The 'Shit Trend' in pop music right now

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

xp - Do you listen to any of these stations?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mainstream_rock_radio_stations_in_the_United_States

No.

"... it's the children who are wrong."

Lyrics about texts, airplane mode, left on read, etc...

moka otm, those rock charts suck ass

October 8 "Not Again" Staind

do feel like "trends" or "rhythms" would be more useful terms for understanding contemporary music than "genre", which seems v old school

doctor casino otm as always that "shit trends" (or "shit rhythms") kind of ruin the discussion

Fwiw, Billboard's Mainstream Rock Chart is based on the airplay of a specific radio format (active rock), as that Wikipedia article states. It's not necessarily even a list of the most popular or heavily played songs that are broadly classified as 'rock'. The Hot Rock Songs chart at least includes other rock radio formats, not that it would necessarily make anyone here feel any better.

Can't vouch for the reliability of the Wikipedia link btw. Here's the chart: https://www.billboard.com/charts/rock-songs

I knew that It's Been a While since Staind were on the charts, but I'm surprised to see that they were there as recently as 2011.

"Rats" r0x0r btw.

Funny that "Not Again" actually did have two spells on the top spot. Or was that the point?

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

― Mr. Snrub, Monday, October 15, 2018 10:37 PM (yesterday)

This really is like the platonic ideal of a Snrub post.

I read through almost every name on that list saying "bloody hell, are they still going?" I guess there will always be bros in big shorts.

I see now that Moka already posted the Hot Rock list. Hadn't slept much.

Tbh, if I put on commercial terrestrial radio in the van, it is as likely to be mainstream rock/active rock as anything else these days since there are usually no surprises on classic rock and the 'alternative rock' station just doesn't rock most of the time. (Radio 2 usually puts me to sleep if they're not playing classical. Pop, AC, and country radio usually turn me off way faster and I can hear the first two anywhere else anyway.) I almost always put on a CD or campus radio, though.

I am a little intrigued by both the sorts of 'canons' these stations carve out of rock history and the ways they seem to like to define themselves in opposition to other formats. Afaict, our active rock station (The Rebel) plays the kind of stuff you see on that list + the heavier end of 90s alternative rock (e.g. Soundgarden and Alice Chains, sometimes NIN, but not Radiohead or Smashing Pumpkins, maybe Green Day or Nirvana, RATM right now) + some Metallica/Megadeth + 80s 'heavy metal' (Ozzy, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest) + Zeppelin and Sabbath but not much other music from before the 80s. They run station ID ads with slogans like "The only 'f word' around here is 'Foreigner' (with a brief clip of 'I Want to Know What Love Is')" and "the only 's word' around here is 'Styx'" (with a clip of "Come Sail Away") that rely on both the listener's recognition of those bands and songs and their desire to define themselves in opposition to them + their identification of those songs with the classic rock station, whose playlist otherwise overlaps with portions of the Rebel's. Afaict, the 'alternative' station plays a lot of what you see on the Hot Rock Songs chart, a lot of what is probably on the triple-A chart (e.g. Arcade Fire, Florence & the Machine), the 90s alternative rock that is not covered by the Rebel (although they agree on Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and pop-punk), and 80s 'modern rock'. I've heard them play Jethro Tull because of their influence on Mumford & Sons and I've heard ELO on the Toronto 'indie' station. They used to run commercials declaring themselves a "Miley-free zone", a "Bieber-free zone", and a "Nickelback-free zone". I think Greta Van Fleet might get play on all three stations. It seems a bit like the 90s alternative/modern rock format split itself into two distinct formats. (Iirc, we had a single modern rock station in the late 90s/early 00s that played the Smiths and Cure alongside RATM and nu-metal.)

Ha, they just went to "When the Curtain Falls", of course.