Do you feel like music is losing its soul?

[Reyesnuthugr]

There was no dark ages, there was no rennaisance. Everything in life is a constant, perfectly horizontal, flat line of consistent quality. Mumble-rap is the skillful equivalent of MoTown. The guy at community college who barfs on butcher paper is no better or worse than the Baroque masters of the past.

To think otherwise is to risk being labeled as "old." It's not worth it.

 

[Rimbaud82]

There was no dark ages, there was no rennaisance. Everything in life is a constant, perfectly horizontal, flat line of consistent quality. Mumble-rap is the skillful equivalent of MoTown. The guy at community college who barfs on butcher paper is no better or worse than the Baroque masters of the past.

To think otherwise is to risk being labeled as "old." It's not worth it.

Well, to a large extent, yes. At least not as people conceive it, the perception of those two historical periods is actually a good example of how people have a warped perception of things like that, influenced by various other factors (including nostalgia, and golden age thinking). That's not to say that muble-rap is equivalent to motown, that's just a stupid straw man argument.

 

[Reyesnuthugr]

That's not to say that muble-rap is equivalent to motown, that's just a stupid straw man argument.

I disagree. These are not cherry picked examples. Motown was dominant in its era for the same demographic as mumble rap is now during its era. Clearly the skill level differs objectively-- in every category of merit Motown has it beat. Could MoTown superstars make passable mumble rap if their lives depended on it? How about reverse? Of course not.

Everything else rises and falls in quality on a graph-- architecture, engineering, wheat production, empires, etc. I don't get why some people spend effort trying to convince others that music or movies somehow keep a constant level of quality throughout history, as if it's pinned to some pre-determined mathematical law of nature. It doesn't have to and it's clear that it doesn't tend to, either. Almost nothing is constant and generational music is no outlier.

 

[560ti]

Mainstream is for sure losing it's touch. Bunch of auto-tuned garbage

Mainstream artist (millionaires who played in stadiums) where all musically good back in the day (Dire Straits, Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, Eagles, Tom Petty....ect).

The millionaires who play in stadiums now a days aren't even qualified to tune Eric Clapton's guitar (Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Wiz, Nikki Minaji, Selena Gomez ). Most of them probably don't even play anything live they just lip sing or mumble to a pre-recorded track.

It's funny, because music used to be something that people talked about, shared with one another, and were "invested" in . Now aside from the occasional person, if you even ask people what music they like you're likely to hear "everything" or at best it's tagged with "except country/rap/metal".

It used to be "Have you heard this band/song?" and they would play it for you, it was a shared experience.

This x100. If you talk to most people now a days about music (especially those under 30) there's not really much to talk about.