Why do old people hate new music?

[EgonSpengler]

The difference between then and now it no one is promoting much anymore. Are there people out there generating new content? Certainly. Finding something one might like can be like looking for a needle in a haystack and I'd only really expect people from whom listening to music is a more serious hobby/pastime to actually put in the effort.

In the past you could just flip on your radio or MTV and a constant stream of novelty was aimed at you with little to no effort required on your part. Now you are at the mercy of algorithms with an agenda.

Sorry, but I think you're looking at the past through rose-colored glasses and ignoring the easily-accessible tools at your disposal today. First, commercial radio is practically the definition of an "algorithm with an agenda." It strains the great wealth of music down to 0.1% and drip-feeds it to you. If commercial radio is to be believed, Fleetwood Mac made 4 songs. I don't think I even heard "Tusk" until I was, like, 30. Seriously, I hate commercial radio and have since about 1986. But I was fortunate to live in a city with a ton of non-mainstream radio stations (mostly college stations), as well as great (non-commercial) record stores and printed "zines" and so on. Lots of people didn't have that luck. When I was in high school, you didn't have to go too far outside the city to lose access to all of that stuff.

As for today, just get Spotify. $10 a month. Boom. Done. (I'm not a shill for Spotify, I don't work for them and I have no attachment to it, it's just the first service I happened to use that met my requirements. There are others, if you feel like asking around. But if you want to keep it simple, just start with that one.) When these services first began, I wasn't too impressed with them. I think I tried Pandora for a little while when it started out, but mainly just for the technological novelty; it wasn't actually very good for finding new music. But the algorithm and variety of content have improved dramatically in the last 15 years. Spotify has a feature called "[Album/Artist/Song] Radio." You start with 1 thing, an artist or a song, then it plays a list of songs based on that selection. The Amazon music service had a feature where it would automatically pick up playing related music after an album was finished, and it surprised me a few times with how good its choices were. I stopped using that service because of other things and I find the extra $2 for Spotify is more than worth it. Of course you can just play an artist or an album, if there's something specific you want to listen to, and bookmark it so you can find it again later. I think you have to dig pretty deep or just get unlucky to find holes in Spotify's collection. So far I've only failed to find two albums that I went looking for (Throwing Muses by Throwing Muses and Flowers From Exile by Rome, if you're curious what they were.)

 

[Birdjaguar]

Thread premise is nonsense. I'm 41 and like plenty of new music (and dislike plenty of music from "my era"). It's been shown that in general music is in decline (in complexity, originality, etc) but there is still decent stuff out there if you search for it & there are still a few decent pop songs each year.

This was what I was waiting for in this thread.

Most claims of music being in decline are pretty much hacky in character. It's something we intricately try to figure out (why it's experienced as such, and whether there's anything substantive to it) in musicology.

I know the usual suspects as popularized on YouTube; the loudness war, claims of harmonic simplification, structural simplification, faltering skill in regards to musicianship. To those in particular, I'd point out that good loudness (that is, well sounding compression) is hard to do; for the simplifications the claimants of this usually swear by blues and/or classical that are incredibly formulaic, which usually undermines that position (classical harmony and structure is much more limited than most people realize); and there is real skill demanded in using a PC to compose this stuff.

Some of the claims of music in decline use the skin of empirical research to provide their results, but I'd like to stress the principle that particularly in the case of art, what measurements you use for it really are in the eye of the beholder. There was a viral study that was popularly read as decline of complexity in sound, for example. How one sided this study's points were... Depends on the reader. I read it and it was much less grumpy old man than it was represented as in the media. It's strue that certain elements have been less prioritized, but it doesn't mean other things have been emphasized for the benefit of some vision (which is, yes, usually capitalist in intentionality more than anything else. There's a correlation between capitalism and sound in a material way, but it's usually more complicated than "decline"). It's basically the equivalent of the OP point: There's stuff in newer music that older ears are usually not able to detect.

This channel is also pretty good usually, but did a ridiculous claim about classical music vs. pop, where they noted that classical tended to do slower buildup in harmony, and pop structures, particularly four chord arrangements, basically gave the climax once every four chords. Thing is that this only holds true if you use function harmonics as a strict base of your perception of music (pop has buildup, it's just not expressed in intervals, usually), and necessiate this classical particular form of buildup as integral to musical quality, because otherwise you can't claim decline or lack of quality. (That classical actually has plenty of pieces without Wagnerian/Beethoven-esque buildup also demonstrates why this whole idea is ridiculous, but let's leave that be for now.) If you don't spend the whole piece building towards a proper harmonic cadence in Western classical, your piece has failed. So if you use that premise for every kind of music, a lot of stuff is just going to be failed art. No matter what other stuff is done there.

