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Chapo_Trap_Horse [none/use name] @hexbear.net

music sucks SO BAD right now

Oh my fucking god I just wanted to say how otherworldly bad music is right now (pop has always been stupid to varying levels but oh my fucking god they have raised the stakes). I just listened to a bunch of pop tracks from various genres and I literally think I'm about to die. Rock, country, indie, folk, hipster white rap, whatever you call home, is aggressively bad. It's like Walmart made a gun that can shoot cum and blood and piss and shit and puke into your soul. We are so fucking fucked. I want to saw my own head off.

164 comments

  • You: despairing that the top 5 tracks on Spotify are soulless garbage

    Me: clicking random folders on random soulseek accounts and finding nothing but bangers

  • When I see this I chuckle. You're your parents now. 'music was only good in my generation.'

    Musics always been good and inventive if you look deep enough. They had king crimson, we had mars volta, and the kids have closures in Moscow. They had a tribe called quest, we had little brother, and the kids have Costa contra. Don't be stagnant.

  • Rock, country, indie, folk, hipster white rap, whatever you call home, is aggressively bad

    So, did you want to say rap here but realize it could come off wrong, so you said white rap instead? OR did you not realize you can listen to nonwhite rappers? Because it's got to be one of those, right?

    • Dunno what's up with op buuuut... When i was a teenager in buttfuck-redneck-midwest-nowhere listening to doggystyle and the chronic in my car i would actually turn down the music if i saw a black person nearby as i really, truly had a half-assed thought process picked up from my peers (both white and black) that i shouldn't be. Like they'd judge me, almost like i believed there was some kinna unspoken rule that it was not mayomusic, or that i was a [slur] for listening to "their" music, that the artist didn't make it for me at all. Like stolen valor or some shit i dunno

      Anyway maybe it's the same for this cat or maybe it ain't but that's my origin story and i can't figure how to end this comment well... Fuuuuu-

  • To stop being an elitist about music is probably the one thing that made me closer to inner peace and open to other humans

    One day I realised that most of what I used to hate was what people who were less privileged than me enjoyed

    Now I agree that there is a mentally destructive Kulturindustrie that robs the people of their popular musical practices by commodifying it.

    But it's also important to realise that most traditional non-commodified music wasn't some advanced shit either and was very much looked down upon by the ruling classes before becoming cool and authentic

    • To stop being an elitist about music is probably the one thing that made me closer to inner peace and open to other humans

      Same here. I work with the mentality that in every broad genre of music, there's going to be something someone likes. It just takes a bit of open minded exploration to find it

      I used to absolutely be one of those prick

      types who would say "I listen to everything but rap and country", make fun of those two genres etc, now country is one of my favourite genres and I've found my niche for rap as well

  • Music has never been better. There's so much out there. If you're intentionally poisoning yourself with things you don't like like, that's sort of on you.

  • You know there's other music than pop right? This is on par with people proclaiming gaming is dead after buying whatever the latest gaming fad shit and conveniently ignoring anything else

  • The cure for this condition known as RBS (Rick Beato syndrome) is to let your playlist be dictated by the Transfem Soviet. Proletarian banjo music, modular generative ambient played by actual mushrooms and bouncy frenchcore remixes of lesbian singer-songwriter pop will heal your soul, turn you into a screaming opossum, or both. Anything else is counter-revolutionary and literally transphobic.

  • Bad music wil always exist but the cheap and easy stuff is what makes profit and gets pushed by record labels. Stop looking there.

    Theres not like 100 years of recorded music one could sift through at any moment. Or the insane amount of content on Soundcloud or Bandcamp. Or have an experience in meat world seeing live music.

    As someone who can play music professionally, I think most people who have this criticism suffer from music illiteracy. Like in a world where art isnt a priority, maybe do some self-crit that maybe your ears arent that experienced, that you have a limited listening palette and you don't know as much as you think you do. Then ask why is this so? Like corporate slop has definitely shaped the musical landscape and has poisoned anyones mind who has partaked but why haven't you ventured much further?

