise it.
As for older styles, I have already mentioned disco, Motown, and folk. There also seems to be a strong lack of new punk rock, classical rock, soft rock, jazz, rhythm and blues, I'm even noticing a lot less Christian rock, classical hip-hop, grunge, really I could go on. When I was a child, all of these and more played on the radio. Now, the stations are almost all dedicated to old rock. Sure, I love old rock, but there seems to be something weird about the branching out of current music versus what we’ve already been listening to for two or three decades. If you are able to tune into a college radio station, cherish it, because I've heard that students today are experimenting with music more than mainstream radio stations, meaning you won't get the exact same five songs throughout the week.
Part of me thinks boy bands came back as strong as they did because the people were clamoring for something different again.
Regardless of the radio, I do not know of the last new song that wasn't pop, rap, or country. There is so much new country, that they hold an event every single month on local programming to hand out awards and congratulations. Mainstream rap has outright eclipsed the hip-pop it evolved from, and swallowed it's other variations. Pop has now just become whatever people feel like slapping the label on. Is Miley Cyrus a pop singer or a country singer? Ask whichever song she just performed.
The most consistent thing with her music is being weird, most likely her higher-ups are hoping for and achieving a Madonna effect. Again, I do still enjoy her work from time to time, and I honestly appreciate an artist who tries to be distinguishable from their peers.
Edit: F**k John K. I’m not taking down this picture but in no way do I associate with him or condone the man’s actions.
-http://www.cartoonbrew.com/music-videos/john-kricfalusi-animation-miley-cyrus-bangerz-tour-96601.html/attachment/miley-bangerz-e
Maybe I could completely blame my disinterest in modern music on it's lack of variation. If I get tired of pop I'd like to be able to hear a new Motown song. I've mentioned Motown a lot, it's time to be frank, I really miss Motown. I would also live for a new Jazz song, but it's been a long time since I was aware of them. They must exist, but the mainstream is just hiding them away, in fact I'm betting that's almost exactly what's happening. Treating them the same way Hollywood used to treat Indie films.
However, I do believe there is something else that attributes to what has happened. How apropos that I already mentioned Hollywood.
-Following Too Much in Other's Footsteps-
There is a YouTuber by the name of Jim Gisriel. Good fellow. Has far more subscribers than I do right now. He has a very thoughtful video on how Hollywood is starting to get too nostalgic when it comes to blockbusters:
I really think his point can apply to modern music as well, I’ve already mentioned as such. Miley Cyrus's shtick feels very derivative of Madonna. I said Lady Gaga probably uses fast gibberish because of her outright admittance to being inspired by Queen. This is not the first time that musicians took direct influence from another and of course that’s not a bad thing in and of itself.
The Beatles were inspired by other rock musicians, and they are considered the people who made pop music start to gain momentum, or to some, the people who created it in the first place. Current rap came from older rap, I stated as such, as well as the fact rap came from hip-hop in the first place. And then there's not only the many genres of rock, but rock music has it’s roots in jazz and rhythm and blues. Music, like all art, evolves over time.
I'm just afraid that the current evolution has turned a few heads too many. The current executives looked very hard at what stuck, and only decided to take a few of those genres forward. The insanity of certain songs was taken forward, without a long enough sit-down as to why they worked in the first place. Stories became too self-involved to be relatable, and boasting became very common after it's use beforehand. Gone are the days of Carly Simon's You're So Vain, now it's common for the main character to be the one who's vain.
A great song can make you laugh, can make you rethink your life, can outright break your heart. I can still enjoy new pop and rap, but it's been a good while since I completely loved a new song. I suppose we'll just have to wait for the next breed of musicians to learn from past mistakes and failures, and see how that pans out.