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March 8, 2010
Jimmy Young
The quality of music has diminished in American society. Teenagers’ standards for music have decreased, and the music industry has responded to that. They give us generic beats and synthesized voices layered with meaningless lyrics. The problem is that we are actually accepting this trash.
The quantity of money listeners paying isn’t proportional to the quality of the music. Adolescents just blindly accept this trash as good music simply because it is played on the radio.
So why have we not noticed this earlier? A lot of teenagers started listening to music during Phase 2. So what are these phases?
I’ll divide the time periods into 3 phases.
Phase 1: Around late ’90s and before. This was the time when a lot hip-hop albums were sugar. You could lick the album all the way around and there wouldn’t be track that was left uncoated; ranging from the jazzy cool A Tribe Called Quest to politically controversial Public Enemy.
Phase 2: This time period is best put as middle school. We were too young to think about what was really going on. The well-marketed iPod increased listeners for its portability and simplicity—it became easier to listen to massively streamed music. Technology slowly seeped in and before you knew it everyone was poisoned by the pollution of mass produced “music.” Artists rely too much on technological advantages like auto tune, a voice correction tool now abused by music producers to produce an artificial voice. Individual artists seek their musical philosophy but producers shut them out-they believed that this generation did not need them anymore.
Phase 3: Now and beyond. Are we going to keep accepting this poor music? Is the “sex” ever going to get old? Who’s going to stand up to it?
Mainstream music overflows with repetitive, catchy and manufactured sounds and underground is the dense, qualitative and powerful music. In the ’90s, the majority of hip-hop music was held to a higher standard. From the beats to the lyrics, everything was original and meaningful. But today’s rap music is just compiled plastic. Music industries treat money as a higher priority than the songs. There’s no real talent under all that futuristic make-up.
What we listen to is not music anymore, it’s just sounds. It’s just vibrations that strike the eardrums. Producers simply need to let the creativity of the artists flow. So who’s going to listen to music?
This article originally appeared in print on March 2, 2010. It has been modified to correct style and grammatical errors.
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April 11th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
I like mainstream music.
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