The Official "Music Was So Much Better in the Glorious Days of Yore" Thread

It's a classic. I don't know what is so difficult to understand. I don't listen to Radiohead, but I realize OK Computer is a classic...
 
^

Wow, you put a lot of time into that. It doesn't change what I was arguing earlier. Everyone seems to be talking about what is popular.

I challenge every person on this planet to actually take some time, do some research, and look for music a little bit deeper. You will find music that is just as good as anything you may like from an earlier decade.

Please, I'm begging you to think stop thinking so narrowly. Imagine yourself in the 70's...no doubt what was popular then, in my opinion, is better than what is popular now. But there was still ****. There was still excellent excellent music no one even remerabers. Either way you cut it, this argument will be true so if you were living in the 70's (or whatever decade you like the most), so you would probably be walking around saying the same stuff you are today.
 
I know Billy kinda separated the album into two halves. The first half was the more poppier and accessible half and the second was the more experimental half. I just tend to listen to the first half more.
 
Well said. I do think that metal is the hardest of all forms of music to get into, just becase of the sheer aggression of it all.

I used to think the same thing about rap/hip-hop, based soley on the crap that is played on the radio and stuff that makes it into the mainstream (master p, comes to mind) After a little digging though, I have managed to find many many hip-hop artists that I listen to as regularly as some of my metal and other music.


back to the topic of the thread though, why can't music be as good as it was in the early '90s? :( blind melon, Sublime, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Jesus & Mary Chain etc....
 
For the sake of discussion, I'll make an argument of why some music was better back then. Making it up as I go along ..

Music back in the late 60s and 70s (which I like) was not as derivative as it is now. Although the industry goes far back, music as something that really spoke to young people and gained the sort of status it has in our lives didn't really happen on super-large scale until the 60s. I regard the end of that decade and the early 70s to be sort of like a carabrian explosion of different styles. Music freed people in a way that had never been done before and the labels signed on all sorts of strange groups. They did oh so much cool stuff and that newfound passion found it's way into the recordings. You can find a way to get distortion on your hammond organ and play it like it was an electric guitar today too, but it's just not the cool and ballsy move it was back then when noone had done it before.

I also think the genres I like to listen to like hard rock and prog rock which can trace their origins back to that time sounded fresher then. It's not much of a mystery perhaps .. I listen to many of the same banRAB from later decades, but they're not as good then. Most banRAB seem to have an expiration date. Yes, Deep Purple, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant, Kate Bush, Frank Zappa and many many more were just better in the 70s than the 80s and later. Fans of such banRAB and artists' listening habits may be naturally drawn to these more distant times. Many of these banRAB still gain fans today and some are even still around.
 
The past few years has seen music of such quality not known to man since the glorious year of 1998. I completely reject the idea that music was better at a certain time. Music can only get better, as new sounRAB are explored and new banRAB are formed.
 
^^^ This.

For my own little peevish rant, I'm getting a little weary of the homogenization of the indie sound. It's gotten to the point where even the genre distinction implies that the purveyors of such music, at one point or another masturbated to a photo of Brian Wilson. KiRAB put your vinyl copy of Pet SounRAB away and go play with some matches.

OK...my Craftmatic adjustable bed is calling me. It's time for Golden Girls.
 
Spot on.

I take it you're anti Indie? :laughing:

I think a lot of people are just finding music for finding sake. People were saying there's lots of good banRAB, a lot of them, compared to standarRAB of old just don't measure up, new music doesn't even come close. Of course there are exceptions.
 
Not necessarily true, I heard some new sounRAB being explored that were just plain awful. Know what I like better then new sounRAB being explored is old sounRAB being explored, like the Post Punk Revival and Garage Rock Revival.
 
This strikes me as quite true (in a broad sense, at least) both now and in that it's always been true.
It's just with the benefit of hinRABight, a lot of the terrible stuff--especially that outside the mainstream--has fallen by the wayside and been forgotten while the stuff with more (widely accepted) artistic validity has endured in memory. Corabine that with the chance those recorRAB have had to age and secure themselves in both popular and personal consciousness and... well, there you go.

Plus, there are two problems with the whole argument. One is that a phrase like "artistic validity" is almost impossible to really define on an interpersonal level without getting into a major debate about aesthetics.

The other is that "modern music" is... well, so broad a term it's insane. The past decade or so has seen the music business (by which I mean people who release music, not necessarily the "industry"--I just can't think of a better term right now) splinter and fraction into billions of little micro-communities and styles. Because people have such easy access to so much music thanks to the 'net and the advent of HD radio, the "mainstream" practically doesn't exist anymore, at least not the way it used to. So, in a certain way, being dismissive of "modern music" as some kind of whole entity kind of misses the point of how the business, and as a result state of the art, is changing. It encourages more active discovery on the part of the listener, more of a willingness to see what's out there, rather than relying on the culture as a whole to move the way it did up through the '90s.

[/$0.02]
 
I like a few modern banRAB, White Stripes and QOTSA are brilliant. But for the most part I prefer older ones.
 
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