It's like, think about if you go into a forest with the intention of biking on a bicycle route. Following this, you believe it's a bad forest if there isn't a bicycle route. You don't find a bicycle route, it's a bad forest. Maybe the forest has other uses than biking, and using a biking measurement for it kind of misses the other ways you can engage with the forest.

Translating that, of course any kind of music is going to be "in decline" if you judge it by unrelated harmonic rules and modes of perception. If you don't have the mode of listening for certain signs. I know the idea of thinking the forest is bad for not having a bicycle route, even if you're a biking enthusiast, is absurd. But that's the usual problem when people claim stuff is in decline. "It doesn't have this old harmonic rule anymore! It sucks!"

I also know that a lot of people swear by having more complicated harmonies that "don't follow rules" or whatever. But... Let's just call it avantgardism, and point out that this is also a poor universal metric, to claim that things must always push forward. It's a metric as much as a stringent harmonic rule to just believe that rules must be broken, and simply doesn't apply to everything. Old ears can have the issue too, of embracing avantgardism at the cost of everything else.

I actually have this problem in regards to a lot of genres. My ears simply aren't in tune with presuppositions of signs that exist in certain genres of music. Which is why I keep to my own ballpark when studying music.

Interesting. My take away from the article was that one's musical taste is mostly set at a young age and those tastes can persist over a life time. As we age we just rationalize why our choices are the best.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Interesting. My take away from the article was that one's musical taste is mostly set at a young age and those tastes can persist over a life time. As we age we just rationalize why our choices are the best.

That's how I read it, too. It seems to pass "the smell test", so to speak.

 

[mitsho]

I also try really hard to keep up listening to contemporary music. But it‘s true, it‘s getting harder and harder as there is so much music around and so few hours in the week. But picking what you like is a necessity and has always been. Like Pop Music, or Classical tunes? and you know, then there are 193 countries in the world and Spotify has 40’000 subgenres in its list. So…

What I feel hasn‘t been touched is Music as a cultural code. Of course, at a wedding we will play the song my group of friends listened to while growing up. They transport cues and suddenly everybody‘s doing the Macarena at 1 AM. Doesn‘t mean though that I like the Macarena… ;-)

Interesting topic though in any case.

 

[Narz]

This was what I was waiting for in this thread.

Most claims of music being in decline are pretty much hacky in character. It's something we intricately try to figure out (why it's experienced as such, and whether there's anything substantive to it) in musicology.

I know the usual suspects as popularized on YouTube; the loudness war, claims of harmonic simplification, structural simplification, faltering skill in regards to musicianship. To those in particular, I'd point out that good loudness (that is, well sounding compression) is hard to do; for the simplifications the claimants of this usually swear by blues and/or classical that are incredibly formulaic, which usually undermines that position (classical harmony and structure is much more limited than most people realize); and there is real skill demanded in using a PC to compose this stuff.

Some of the claims of music in decline use the skin of empirical research to provide their results, but I'd like to stress the principle that particularly in the case of art, what measurements you use for it really are in the eye of the beholder. There was a viral study that was popularly read as decline of complexity in sound, for example. How one sided this study's points were... Depends on the reader. I read it and it was much less grumpy old man than it was represented as in the media. It's strue that certain elements have been less prioritized, but it doesn't mean other things have been emphasized for the benefit of some vision (which is, yes, usually capitalist in intentionality more than anything else. There's a correlation between capitalism and sound in a material way, but it's usually more complicated than "decline"). It's basically the equivalent of the OP point: There's stuff in newer music that older ears are usually not able to detect.

