Music.

Looking at my iTunes Top Rated and Most Played lists, you'll see 22 songs (only on the Top Rated list) from the last 15 years...all other 88 songs are pre-1992. My favorite CDs have included The Beach Boys - The Sounds of Summer, which is currently one of the few CDs I'll listen to the whole way through. When growing up all I'd listen to is popular music...now I find myself repelled by almost all of it. (Evanescence, Disturbed, System of a Down being the most recent bands I've liked.) The only thing I'm looking forward to musically is Evanescence's new CD. They say the music industry is cyclical but hip-hop has not only dominated the music industry but popular culture for the last 10 years, outlasting punk and boy bands and Britney/Christina/Jessica and permeating the other genres (see Linkin Park and Jay-Z). I've been expecting a backlash for years and it still hasn't come.

Where do you stand as far as where music was, where it is today, and where it is going?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Music is cyclical but also it loses aspects/styles as time goes on based on changes in society for example, we will never have another Chopin, Mozart or Beethoven again because back in their time life was not as full of activity as it is today. All those guys had was music so being that they were prodigies they could focus entirely on the music hours after hours of music. There were much fewer distractions than today's world. I feel that music of today is just as enjoyable but different when compared to music 20 or 30 years ago but new styles/genres with different uses of experimentation will always be happening so I'm sure the future of music will continue to be an evolving and amazing process.

EDIT
Oh yeah and by any chance did you play on the 907th day of defeat clan/guild?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Most music coming out nowadays is crap and requires no real talent. I'm a fan of 80's and older metal primarily, where it required a gift to actually play the guitar well and make music sound good. Today it's all generic "mass-marketed" music designed to appeal to as many people as possible without actually meaning anything or being original (see: Linkin Park). That's not to say that the music overall "sounds bad", it just means that it's generic, like the Hollywood Blockbuster movie that comes out every summer. It's simply a "feel-good" movie with nothing meaningful behind it.

The problem is that the "good" new music that comes out is very few and far between. I'm sure that in the future, music will break out and become good again, but untill the RIAA is abolished or at least reduced in power, "their" music will continue to dominate the mass market, and overall ruin what should be driven by artists, not money.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Lord Jaroh

Most music coming out nowadays is crap and requires no real talent. I'm a fan of 80's and older metal primarily, where it required a gift to actually play the guitar well and make music sound good. Today it's all generic "mass-marketed" music designed to appeal to as many people as possible without actually meaning anything or being original (see: Linkin Park). That's not to say that the music overall "sounds bad", it just means that it's generic, like the Hollywood Blockbuster movie that comes out every summer. It's simply a "feel-good" movie with nothing meaningful behind it.

The problem is that the "good" new music that comes out is very few and far between. I'm sure that in the future, music will break out and become good again, but untill the RIAA is abolished or at least reduced in power, "their" music will continue to dominate the mass market, and overall ruin what should be driven by artists, not money.

The problem is not that there is no good new music. The problem is people like you who complain that there is no good new music while having no knowledge of anything but the current Top40. While I agree on the shittiness of Linkin Park, there are literally thousands of current bands and musicians who do not suck, and are in fact quite good. You just have to look a bit.

Secondly, I don't know what alternate history you're from, but to suggest that the nature of the music industry has only recently shifted to mass-marketed crap is ludicrous. Especially as a fan of eighties metal. NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING, is more generic than hair-metal. I am of course, assuming you meant 80's hair-metal, and not thrash or black metal. If this is the case, insert rant about genericness of disco.

How ya doing, buddy?

I love music from all types and all eras. I just don't listen to anything on the radio. It rarely plays anything that I like and the stuff it will play will piss me off. The Internet has been my saving grace with music with metal and jazz pulling me up from the wastelands of music popularity. As knkwzrd said, there's a ton of great new bands out there, just go look for them.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I have no hang ups about what music I listen too. I like what I like. Its that simple.

People have too many views and bias when it comes to listening to music. Just enjoy it.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Quote:

Where do you stand as far as where music was, where it is today, and where it is going?

