…except country…
It’s called Baby Shark.
My son was the prime age for Baby Shark when it blew up a few years ago.
I remember we were on a ride at a little local amusement park and some girls started singing Baby Shark.
I was the dad that stepped in right on the beat and bellowed out “DAAAAAADDY SHARK DOOT DOOT…” with as much bass in my voice as I could manage.
I grew up in a conservative household. Fuck that whole universe of attitudes.
And then came AI generated music…
it was disney channel musicals here. and i actually didn’t mind (too much). some of those are ok movies.
AI music still easily beats all the top chart slop in creativity and like 95% of actual musicians in production quality. Honestly, it’s probably the least shitty thing that came out from the AI hype-bubble.
So I’m pretty ignorant of the top of the chart I’d be willing to be a guinea pig. Do you want to send me like 3 chart toppers and an AI song and I’ll see which one is most creative? Don’t tell me which is which.
I’ll do you one better. I’m actually curious what’d the result be so I’ve thrown together a little survey.
https://drath.ru/ai/
Methodology: Picked 11 random tracks from random youtube regional weekly charts (10-20mil views each), and 11 random AI tracks from Suno monthly trending, also in random regions. I don’t trust you being ignorant of charts to be good enough factor to shield you from their influence, hence the random regions part. I’ve tried to make it a little more fair by skipping tracks in both sets that contain elements I think would’ve been dead giveaways, like diegetic switches, heavy metal hooks, etc. Also, all tracks are intentionally downsampled to 120kbps to try and hide some of the artifacts inherent to AI music. After all, I don’t think I did that good of a job picking the tracks, tbh, certainly not in favour of AI, but let the result decide.
Fantastic, I’ll try to listen today
Everybody is entitled to an opinion. And that certainly is one.
Sometimes its more traumatic to encourage their musical taste than to berate it.
I pretty much like good music from many generations and genres. But you know what I don’t understand? About 85% of the Beatles songs.They had a few great songs, but so many of them do absolutely nothing for me.
This is, in a nutshell, why music was better back then. Only the gold has stood the test of time. Most of it, like today, was shit.
My kids told me about how they love something called phonk or something. I got excited, because I thought they said “funk”. I was very upset when they put on their phonk “music”. I was expecting something akin to Sam and Dave or earth wind and fire, but what I got was a cacophony of dying animals and a back beat so horribly off tempo that I couldn’t be sure that it was actually part of a song
phonk is so 10 years ago
“Yarrr, add it to me playlist.”
My parents routinely started listening to several of my favourite bands when I was a teen.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to be an angsty rebellious teenager when your parents are supportive of your tastes and phases?
Unless it’s an AI song. If you link me an AI song I will bring back the beatings.
Why is this Tool?!
Professor Nick Harrison recreates songs using AI and giving it stylistic direction/prompts. AI can’t write good music but if you give it direction it does a pretty good job of changing instrumentation and vocals. He does two genres - soul and yacht rock. I don’t care for the yacht rock stuff but the soul stuff is pretty decent sometimes. I have a couple of his recreations in my Spotify playlists. I kinda dig this version of Tool’s song.
It’s been a while for a new rebellious music genre to appear, though…
Kids, let’s go, we are waiting!
You think you’re immune.
You think you stand over the previous generations outrage over young peoples listening habits.
Let me tell you two words:
AI Musicyou just need to go deeper (more underground)!
Mumble rap is the rebellious version of old school rap.
Just look how angry it makes old school rap lovers.
I generally don’t really like rap, but mumble rap just sounds lazy as shit. Like “I can’t even be bothered to open my mouth”. It’s also so stupidly monotone. I may just be an old man yelling at kids, but that’s music I will never understand.
Might well be, some variant of rap seems to be a good candidate.
Although here in Germany I would rather see immigrant-influenced Deutschrap here, maybe connected to the Talahon youth culture.
That would definitely fit the bill, as I certainly will never become a fan of any kind of macho ultra-conservatism.
I love the strange genre merges by bands like electric callboy or hanabie but i doubt you can call most their fans kids
Don’t know Hanabie, but Electric Callboy certainly is the ultimate comfort music for GenX and Millenials.
The Europop-Techno-Metal mix massively tingels my nostalgia based on the music genres of my youth. Plus it is a surprisingly fitting combination and rocks on a massive scale. :-)Fucking same. I’m early millennial. Been absolutely loving Electric Callboy. Favorite Band to come out of the 15ish years. Also like Hanabie and some of the more recent Babymetal. I don’t need to know the words to like the music.
