Tony Bennett: "Modern music is terrible."

  • Thread starter Thread starter VeritasLuxMea
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
There’s a lot of great music out there today with some remarkably talented performers and writers. We just don’t call it “popular” and you have to look for it. But you don’t haveto look too hard thanks to the internet.

Joe B
 
A considerable deal of modern music is, at best, meaningless in its message, or at worst, designed to handicap a person’s conscious from being able to feel uncomfortable, or to keep a person distracted in the throes of shallow romance:

Life is a journey,
Not a destination,
There are no mistakes,
Just chances we’ve taken
Lay down your regrets cause all we have is now

“A Beautiful Day”, Indie Arie

Perfectly heinous, heretical words, formatted into an innocent, positive-sounding song with an upbeat melody.
 
I’m probably biased since I’m still pretty young, but I think there is good music in every decade. I have more “favorites” in the earlier decades than 90s and 00s, but I still have found a few songs I liked every year. In earlier decades my interests would align with the mainstream. Now my interests would be considered more niche. For example, I have never gotten into hip hop, rap, or the current popular dance pop. Well, there are maybe 3-5 songs in those genres I like, but in general, that kind of music does nothing for me. My interests are rock (and most subgenres), classical, and soundtracks (both movies and video games). However, “the classics” influence new artists, so I hear bits and pieces of good music even in a bad song.
 
hamandcheese said:
You guys are getting a little carried away. Some of the best music ever made came out of the 20th century and it came from our country, the USA. Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, etc. Jazz is our classical music and every American should know it and be proud of it. Id put Ella Fitzgerald right up there next to Cecilia Bartoli or anyone else. I think this music might be the best thing we’ve ever given the world.
Click to expand...
Just wanted to point out that there are posts in here from people from Great Britain, Australia and elsewhere. This is not a purely U.S. forum. 🙂
 
alexandratm said:
  1. There’s good music to be found in all times. But it’s not usually on the pop charts, whether it’s 1950 or 2050. Anyone who talks about the good old days, I’m pointing you to such chart toppers like “Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom)” or “Mashed Potato Time.”
Click to expand...
Is there really anything wrong with this? Personally I’d sooner listen to that over anything currently on the top 40.
 
PietroPaolo said:
Compared to Palestrina (16th c), Bach (17th c), Mozart (18th c), and Beethoven (19th c) most of the music made in the twentieth century is “terrible.” But I do listen to stuff from the 90’s and early 2000’s (when I was in HS and College).

And, yes, I’m aware of Stravinsky, Debussy, Schoenberg, et al. And, yes, I’m sticking with “terrible.”
Click to expand...
Omitting Chopin? That’s unforgivable.

Have you heard Gorecki’s Third Symphony? Gorecki was a religious man too.
 
I would qualify the statement by saying a lot of modern “pop” music is terrible. There are plenty of great musicians still around, and great music being created, but it is no longer in the forefront of the general public.

Music that is in front of the general public is there simply to make a fast dollar. Much of the music structure of this music is very simple, and in a great many cases the singers are selected on the basis of looks, not singing nor songwriting ability. Did you ever hear the live vocal tracks of some of these people…it’s scary how bad many of today’s “stars” are. Hey, and Church with a choir will likely have people that can sing better than these people.

This is an entire turnaround from the 1960s/1970s, where many bands/musicians wrote their own songs, played their own instruments, and weren’t selected on the basis of looks.
 
TheWarriorMonk said:
This is an entire turnaround from the 1960s/1970s, where many bands/musicians wrote their own songs, played their own instruments, and weren’t selected on the basis of looks.
Click to expand...
So video did kill the radio star…
 
There’s more great music being recorded today, in 2014, than there has ever been. “Royals” by Lorde, is an amazing song. That’s just one example. “Hey Ho” by The Lumineers. Another example of a song our GRANDCHILDREN will be humming. There’s a ton of ‘cross-pollination’ between genres, which never happened in “the good old days” - a country song by Brad Paisley with LL Cool J rapping on a few verses? Would that ever happened in the “good old days”? Not to mention that this supposedly “terrible” music - so many remakes of inferior songs from earlier eras. Not to mention so many wonderful singer-songwriters who are writing with open tuning - “open tuning” means instead of playing guitar EADGBE, you play it DADGAD or DBGBE or whatever you want. So, let’s see if I understand the “modern music terrible” logic: Joni Mitchell (who wrote drop-tuned “Big Yellow Taxi”), for example, is good music, but any rock bands or heavy metal bands do the same thing with new tunings and even playing 8,9,10 strings or without bass or doing new and exciting things…that’s terrible why? And, more pertinently how is it even possible for it to be terrible? I’m not talking about the garbage on the radio - I’m talking about the music that doesn’t even get to radio airplay until enough people start liking it and sharing it with friends and family.
 
The reason why I don’t like some modern music. In particular electronic is because there is nothing unique in learning it. Most of it is computer work. Plus you don’t even have to know a musical instrument or know how to write lyrics.
 
JButky said:
There’s a lot of great music out there today with some remarkably talented performers and writers. We just don’t call it “popular” and you have to look for it. But you don’t haveto look too hard thanks to the internet.

Joe B
Click to expand...
Amen to that. And, yes, there are a lot of very remarkable artists who are taking music to new and exciting places.
 
Anyone who talks about the good old days, I’m pointing you to such chart toppers like “Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom)” or “Mashed Potato Time.”
Click to expand...
Every era has silly songs. There’s a legitimate market for it and we need it sometimes.

Is anybody writing songs like we saw in West Side Story, or The Sound of Music today?
No. Nobody can. The art is lost. The people have been dumbed down.
Forget about Oscar winners like “Climb Every Mountain”. Now we get,…er… anybody remember this year’s winner? 🤷
 
empther said:
Is anybody writing songs like we saw in West Side Story, or The Sound of Music today? No. Nobody can. The art is lost. The people have been dumbed down.
Click to expand...
There are great artists and great songs being written…it’s just not being put in front of the public.

FWIW, I’ve seen any played with various young musicians over the past several years. They all have something in common: They are playing the music of the past, not the present. That’s because modern pop music lacks not only the musicality, but the real instruments.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top