the FUCK is wrong with music now?!?!?!?!?

Gongshaman, If you are referring to me as holding up "boring (to you (actually me) ) though quite original music" and are basing your response on your assumptions of my musical taste. Let me clarify.

I despise electronic music, and a lot of modern music that depends on sampling.
I think Johnny B. Goode is the best rock song written (ever). (Better even than Stairway to Heaven, for reasons I've explained in other threads.)
Sinking of the Reuben James is one of my favorite pieces of music, as is Wildwood Flower.
Pete Seeger is my favorite musician.

Sturgeon's Law says that 80% of everything is crap.
That means that 80% of the music being written today is crap.
That means that 80% of the music written in the 60's was crap. 20% was good.

Insisting the new music be original and non-derivative leaves that 20% of good 60's music in the past.

Fortunately, good musicians don't hold to the originality directive. They take old songs, change them (perhaps), and put them out so the 20% isn't lost.
Johnny Cash felt quite free enough to put out Lead Belly's Rock Island Line, even to the "pig iron" preamble. And we are richer for him having done it.
Country Joe takes Muskrat Ramble and we get the Feeling Like I'm Fixing To Die Rag.
Jefferson Airplane plays Bloodstained Banders in a new style, with new instruments and we are blessed with Good Shepherd.

Sampling is a musical technique that is available because of the new computer technology.
Just as Jimi Hendrix used the new technology of the transistor to use feedback. (Hey Joe is far from original, the sound was Hendrix, the music was old.)

And I don't have to like it, for music to be good or valid. And many find music that uses sampling to be enjoyable.

You can combine the new with the old.
When Dylan went electric (at Newport of all places), Pete was apoplectic.
But later, Pete played lots of the best gigs in history by sharing the stage with Arlo Gurthrie's electric rock style band.

I would argue that the instance on originality, as expressed by the lawyers overuse of copyright, is what the FUCK is wrong with modern music.
The financial hit from playing other people's music, the insistence that everything be original is keeping the 20% from the past away from our ears.
And it's limiting the 20% of good current music to a smaller audience. No body is playing each other's songs, they are all on their own paths. Tina Turner isn't covering CCR's Proud Mary. Jefferson Airplane isn't covering Wooden Ships.

(OK, Johnny Cash did cover Hurt, but he was always an outlaw.)

And in that, sampling does have a good portion of the blame. The lousy samplers caused those musicians being sampled to go to the courts to get their due. And the lawyers and accountants took those decisions and wrung every dime that they could out of the good 20% of the past.

Sampling is a musical technique that should be judged by the ears, not by some sense of originality. Computer technology has made it so one can be a musician and not know how to make a barr chord. But that doesn't make the music bad.

Originality gone loco, an industry driven by copyright lawyers, is what is wrong with modern music.
Sampling, like Filk Songs, is one of the techniques that might save us from the lawyers.

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do."
Woody Guthrie

 

You gotta excuse the folk and country people, though to be fair some of them actually make up new melodys along with the words to those same old chord progressions, lol

Who the fuck is Sturgeon? Sounds like a real bitch.

That you think copyright layers are whats wrong with the music industry says a lot...

That you think there's a best song ever written says even more. *rolls eyes"

 

Theodore Sturgeon, science fiction author.

Best song, no. Best Rock Song (to the extent that "best" is meaningful in regards to music) yes.

Short version:
Stairway is said to be the best Zepplin song. OK, but its only played by Zepplin.
To be the best "rock" song, Rock bands have to play it.

Chuck Berry, Bob Marly, Grateful Dead, etc. etc. etc. have all played Johnny B. Goode
Any rock band can open their set with it, both because they know it and because it fits with the rest of their set.

Therefore, Johnny B. Goode is the best rock song.

If I were in a mood to be feisty, I might note that "same old chord progressions" is another way of saying "time tested, resilient, proven (over and over and over with many ears) to be good chord progressions"

I'm beginning to suspect that you don't respect popularity as a measure of musical quality as much as I do.

I generally hold that art, including music, is a communication not a "message in a bottle".
The receiver of the art, the audience, is as important to the artistic (musical) experience as the creator of the art.

 

If they would do nothing more with it, it would seem like that indeed. But a lot of the time an old rhythm or melody is sampled and gets a new purpose in a new kind of music. Using a sample of someone elses musical recording or performance is not a creative act on itself, no. It is how and why it is used of course. You seem to judge from a theoretical perspective (namely: when one samples from another artist than themselves it can't be creative music), I judge from the music I have actually heard.

 

Society is really quite diverse, it can be perceived as many subcultures (kind of mini societies) blending into eachother and making up one big society. I'm not saying this is the case for you, but most often people only or mostly dig the music of the subculture(s) they can identify with. Personally I thought 10 years ago as well that today's music sucked. Now not so much (not saying there isn't a lot of crap ). Guess in which time I was more 'stuck' in just my own subculture or ones I had some affinity with?

 

The objective difference between modern music scene and what has passed before is the lack of "set-list overlap".

Nobody is playing the same songs.

Ariana Grande and Mili Cyrus don't perform any of the same songs.

This lack of overlap is unique in history.
Pre-phonograph, music had to be performed by many folks in order to reach many ears. (Steven Foster couldn't perform Oh Susanna enough times to make it as popular as it was.)
Post-phonograph, we can observe the recent demise in overlap. (Examples above)

Before now, there was significant overlap in performers set lists. This is objective, in that "I think it sucks" never enters into the discussion.

I see this as a part (or a consequence) of the transition of the public from music makers to music consumers.
Compare the percentage of people who are in adult choirs in 1850, 1920, 1950 and now. There are fewer music makers per capita now than there have ever been in the world.
Along with that change, the change from music as a public experience (you had to go to a concert to hear music) to a private one (ear buds only fit one head at a time).

Its possible that this is what John Phillips Souza was thinking when he said of the invention of the phonograph, "I fear for the future of American music."

 

"...do you really think they were in it for the cash????"

Funny you should mention Cash. He was in it so he could stop picking cotton and making cars.
When we look at musician's motivations, it would be hard to say that they were motivated by changing the world. Consider how many skeedadled into Marin county and pulled up the drawbridge as soon as they could. Wonderful music, but not so much actualy living the "change the world" scene.

Hank Williams Sr is another musician whose lyrics wasn't matched by their life. That's not a criticism, just taking note that musicians are performers. Real people whose lives and motivations don't necessarily match their stage personae.

 

"Rock did not die of old age. It was murdered."...
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