Definitely check Hanabie out if you like Electric Callboy. They are the all female Japanese answer to them. One of the best female shouts I’ve ever heard and the Jpop-techno mix is real fun
I feel like there’s a few. Like whatever you want to call artists like 100 gecs, or femtanyl.
Just looked them up.
Fentanyl I found classified as Hardcore Punk, which would already be around since the 80s.
But 100 gecs seems to be something called Hyperpop, which is a genuine new GenZ thing!
Sounds interesting, will have a look!Calling Femtanyl “hardcore punk” is certainly a choice. Hardcore punk has specific genre conventions (e.g. having drums and guitars) that Femtanyl doesn’t follow at all.
I see Femtynal classified as “digital hardcore,” which is a fusion of Hardcore Punk and the EDM subgenre Hardcore.
Hyperpop kinda feels like more of a vibe than a music style. The most defining trait being pitched up vocals but to me, is moreso about the energy (angst?) it brings
We have hyperpop that veers more towards rap https://youtu.be/BFF5pyVNd8w
And more standard hyperpop like ericdoa, glaive, and midwxst https://youtu.be/WCPJK9GCXHE https://youtu.be/LseJIsQ62WQ https://youtu.be/Jmz8CXm8JLY https://youtu.be/kCBKHdTwbXU
And derivatives from hyperpop like dariacore https://youtu.be/Lojx82Etjl0
And other artists that started in hyperpop but went on to do their own thing like my goat brakence https://youtu.be/cpGHMGOeg-o
I hope it’s something like TechnoCountry…
Remember Cotton Eye Joe?
Oh yeah, and Steps (5, 6, 7, 8) though that was more country pop.
Don’t remember this, might not have been a thing here in Germany.
Be glad 😄
Is Skibidi Toilet music good enough for you?
The whole brainrot thing goes in the right direction, but is not really a music genre.
The Skibidi song e.g. is pretty conventional stuff.
The videos are the avant-garde part here.richard d james need to get back into the studio.
it’s always been punk music
Growing up in a still deeply Catholic environment, and having heard all those Satanism-warnings in my 80s school classes (best promotion ever…) it was more Metal for me.
But yes, also “Bad Religion”, for obvious reasons… ;-)All of the genres try to push the envelope to some extent. I listened to all of them. I loved the vibe and recklessness of nu metal bands like Korn particularly. It’s funny that two of the band members are Christian now. In my mind the songs pushing the envelope the hardest these days is shit like WAP. Can’t say I’m really a fan of that song in particular but I’m still listening to everything I can.
SpongeBob me boy, that sounds sick AF! What’s the song so I can add it to me playlist? Arg arg arg arg arg!
Cor blimey
Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism, in another book called “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, argued that in the history of recorded music, every 20 - 30 years or so there were new genres of music that wouldn’t be recognizable as music to the previous generation. But around the early 2000s this process stopped, and musical categories hardened due to capitalist logic. Record companies just wanted to churn out the same things that they already knew how to market, rather than invest in artists who were cutting edge. He called it “the slow cancellation of the future”.
Granted I think Fisher is kind of overrated as a practical theorist, all those CCRU research people went crazy, and Fisher is a particularly sad example. His vampire castle book is okay, and that generation was like preoccupied with marketing manipulation (a perspective that arguably was being marketed to them/us).
But through that perspective this meme is interesting, because the reason younger generations can connect about musical tastes, is because popular music has stopped being subversive. Chances are the band the younger boy is listening to has a sound that was copped from an older group, which is why the young man recognizes it as good. But to the older generations, music was still subversive, the young rejected the older, already explored categories of music, which were themselves subversive in their own time.
To play the devil’s advocate here: “music used to be subversive but now it’s all the same, nothing original” sounds just like a grumpy old man yelling at a cloud. Old people will find reasons to hate new stuff.
This isn’t to disagree. I read Capitalist Realism and think the argument works. And personally, I remember how shocked I was to find out that Behind Blue Eyes wasn’t originally by Limp Bizkit but much older and that my mom listened to the punk rock band I liked as a teenager when she was young. My question might be if there ever was anything “new under the sun” but first and foremost, I like the idea as a devil’s advocate.
I remember how shocked I was to find out that Behind Blue Eyes wasn’t originally by Limp Bizkit
Are you fucking kidding me
What is going on here
You listened to that and went “Yup, Fred Durst wrote this”?
In my defense, I was like 12 or something. I knew the song from my older brother and liked it. My English wasn’t good enough to understand it completely but it spoke to me on an emotional level.