This channel is also pretty good usually, but did a ridiculous claim about classical music vs. pop, where they noted that classical tended to do slower buildup in harmony, and pop structures, particularly four chord arrangements, basically gave the climax once every four chords. Thing is that this only holds true if you use function harmonics as a strict base of your perception of music (pop has buildup, it's just not expressed in intervals, usually), and necessiate this classical particular form of buildup as integral to musical quality, because otherwise you can't claim decline or lack of quality. (That classical actually has plenty of pieces without Wagnerian/Beethoven-esque buildup also demonstrates why this whole idea is ridiculous, but let's leave that be for now.) If you don't spend the whole piece building towards a proper harmonic cadence in Western classical, your piece has failed. So if you use that premise for every kind of music, a lot of stuff is just going to be failed art. No matter what other stuff is done there.

It's like, think about if you go into a forest with the intention of biking on a bicycle route. Following this, you believe it's a bad forest if there isn't a bicycle route. You don't find a bicycle route, it's a bad forest. Maybe the forest has other uses than biking, and using a biking measurement for it kind of misses the other ways you can engage with the forest.

Translating that, of course any kind of music is going to be "in decline" if you judge it by unrelated harmonic rules and modes of perception. If you don't have the mode of listening for certain signs. I know the idea of thinking the forest is bad for not having a bicycle route, even if you're a biking enthusiast, is absurd. But that's the usual problem when people claim stuff is in decline. "It doesn't have this old harmonic rule anymore! It sucks!"

I also know that a lot of people swear by having more complicated harmonies that "don't follow rules" or whatever. But... Let's just call it avantgardism, and point out that this is also a poor universal metric, to claim that things must always push forward. It's a metric as much as a stringent harmonic rule to just believe that rules must be broken, and simply doesn't apply to everything. Old ears can have the issue too, of embracing avantgardism at the cost of everything else.

I actually have this problem in regards to a lot of genres. My ears simply aren't in tune with presuppositions of signs that exist in certain genres of music. Which is why I keep to my own ballpark when studying music.

I'm not going to pretend to understand most of the metrics people use to compare music but there's gotta be at least 10 objective measurements to prove that any song by Pink Floyd is better than Rumor Has It by Adele (the last unpleasant, repetitive, generally irritating modern song I remember hearing).

As for buildup, my favorite slow buildup to exciting climax song is Bolero by Ravel. Good sex track.

 

[Narz]

Interesting. My take away from the article was that one's musical taste is mostly set at a young age and those tastes can persist over a life time. As we age we just rationalize why our choices are the best.

I didn't start listening to much electronic music until my mid-30s and now it's the genre I listen to the most (voices & words are a bit much for me sometimes!)

 

[Angst]

Interesting. My take away from the article was that one's musical taste is mostly set at a young age and those tastes can persist over a life time. As we age we just rationalize why our choices are the best.

In case I was unclear, I was talking about a few articles. When I explicitly talked about the article in the OP, I did that. When I refered to other articles, I did that.

I'm not going to pretend to understand most of the metrics people use to compare music but there's gotta be at least 10 objective measurements to prove that any song by Pink Floyd is better than Rumor Has It by Adele (the last unpleasant, repetitive, generally irritating modern song I remember hearing).

As for buildup, my favorite slow buildup to exciting climax song is Bolero by Ravel. Good sex track.

No, nope, objective measurements of music don't exist. At least not in a determinant of artistic quality. We can say reasonably objectively what musical material is a lot of the time (for example, what frequency an interval has) but not how it is "objectively" aesthetically pleasing, as in aesthetically pleasing outside modes of listening. What does exist is qualified explanations of taste and how it connects to people with certain modes of listening. But there's no objective measurement that proclaims quality in the way you're looking for.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Interesting. My take away from the article was that one's musical taste is mostly set at a young age and those tastes can persist over a life time. As we age we just rationalize why our choices are the best.

That's how I read it, too. It seems to pass "the smell test", so to speak.

Tend to think this too.
I think the phases I went through (and rough ages they apply to) were:

1. Like whatever was on TOTP or radio a lot (10-15)
2. Start developing preferences. Still mainly listening to current music, but more obscure/less commercial. Certain friends endless playing of Saxon/Def Leppard etc is why I still dislike most metal (15-early twenties)
3. Tastes start widening. Go back through the "classics" (mid twenties-early thirties). Most of the music I like has certain elements to it
4. Tastes pretty confirmed. Still listen to new music/artists but from genres I like (mid thirties to early forties)
5. Rarely listen to new music unless its by an artist I already know I like (mid-40s to present)

I also think people have differing tastes in what they react to. I like good lyrics, passion and energy in a song.
In general I react best to words. Dance music tends to leave me cold.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Yes, lyrics are important to me too.

