The 'Shit Trend' in pop music right now

but what is mainstream rock these days? lots of people complaining about it and yet I don't really hear any on my travels? apart from when they leave Radio X on in the work kitchen, which is all Foo Fighters and Biffy Clyro, but that barely counts as new music ?

Tell me with a straight face this isn’t the most depressive billboard list of the decade:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Mainstream_Rock_number-one_songs_of_the_2010s

it's been decades since the best or most interesting rock music was accurately captured in a billboard modern rock chart.

And the “rock” list is equally laughable:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_number-one_Billboard_Rock_Songs

But that mainstream rock list gives me shivers, had to recheck if the year for those songs was wrong. Poor genre has been trapped in a loop. I’ll take terrible trends over not following a trend at all and being trapped in that graveyard.

it's been decades since the best or most interesting rock music was accurately captured in a billboard modern rock chart.

― voodoo chili

I’m not talking about what’s going on in the underground or the indie scene. This thread is about the mainstream. What would be the biggest rock bands that weren’t popular in the 90’s nowadays? Imagine Dragons, 21 pilots, Black Keys? I’ll take the current trend of trap and reggaeton over those ay day.

This ‘current’ trend of trap and reggaeton as mainstream chart music is also nearing the end of its second decade on top, not looking particularly fresh.

As someone who started listening to reggaeton in 2003 (and I realize that makes me a relative latecomer), I'm genuinely curious what is "forward thinking" about the genre in 2018. I guess if you could explain that, I might be better able to follow your argument.

progress in music is an illusion put in place to sell garbage

Totally. There's a clear continuum between the Seikilos Epitaph and 'Girls Like You'.

This isn't me actively defending reggaeton, I'm rather attacking rock which seems to only exist in a vacuum of self-congratulatory gatekeeping and revivals.

The style of reggaeton from 2003 made popular by Daddy Yankee and Don Omar (reggaeton subgenres known as Romantiqueo or Perre) is decidedly different from what J Balvin or Maluma have been making which could be classified as Reggaeton Pop which keeps feedbacking on trends and styles in pop music - in the middle of both styles you get Ozuna. Taki taki is closer to the old style, but listen to 'siguelo bailando' by him ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvpd9_5vuks ). It's still based on the dembow beat but the sound design marks an evolution into reggaeton pop.

Reggaeton is extremely limited, a genre based almost entirely on the dembow beat but unlike rock it keeps reaching out into other trends. While it maybe felt like a novelty in the US/Europe 15+ years ago, it has already cemented into global culture and this will only mean the genre will move forward and out of latinamerica, the next reggaeton star and subgenre could come from korea for all I know.

Personally I'd love if there was some growth in the lyrics section, the underground scene is more involved in pointing out socioeconomic issues and I don't think since Calle 13 there has been a mainstream reggaeton act with lyrics as thought inducing and confrontational as them.

Yeah, very cool, an established genre that didn’t originate in North America or Europe manages to get a foothold in the US/UK charts like it has in large parts of the rest of the world, and now it’s the “shittest trend” in pop music since “Happy”.

Is there a thread for worst thread titles? Feels like I time-travelled to 2001 ILM.

I listened to pop radio for the first time in awhile the other day, and it seems the shit trend is dudes with little boy voices emoting over acoustic guitars.

this always happens in Mourinho's third season

xps I think it's less a problem with reggaeton as a genre (which is generally decent music) and more how so many mainstream popstars are doing a very bland imitation of it, not because they're inspired by it, more that it's just what one does of one is a popstar right now

Little Mix having a reggaeton single a wee while back just seemed like inauthentic and off-brand bandwagon-chasing, I'm all for non-English music to be internationally huge but there's an insincerity to the moves made by a lot of popstars when they pivot to on-trend sounds and styles

crazy frog was good

utterly baffling to me to criticize entire genres of music for not "developing" enough or whatever - like every form of music must constantly be being transformed into some *other* form of music or it isn't valid - I just don't relate to music in that way.

while plenty of pop music today is mediocre as it always has been, i'm not sure there are any pop trends i'm actually annoyed by lately beyond some of the bizarre vocal affectations that have clearly taken a strong hold

Oh noes, “insincerity” in pop music(??)

boxedjoy's nailed it really. it might be UK perspective here. The only reggaeton most people know are Gasolina, the Bieber version of Despacito, Little Mix and maybe a couple of other, washier, Despacito soundalikes that got covered on the 'Latin' edition of X Factor

Speaking of which, Olatunji, the star of afrosoca, a modern day legend in Trinidad, is now a contestant on X Factor. Fair play that he's bringing soca music to mainstream audiences, but so far they've had him performing a crappy electro-swing crossover tune and a cover of Mambo No 5. It's about as starchy and primetime as they could possibly make it.

But yes, that's pop TV for you of course, what do I expect?