So the shock wasn’t that I was a huge Limp Biskit fan. I can’t name another song and had to look up the spelling writing the comment. The shock was how much older the song was than, well, than me. It spoke to how I felt towards my parent generation but it was basically written by my parent generation.
sounds just like a grumpy old man yelling at a cloud.
Yeah totally agree with you there. The book is actually pretty funny in that regard, he spends most of what I read talking about Tricky and 90’s Jungle, and really, really hating the arctic monkeys. He spent his last years talking about how leftists were too mean on twitter, so he’s like a spiritual influence on the right’s war against “woke”. In response, the twitter left was really mean to him about it. Like there was something to it but he also missed the mark, even though he early on recognized the trend.
But like I said those CCRU people like broke their own brains. Very sad. Except maybe Sadie Plant but she hasn’t published anything in a very long time to my knowledge
musical categories hardened
That seems like nonsense, given how genres slimed together by the late 90s. Everybody was stealing from everybody else and the best we could do was throw around labels like “alternative.” ClearChannel made every genre pull toward country while country became R&B for hwhite people. Meanwhile the electronica scene had discovered computers - a development that took longer than you’d think - and a bunch of dorks styling themselves as DJ [noun] had MP3s all over piracy services. This is right before Youtube, SoundCloud, and MySpace let truly independent artists reach arbitrarily large audiences.
If we really want to start an argument - there’s people who say anything generated literally is not music. Kids these days are growing up with the ability to drop a diss track on their friend for a faux pas that happened five minutes ago. Formulaic, yes, but immediately distinct from everyone listening to the same ten conventionally-attractive pop artists.
Actually he wrote a lot about 90s music in this theory, his main example of a subversive musical genre from the 90s was Jungle/D&B.
I mean I don’t think its complete nonsense, this is definitely something that has always happened regarding the capitalization of popular music, Gramsci wrote about some of the tendencies, in his analysis of italian theatre and how monopolized capital exploited artists and small venues, back in the 1920s. I think the pressures certainly exist, especially because of the examples you mention, like clear channel, but also live nation and ticketmaster. Those pressures to homogenize and commodify music are objectively the result of monopolization of the music industry. Culture and economy are intrinsically bound up in one another.
But also I feel that he sort of over stated his point, like his analysis is sort of warped by chronic depression and like fiercely hating the Arctic Monkeys.
I think the point isn’t that categories hardened in the sense that they stay distinct but that there are no more experiments, nothing subversive. Stealing and mixing things you know work, is exactly that. Your kid’s diss track will be totally generic with no original idea. That’s the whole point of the comment above, not that it’s exact covers.
That really ignores the subgenres so bizarre they were considered jokes. Nightcore, dubstep, vaporwave, witch house, et cetera. All of those influenced popular culture and popular music. In terms of mainstream experimentation - Radiohead alone, come on. The Flaming Lips careened through popularity and back into weird shit like a hyperbolic comet. A Deftones fan in the 90s would listen to “Spell Of Mathematics” and ask if it sounds like that on purpose. Chappel Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe” would not have been made the same, a decade prior; what she’d be guide toward is more like Adele’s “Your New Love.”
Rick Rubin is still alive and working. Artists give him their latest tracks for a vibe check and he consistently steers them toward success. And he tells says, he doesn’t give a shit what’s popular, because people have no idea what they want next.
I might be wrong but I feel that today’s mainstream music is quite generic. Of cause there are bubbles for everything and more than before due to the internet.
I don’t know where to draw the line tho. The top level comment says it’s the early 00’s (or rather quotes Mark Fisher who said that), maybe it’s later. Maybe kids these days don’t listen to what I think is mainstream. Maybe I’m just old and “this is generic and no art” is the new “this is noise and no music”, I donno.
My perspective’s always skewed when people say ‘you just hate new stuff,’ because I hated plenty of the old stuff at the time. We can say pop is generic, and I mean, as opposed to when?
Relying on the radio for music just plain suuucks. There’s a cycle of alternating decades where the most popular stuff tends to be worth keeping, versus the big hits being unfortunate relics, but even the highest highs are rarely experimental or subversive. The idea of a cultural phenomenon being countercultural feels self-contradictory.
So yes, The Beatles were a big fucking deal for a variety of reasons, but their early career was all teeny-bopper relationship fluff. As late as Revolver they were writing two-minute AM-friendly hits like “And Your Bird Can Sing.” Meanwhile the Silver Apples were using homemade synths to sound years ahead of their time. If you went by radio play you’d think very little was happening.