My wife and I traveled different musical paths during the same span of time. She tended towards blues while I did not. Until 1981 and the advent of MTV, radio, albums, and concerts were how people accessed new music. Radio selected for you; albums had to be bought; concerts were limited and not everywhere. There was lots of new music by new bands, but often the albums were terrible. I bought many first records by new groups that were pretty terrible: Godz; Luther and the Hand People; Piper at the Gates of Dawn (first Pink Foyd). Otehrs were of course excellent but never got traction: Thorinshield; Van Dyke Parks; Pearls before Swine; and many others lost to time. I sold hundreds of obscure albums in 1990 before moving to NM.

 

[Angst]

Random.

My masters, that I'm currently writing, is working from the idea that expression in music is actually a number of material practices. And that grouping them together as expression ends up with discrepancy as to what you're talking about to the degree that it's reasonably meaningless, if not just inaccurate to the point of uselessness, to talk about expression as it's currently done. Part of the reason the subject fascinates me is that I have a personal detachment as to the idea of expression, I have a very material way to listen to music, usually. And I'm not alone in this experience, where there are modes of listening that are indifferent as to artistic expression, but still very much involved in musical processes. To put it bluntly, to me, music is the absolutely best experience I can have. Better than passing with flying colors, better than meeting a love of one's life, better than, uhm, intercourse. While not really caring about personhood in the music.

In musicology, the voice and lyrics have a very special place, since it's the part of music that's by far the least ephemereal and by far the most expressive. Some genres explicitly play with the idea of removing expression as much as possible from the material. And guess what, most of the time I don't care one bit about lyrics.

I still study them and understand what function they have, and can work to enter a mode of listening where lyrics matter (some stuff I listen to *does* matter lyrically), but lyrics are generally not important to me. Most of the stuff I listen to for fun is instrumental.

 

[Hygro]

Man, I pretty much only have time to listen to new music. I’d love to listen to old music too but the best music hasn’t been made yet and I’m on the hunt!

 

[Chukchi Husky]

I'm not going to pretend to understand most of the metrics people use to compare music but there's gotta be at least 10 objective measurements to prove that any song by Pink Floyd is better than Rumor Has It by Adele (the last unpleasant, repetitive, generally irritating modern song I remember hearing).

At the time, Pink Floyd were hated, especially by the British music press. Pink Floyd are considered part of progressive rock, a genre that was hated at the time for being too complex and too out of touch. When punk rock arrived, punk was praised for returning rock music back to it's simpler form.

 

[Angst]

Bit tired, spent hours doing masters nonsense. Let's try and see if it makes sense:

What music theory can do is try to explain why people like something, that is, describe the affective elements that pieces succesfully fulfil in a sort of contract with the listener, that is, how the affective elements are in tune with a mode of listening. But music theory cannot be prescriptive in an objective way and objectively say why something is good, at least not objective in a non-subjective way, as a Ding an sich. It can get really close to objective when describing people's experiences of something (which is not the same as describing an objective quality in itself, outside of the subject). This is the general stance in music theory, although some dinosaurs (sorry) cling to the "objective" qualities of traditional Western composition. Those are basically the only real leftovers of that kind of thinking in the academic community. This theory is actually often useful however, as it's very well-formulated, but only really to describe and analyze that listening mode's experience of classical music. It has absolutely nothing to why this piece rocks, as it has no terminology to properly assess it:

And it doesn't have to be like an African example with hints of anti-colonialism, PC politics or whatever one would assume my intention to be here. Western music theory is really deep and expansive, but there's just a lot of stuff it can't explain.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I like to think of music as language.
We know that there are some special years in early childhood where you will pick up on and learn a language if practiced entirely naturally, without much effort. You will grow attune, you will sync with it. and "groove" with it, so to speak.

However...

My youth music was hiphop (90s American gangsta rap. fully dived in and rode that whole hiphop wave with baggies and everything, just everyone did at the time around me) and Nu Metall.
While today I still can and do moderately enjoy both... they both have since moved away into the background. Most music I enjoyed in my teens, I do not listen to much anymore, and much of it now seems a bit cheesy to me.

At the same time, in my youth I clearly disliked most music without vocals.

Today I got a huge spot in my heart for electronic music lacking any vocals, and that only really started to happen my very late 20s when I got into the techno scene. I also discovered metal core (scream music), which I fell in love with. And I learned to appreciate oldies... And much of the music I liked as a kid, I consider now not that good, sooo....