Yes, artists will jump on bandwagons, and the Little Mix track is a good example of this. “Taki Taki” is a very bad example though. That beat is legit good, Ozuna is in his element, and both Cardi B (who has dueted with Ozuna before, in Spanish!) and Selena Gomez, with their Hispanic/Latin roots, are not exactly clueless participants.

Of course it’s also a “cynical” pop move, people want to have hits. And DJ Snake has built his career on other people’s work (he recently released Niniola’s African megahit “Maradona” basically unchanged under his own name). Like I said when I posted “Taki Taki” on the Rolling Pop thread, I don’t know where he got this beat from (for all I know, he might have bought it from Afro Boys, the Dutch production team that produced Nicky Jam & J Balvin’s smash “X” from earlier this year - proving Moka’s point about how far reggaeton has branched out internationally), but he absolutely nailed it. Describing it as “very bland” or “watered-down” seems spectacularly off the mark.

Anyway, I’m going back to rinsing Lalo Ebratt’s “Mocca” - both versions!

okay Taki Taki wasn't a good example to use. you can hardly call it watered down

"insincerity" is probably not the right word for me to use - I'm not sure what is though. Pop is performance and doesn't have to be authentic to be good. Perhaps a better term is "unconvincing" - in the Little Mix example, they hadn't really done anything massively similar before or since (as far as I know, at least) and it didn't seem a natural or obvious step for them, but it also didn't seem like an astonishing leap of skill and talent and imagination. It literally just sounded like and felt like someone in an office saying "reggaeton is big, maybe we can get the girls involved in that"

You can make a cynical cash-in and it still be really good, but if it isn't up to standard then it just seems so hollow and forced. In pop, nobody wants to see the cogs in the machinery at work without being awed.

yeah Cardi has stated she listens to mostly spanish music and not rap, and that she has previously aimed to do a spanish version of bodak yellow (name of song escapes me, but not taki taki)

Britishers would recall Pixie Lott, who started out in the Duffy/Winehouse mould of vaguely retro pop, then following up her debut album with really uninspired and cheap-sounding EDM-pop about dancing in clubs. Not that she was ever a great popstar but something like "All About Tonight" or "Kiss The Stars" had a real air of will-this-do desperate cynicism. And then not too long ago she was dancing awkwardly on Saturday morning shows with grime rappers.

The question is maybe not around the trends themselves, but the popstars who pursue them and fail. Because when they succeed, it doesnt feel like a trend being chased.

xps So the actual “shit trend” in pop music right now is Little Mix doing a bit of reggaeton and the UK not getting Latin music? Lock thread, I guess.

...or maybe we could rename it to “Some pop music is actually shit, and other eye-openers”.

that last comment makes me think of nelly furtado, whose arguably trend-hopping self-reinvention for loose ended up being one of the biggest things of that year and totally blotted out most people's memories of her previous efforts at making it big. so she basically just seemed like a major new hitmaker, not someone following a trend. but there must be other people who tried to leap into cutting-edge club music (even if they couldn't get timbaland) who fell flat on their faces and were seen as hapless trend-followers.

i think thinking in terms of a "shit trend" sort of dooms the discussion if we really are interested in trends and the decisions made on adapting to them/jumping on them/starting them/whatever. and if we're just listing trends we thought of as shitty it's pretty well-trodden ground. maybe a middle ground would be, what causes trends to get viewed as shitty ones rather than good ones? obviously if you don't like nu-metal you think of nu-metal as a shitty trend but are there meta-features? like, for example, a trend is more likely to end up being viewed by some as shitty if it involves one or two really obvious easily copyable elements like the OHHHH vocals or the sharp female "hey!" of recent years... or looking back, grocery-bag rhymes circa 2011, fake telephone filter and gratuitous turntable in '99, pixies/nirvana loud-soft dynamics in '93, or booming gated drums in the late 80s..... if audiences really are eating it up for a year or two, then it's easy to see how people throw those features into otherwise not-that-great-songs and achieve hits that a short time later feel a bit hollow and signal a trend decline.

er "that last comment" is re: "Because when they succeed, it doesnt feel like a trend being chased."

I don’t get Moka singling out Rock when all mainstream is shit

https://www.citywesthousingtrust.org.uk/thumbs/cms/attachments/event/contents/5/8/a/58a38722-e105-4f44-8722-cae6b9553b70/bingo.png/articleView/bingo.png

So much of our perceptions of this kind of stuff is just the application of a readyformed narrative combined with hindsight bias: when Nelly F embraced pop she succeeded commercially, so it was all bold reinvention; when Jewel tried the same thing earlier she failed commercially so it was all desperate pandering.

it cannot be stated enough how deeply ingrained reggaeton has become globally! for example in Balkan pop it has been a staple for so many years that at this point it's like autotune - not something you do to stand out but rather to blend in, to sound "normal", natural even... it's so omnipresent in Balkan pop that when, say, Croatian peeps prone to grumbling about "shit trends" hear a reggaeton beat - they're just as likely to think of it as "that Serbian folk beat"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g15XXPikC4g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUOcNI8RBGk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKJEKww8zqk

xxpost: Come on not all mainstream is shit. I singled out Rock because Rockists tend to think their genre of choice is better than everything else out there when it clearly isn't the case. Those rock charts on billboard are horrifying to me. I don't see hip hop or pop or reggaeton or country or r&b audiences ashamed or misrepresented by their biggest selling artists. House/Techno could fall for that trap but they are genres which don't really exist in the US/UK charts. Who else is left besides rock to feel shame for their mainstream acts? Jazz? I don't know.

lol, you talk as if "rock fan" is some identity group

Any fan of X who think the best examples of it are routinely also the most popular is...a real puzzler.