Conversely, Depeche Mode blew everybody’s dicks off with Violator, but it’s just stripping back all the spacey industrial shit they’d been doing for a decade. “Personal Jesus” is a minimalist and twangy version of Martin Gore being horny on main. Their raucous live album 101 came out right before that and to my ears is the better experience. Was any of that on the Billboard 100? Was it fuck. Women crooning about love outsold them ten to one. (Okay, shout out to Phil Collins getting “Another Day In Paradise” to #7, because talk about atypical confrontational subject matter.)
Some of my favorite albums are from around 2000. Stuff from Kingston Wall, Meshuggah, Neutral Milk Hotel, Dragonforce, Blind Guardian, Slayer - was that what I listened to, most days, at the time? Nope. I was subjected to “Last Kiss” for the thousandth time, having hated it since the first. I heard so much country that I developed opinions about it. At the lowest point, I could tell boy bands apart. Admittedly: this deluge of crud was sprinkled with Third Eye Blind’s love letter to meth, Filter tricking people into buying Title Of Record, Chumbwamba making anarchist agitprop dancy as a complicated joke, and quite a lot of genuinely good pop. But sometimes you’d spin the dial for a solid minute and prefer to leave it on static. When I finally found out how to pirate shit, I just grabbed stuff they’d already played, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Nowadays - is there a mainstream? I only heard “Your New Love” when I was in a dentist’s office. I found “Good Luck, Babe” on Youtube after some screenshots of tweeted jokes. For two decades, it has been dead easy to filter and cultivate your own tastes. You don’t have to hear about a band, visit a store, and plunk down negotiable currency to receive a physical album, unheard. You can go from “Who?” to an informed opinion in like twenty minutes. Elsewhere in this thread someone linked Igorrr, so there must be some newly-minted industrial polka fans, and you can readily say ‘don’t miss Gogol Bordello.’
I’d love to be that dad, but my daughter only listens to k-pop
Blackpink kinda slaps though.
Counter-point: AI-generated muzak.
Counterpoint to both you and OP: AI generated country songs
Actual, classic country is really good. It’s the modern stuff that’s all about loving Bush’s wars, drinking shitting beer, and hating gay people that’s the problem.
Doc Watson, Johnny Cash, and Marty Robbins are all worth checking out, to name a few.
Some modern country is also great! Tyler Childers has multiple songs about fucking around and being a cokehead in Kentucky (he’s thankfully clean now). Then there’s his Country Squire album that’s very fun to watch videos from while stoned. It’s like some southern Yellow Submarine.
Zach Bryan released an anti ICE song that I can’t currently remember the title of for the life of me.
If you want more folk, Haunted Windchimes, The Ghost of Paul Revere, and Poor Man’s Poison are all excellent, with Poor Man’s Poison just straight up having multiple leftist as fuck songs. More mainstream you’d find Noah Kahan, who’s done some excellent music. It’s more pop folk than normal folk, but I’m still a fan personally.
Basically, just avoid artists like that whiny little bitch boy Morgan Wallen or basically any of the mainstream musicians from the 80s to the 2000s and you can find some actually good shit.
Also, both are mainstream, but Travis Tritt’s Trouble and John Michael Montgomery’s Sold are both absolute bangers.
Thanks! I’ll check them out; I know I was speaking in a broad generalization. For contemporary country, I’m a fan of Aida Victoria, to name one. It’s just, as OP said, those songs and musicians who produce “Republicunt siren songs.”
Johnny Cash was his own genre.
I hate country, but I love Johnny Cash. His old man’s voice on his last album was just perfect.
that’s just americana
I find actual classic country to just be boring, but not boring with a beat enough for work music like Classical music.
The modern country stuff I loathe for just like you said, being Republicunt siren songs lol
drinking shitting beer
Please keep this in, it’s hilarious!
Ahaha, I won’t correct 🫡
I also consider myself to like all genres of music. Some country isn’t bad. Especially older country. Actually newer country isn’t that bad either, but it’s all often so tied into identity politics it can be difficult to listen to.
Outlaw country is a whole thing and it’s very different from that cliche rightwing pop country stuff.
I enjoy country music a lot when it doesn’t fall into similar traps to a few other genres where they just sing about the same things (drinking, women, nice cars, etc). I like the ones telling a story or singing about various phases of their life (serious or goofy). Stuff like Jamey Johnson’s “In Color”, Blake Shelton’s “Ol’ Red”, or Thomas Rhett’s “Sixteen”.
The Beatles were influenced by Buck Owens. If you play guitar or just have an ear for music, listen to a Buck Owens greatest hits album and you will totally hear it.