It is complicated?

Coming back to that language analogy: If you throw whatever dude into a foreign country and force him or her to interact with the locals on the daily basis, he or she will learn the language and will grow in sinc. Due to the emotional (since social) relationship. So that is what counts. Emotional relationship to a style. And that can always be established, at any age. But is most easy and most natural established in your youth.

Like my drastic shift in music taste was accompanied by drastic shifts in my personal (and social) experience, as well. Which naturally fed right into it.

Wow... I saved this post, barely.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

An observation which I think deserves its own post: Oldies seems to have a kind of smooth unintrusiveness to them compared to modern music which makes them more naturally appealing to older folks of all generations. Perhaps a sign of how the world is ever getting more erratic and crazy.
And if that is all you ever learned to love, modern music will seem all the more distasteful.

Perhaps... in its digital artificial tunes.. music grew to reflect the atomization and unnaturalization of the human habitat. It is estrangement. Which can give you a particular great kick, like anything actually wrong and foreign, or it is just off-putting. As people are removed from the natural, they need more and more edge to feel. God how fantastically dystopian this sounds.

 

[Angst]

An observation which I think deserves its own post: Oldies seems to have a kind of smooth unintrusiveness to them compared to modern music which makes them more naturally appealing to older folks of all generations. Perhaps a sign of how the world is ever getting more erratic and crazy.
And if that is all you ever learned to love, modern music will seem all the more distasteful.

The oldies used to be considered pure noise; it's really eye-opening reading the first reactions to early jazz, for example. It's like reading bad takes on hip hop ("It's only rhythm, there's no melody or harmony" is literally the reaction to a lot of jazz back in the day). They're only unintrusive to us due to being used to it at this point.

Perhaps... in its digital artificial tunes.. music grew to reflect the atomization and unnaturalization of the human habitat. It is estrangement. Which can give you a particular great kick, like anything actually wrong and foreign, or it is just off-putting. As people are removed from the natural, they need more and more edge to feel. God how fantastically dystopian this sounds.

The relation with artificiality is actually quite more complicated than that. The alienation of new sound has more to do with introductions of new instruments, which due to the DAW is a near infinite amount of instrumentation introduced into culture over a very short period of time (historically). Every time a new instrument is introduced into a culture, there is some kind of reaction to it. The utility of DAWs is just pure overload, meaningfully infinite instruments introduced over a few decades. That can cause detachment. Digitality when we talk about instrumentation specifically is just a tool. It's again relevant to look into developments of new technology, such as the massive expansions of the guitar rig over the 20th century (that "peaked" with shoegaze and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, according to Torben Sangild), the introduction of microphones, and so on. I'd suggest, not snarkily, to try and avoid the idea of natural-ness when it comes to music, particularly because it's wholly integrated to tool use; acoustic instruments are as unnatural as any other machine. Digital machines are as much machines as mechanical ones, including tools. They're still pure material, even if their complexity can feel like another world.

Like, already today one can signify "simpler" times, Pepperidge Farm nostalgia, through digital sound. Chiptune, early hip hop, vocoder, Moog. Those can actually infer nostalgia, in spite of "artificiality".

Imo the only thing that really changed our relation to music in a fundamental way happened way before digital instruments. In music, even the internet pales in comparison to the grammophone. That was the real game changer. Before that, people thought of music as something devilish and ephemeral, because it could literally not be contained, only 'chaotically' let loose in time (notation is not music, it's paper with instructions). Now you can save a recording and replay it. That's huge and a much greater and much more an actual leap.

 

[sendos]

Over time, the quality of music has actually dropped.

 

[Angst]

Over time, the quality of music has actually dropped.

No.

 

[Farm Boy]

Lots of it has always been horsehocky. The horsehockytier oldies fade, leaving mostly the good ones, or at least ones you like. Newer stuff still bombards you with other people's tripe. So yes, older stuff will always be better. Because yours sucks. Like for real.

If you'll excuse me, I need to confuse my son by blasting Mairzy Doats.

 

[sendos]

No.

Yes.

Just about every new tune uses 4 beats to the bar time signatures, they use the same groups of 4 bars phrasing, they have the same structures and themes.

New music has become more and more uniform in its style, even across different genres.