  • It goes both ways, mainstream music has achieved the production rate to pump out so much shit that it can overshadow everything, but at the same time access to instruments and recording software and music repositories has improved too so really small musicians are putting out gems out there that can hardly be found, but they still exist

    • The social technology to create slop music has been advancing by leaps and bounds for decades, so a lot of the mass-produced stuff is advanced level soulless and cynical. The worst stuff is where they try to artificially inject soul into the music. If the OP is just letting algorithms or radio passively deliver music to them, then they're going to have a bad time; I gotta think that's where they're coming from.

  • I do think music has declined, but it has nothing to do with the songs themselves but our (well more specifically Western) relationship to music. If you travel back in time to the late 19th century, music was a communal activity. If there was any large family gathering like a holiday, there was the expectation that there was at least one person who could play the piano well, one person who could play the violin well, and so on, and they would put their musical skill within the family gathering to play music. And even for people who don't know how to play music, there was always singing, meaning that it wasn't just one pianist wowing their relatives, but everyone creating music together, whether it's some hymn or some festive song or some popular music of that time.

    The first treatification of music, if you want to conceptualize it like that, was the separation between performers and the audience. You now have one group of people who played music and one group of people who passively consumed music. One consequence of this was the decline in music literacy among the general population. I'm not saying that most people knew how to read music way back in the day, but most people would've at least intuitively understand what a chord progression was or what transposing a melody meant. A lot of songs just hit differently when you actually know how to play a musical instrument or actually tried to create music before.

    The second treatification of music, was the creation of pop music that displaced folk music. Parenti made this point that pop music isn't actually popular music in the etymological sense of music of the people. Actual popular music is something like folk music. Some folk song that is exclusively played in a rural village passed on from generations to generations within that rural community is popular music. Pop music is just music imposed on the masses from the top by capitalists. In that sense, pop music will always suck and is supposed to suck. It's one means in which capitalist realism gets cultivated and spread.

    The third treatification of music, was streaming services in my opinion. Most people understand on a basic intuitive level that pop music is worthless slop. Since the impulse to create music, like all other artistic impulse, is inherent in humanity, people will naturally try to get around pop music slop through the creation of indies. Streaming services are a monkey paw because a consequence of these services is that it can cater to a person's idiosyncratic tastes so well that it leads to hyperspecificity. The end result is someone has a hyperspecific collection of indies that no one else has heard of, leading to further atomization. It also propagates more capitalist realism, or more specifically, faith in the infallibility of the market. "Music is now better than ever because you can find all these good indies." That's faith in the idea that if a commodity is being sold on the market, the inherent qualities of that commodity will eventually cause it to take its rightful share of the market (ie good commodities will float to the top while bad commodities will sink to the bottom).

    Does pre-treatified music still exists in the West? Yes. There's basically two musical traditions: one is religious music and by religious music I mean shit like Gregorian chants and hymns. They come packaged with their own bullshit that is pretty self-evident. The other is sport chants. I would say that sport chants represent the only authentic form of pre-treatified music that currently exists in the West. Sport chants are very much music even if they aren't conceptualized this way (and the reason why they're aren't conceptualized this way is because precisely sport chants haven't been treatified). The basic definition for what constitutes music is that it's an audio experience where rhythm is important. And sport chants very much have rhythm to them.

    Sport chants are a completely communal experience with chants being passed down from generation to generation, they belong to no single individual but the people themselves, they are an experience where the performers and audience are one, there's a huge degree of physicality to it like everyone stomping on the stadium at the same time to create rhythm. It's an authentically human experience and no amount of weird chord progression and time signature, quirky juxtaposition of musical instruments, or topical lyrics from some indie no one has ever heard of will change that.

    This is real music, and music will be good again when the rest of music gets back to the level of sport chants.

  • I just listened to a bunch of pop tracks

    The charts have literally never been reliably good, it is useful to remember this imo. I think "musics" generally is better now than it has been because there's a very healthy amount of new music outside of the Billboard Hot 100 ass mainstream.

  • Nah. A decade or two ago people were literally listening to pop punk. Before that bands like Rolling Stones had a fanbase. Awful stuff.

    In many ways I think modern pop is better. Phoebe Bridgers puts out some solid music, and hyperpop is just a treat.

    For country even the mainstream lets Chris Stapleton get a place on the radio, though I do prefer his bluegrass stuff. If you want more obscure stuff give Mama's Broke a listen.

164 comments