I feel like everybody listens to middle school music permanently now. I dunno how else to describe it. Disney Channel music became the main type of music
This is true of what's currently being produced but a hugely under discussed side effect of streaming is that the stuff kids are actually listening to is weirder than ever. I just watched some random normie teen doing a completely unironic tiktok dance to Dead Can Dance
there's always been weirdo outliers (cf. me, being a '90s teen knowing about Sun Ra and Jorge Ben because my parents had some of their LPs) and unexpected vectors for discovery: TV/movie/game syncs, sample-spotting, random record store finds, etc. Forming taste is chaotic and that's the fun part
and one thing I think has gotten a lot better since I navigated becoming a music dork in the '90s is the idea that there isn't so much cliquishness around genre, like there are probably still people mad at poseurs or w/e but a lot less likelihood your punk friends will make fun of you for liking ELO
I kind of think this is overstated, and that it's more of an increasingly sharp divide between kids who are curious about things (in which case they have an unimaginable access to the entire history of recorded media) and kids who are incurious (in which case they rely solely on games/influencers)
Yeah there’s basically no mainstream anymore, they don’t distinguish (as far as tastes, I don’t mean they literally can’t tell the difference) between high budget Disney content and some low subscribe YouTuber they heard about from friends at school
The big labels are getting more formulaic for the same reason movies have been - the number of things that will gain widespread cultural currency they can milk for profit is shrinking rapidly
i've grown up knowing what torrents are, so i had an infinite panoply of music in front of me able to just look up anything i ever heard about. the result being that i was usually about 30 years out of date culturally
kind of the same reason so many people drink coors or go to McDonalds, sure there are better options but this option is everywhere and familiar so why try anything new or different
Eh, pop music has always been that, I mean the actual songwriting sensibilities of current pop. There's a very "fake pop musician from a Nickelodeon show" quality to a lot of the pop music from the last 10ish years
Yeah you can tell it’s someone who’s better than this flawlessly emulating a form they have no affection for. Tryhardy shit. Musical theater shit. Except musical theater is supposed to be like that.
No, that has always been there. This applies to someone like Taylor Swift just as well. Or a lot of rock and country acts. A distinctly "this sounds like a fake song written for a TV show" songwriting sensibility. Dr. Luke and his many victims might be the subgenre
Yeah idk I heard something that sounded like a rehash of post punk new wave stuff and was thinking about about how they had a rehash of emo on top 40 a year or two ago and come to think of it the faux morrissey shit already got done by Harry Styles too there really is nothing new anymore huh
That stuff sounded really different from 70s punk, though. Popular rock was still transforming itself every 5 years or so back then. Now it gets the same American Idol-ish production sheen and songwriring approach as any other genre
I mean the Ramones and the Sex Pistols were at heart teenybopper shit. Feel like the Clash tried to be a little more high-minded but maybe I just like them better.