House, after a few fashions, has done pretty well in the UK charts throughout this decade though fwiw.

That’s not what I’m saying?

Just saying that of all the genres in the charts rock is the only one that feels really misrepresented, not that the acts in the other charts are necessarily the best. I don’t see noone with the level of respect as say Kendrick Lamar for hip hop or Ariana Grande for pop in the rock charts. The rock chart is indefensible compared to the others imho is what I’m saying.

What's to "defend"? It's an airplay chart. People who listen to stations in the mainstream rock format must like those songs, or they wouldn't be played so heavily.

I do believe rock is less popular than the other mainstream genres and modern rock radio prescense is probably diminishing. I hate them all though. I probably hate mainstream pop and r’n’b more than modern rock because I’m much more aware of its presence.

Dance music enthusiasts universally hate the stuff that charts, all the way back to disco. Ask a panel of bonafide dance music experts to draw a 100 best dance tracks ever you’ll get stuff like Basic Channel and Juan Atkins, it won’t include anything close to 2 Unlimited, Scooter, Boney M, Modern Talking, Eiffel 65 or Pendulum. Few jazz fans rep for Engelbert Humperdinck and Michael Buble either.

Any fan of X who think the best examples of it are routinely also the most popular is... a real puzzler

I always think r&b - specifcally, r&b designed for club purposes of dancing and drinking - is at its best when it's at its most popular. Peak-era Timbaland stuff (ie pre Danja) was weird and jittery and thrilling for it and it was also the sound of so many hits at the turn of the millenium by both him and his imitators. If the idea is to bring the funk and groove that makes your body move in interesting ways then it makes sense that the stuff that is most fun to dance to is the stuff that's also the most rhythmically unconventional.

the stuff that is most fun to dance to is the stuff that's also the most rhythmically unconventional.

this is just demonstrably untrue over the history of dance music

140 bpm trance is so joyless in a club though? I love the 4/4 stomp of house and techno as much as I love 2-step garage and uk funky but there's always stuff going on in the grooves (and between the grooves lol) that's markedly different to eg EDM/trance pop

I mean I also wouldn't want to dance to Autechre in a club I guess, so you are right in a sense

but there's a lot of really boring, earnest, "straight" r&b out there that just feels motionlessly unsexy in a club context

Familiarity breeds contempt, when it arrived around 92/93, 140bpm trance was a revolution that swept away the stale chicago-style house and gimmicky cartoon-rave, after ten years it felt kinda stale and dropped back underground and now after 25 years it’s clearly not ready for a revival yet.

Guetta/Swedish House Mafia/Aviici style “EDM” once was fresh too, hard to believe now.

the history of dance music going back to the dawn of recording technology (and probably well before then) is one of passing manias for different rhythms. A rhythm becomes popular (presumably because ppl enjoy dancing to it), it is quickly copied and replicated into infinity until ppl get tired of it and it gets superceded by a new rhythm. rinse and repeat.

Tell me with a straight face this isn’t the most depressive billboard list of the decade:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Mainstream_Rock_number-one_songs_of_the_2010s

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Monday, October 15, 2018 3:23 PM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

“Mainstream” Rock? I’ve never heard of a single one of those songs.

a rhythm being complex doesn't really figure into it. and a rhythm is only "unconventional" until it becomes the new flavor of the year, and then it gets considered conventional v quickly.

xp

Stephen Stills invented jazz and wearing football jerseys

Pop singles were fire in 2018.
Radio was not fire.

Okay this was like 600 points ago, and feel free to continue your discussion uninterrupted by my comment on it, but was someone in here really predicting that the replacement for Imagine Dragons sorta-rock as the “shit trend” on pop radio would be a Kpop crossover
Like, putting aside the question of how those two even map onto each other (or whether the former is primarily of annoyance to “old people” when the better part of this thread has now been spent trying to talk a RYM user down from the ledge of that “millennial whoop” video), I would gladly make that trade right this second if it were up to me

God I don't know if I can get through that response video. Over analyzing something that bugs you and and putting in several hours to create a response can't be healthy.

― (V) (;,,;) (V) (FlopsyDuck)

you know what i like most about you, flopsyduck? your apparently complete and total obliviousness to irony

if you read on you will see that I saw the irony and flipped that post on its head

But i do like to feel liked every once in a while