I love music where it is at today. I think within each passing months there are some new bands or new cd's by older bands that just seem to amaze me. Some bands that have amazed me in the past year actually are Nightwish, Lunatica, Dream Theater, Symphony X, The Sounds, The Rasmus, Him. Allthough all these bands don't have legendary status as most others, the music is still great to listen to and obviously is what matters most, and that is just a few bands at the top of my head.

For some useless information, I search for bands quite often around the net, and same with most friends who tell me about certain bands that I have no idea who they are. The best feeling with music, is getting a small unkown band big, then when they turn into big stars, you hate em'

FELIPE NO

Who is this mysterious The Dopefish, and from whence does he come?

Whenever I hear people talk about music, especially where it's going or where it's been, they invariably start naming off dozens of semi-obscure bands, lauding the ones that stayed small while talking smack about the sellouts that got out of the garage.

If your tastes are confined largely to a specific genre, espeically one outside the mainstream, it's hard to talk about music in the same way, since no one will have heard of your favorites, and you'll be clueless as to some of the current "it" groups.

I'm into instrumental music, from movies or games; it's what brought me to Gamingforce. It's a lot like classical music in a lot of ways, but has a more modern sensibility (and, occasionally, instruments) that modern ears may find more palletable. It's essentially modern classical music, and the number of media products produced means that I get 2-4 50-70 min CD's from my favorite artists every year.

In VGM, the trend is twofold; toward higher-quality symphonic music on the one hand, toward the greater use of licenced popular music on the other. One of those trends is the dawning of a new golden age, while the other is God's punishment for a cruel world.

In filmmusik, the trend is toward wider score availibility, but declining score quality. More and more scores are being rejected and replaced at the last minute, and score factories like Media Ventures are increasingly popular. It's a worrisome trend, since it views the music as an inconsequential product, something that can be thrown together at the last minute.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

From what depths comes Dopefish? Only the Oracle knows.

Anyway, the genres I know best are metal and VGM.

Been a VGM fan for a long, long time, and the trend toward licensed music worries me as well. I rented Gran Turismo 4 to test my HDTV's 1080i picture quality, and while the game was alright (not a fan of racing games), the soundtrack was horrendous. My exposure to racers has been Wipeout and Outrun. Where was the original chiptune or trance-techno soundtrack? Where was the little "finish line" riff? And what was this cacophony that was raping my ears?

On the plus side, soundtracks have been getting more epic and grandiose, and that's a good thing. Ace Combat is a good example of this, as is Magna Carta. There have been some good weird/experimental soundtracks in recent years too: the gothic rock sound of Nocturne, the quirky jazzy only-in-Japan-would-this-ever-rock-so-hard Katamari Damacy, and the "noise horror" of Silent Hill. Hell, for that matter, even Final Fantasy 8 had some unorthodox tunes in it, when Waymatsoo was at his peak and playing with different concepts. It's probably for those songs that the FF8 soundtrack is my favourite of the series.

I think the only soundtrack I didn't mind using licensed music (to a certain extent) was Indigo Prophecy. Being able to play Lucas' stereo added properly to the mood, and "Sandpaper Kisses" playing in Carla's apartment helped to establish her character and lifestyle a bit. They were licensed songs, but at least they were intelligently chosen and placed. Plus, for all the potential faults of the licensed portions of that soundtrack, the car chase/apartment-flying-objects music more than made up for it.

As for metal, I'm a sucker for anything operatic/epic/grandiose, and I'm glad a lot of symphonic bands are heading that way. After Forever and Epica spring to mind, as well as Therion and some later Nightwish. I'm inhumanly pissed off at After Forever for the DRM on their latest CD, as I can't add it to my collection, but I do await Epica's next release with baited breath. If their trend continues, and the next one is as much an improvement over CtO as CtO was over Phantom Agony, they look to ascend to a higher plane of existence within the next 5 years and then inevitably make guest appearances on Stargate Atlantis.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

this topic will lead to nothing good.

There's nowhere I can't reach.