The 'Shit Trend' in pop music right now

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ppl enjoy dancing to it), it is quickly copied and replicated into infinity until ppl get tired of it and it gets superceded by a new rhythm.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.

(I drive a LOT these days.)

Mediabase has also recently changed its breakdown (if you’re into the nitty-gritty of radio formats): http://www.insideradio.com/free/mainstream-rock-gets-rolled-away-by-mediabase/article_b3b245a4-9358-11e5-a8f4-670625f5ac53.html

Ah, thanks.

I had wondered what the difference was.

I'm a bit confused about why this has become a 'pop vs rock' thread, or even an 'in defense of pop' thread, or even in some cases an 'all pop is good even the shit stuff wildcard' thread...

With respect dude the original post was hardly your finest hour and it was so ill-defined it could have gone pretty much anywhere. It was either going to end up here or with people calling each other racist.

In terms of the biggest gap between a sound's "credible" beginnings and the awfulness that came afterwards, I think Bossa Nova might be notable. Or dubstep, but with the qualifier that the early good stuff consists strictly of Horsepower Productions and literally everything afterwards was of the Shit Trend

It was either going to end up here or with people calling each other racist. <--- new board description

The “Shit Threads” in ILM forum right now

dude the original post was hardly your finest hour

at least it drew my attention to that vine of the guy doing the indie girl voice and now I can't stop saying 'We have bananies and avocadies' to myself

I enjoyed this in-depth linguistic analysis of "indie girl voice"

https://www.acelinguist.com/2018/10/dialect-dissection-indie-girl-voice.html

No mention of Karen Dalton is odd

I had been genuinely confused by that diphthong in "Good for You".

Sometimes I use the phrase "american idol voice" when discussing what I don't like

Surely Britney is the ground zero for this phenomenon, oh baybay baybay?

This vocal trends makes me “??” as well (if we’re talking about the same thing), but I’m hesitant to come down too hard on it for obvious reasons. Maybe if it were an “indie dude voice”...

Yeah, idk what this has to do with 'indie', really. The linguist actually has a separate article about "babay" vowels!

Here; haven't finished it yet: https://www.acelinguist.com/2017/05/oh-babih-babay-how-one-vowel-one.html

I think it's pronounced 'inday'.

Think the vine was originally posted on this thread in connection to the "passenger voice" which I consider to be a different, much worse thing.

Aka"Ellie Goulding ballad voice"

Ooh ooh can we do the Sting / Elvis Costello swallowed-voice?

Parts of Iggy's 'Passenger' fall under the "Joy Division voice" which I generally dislike (Iggy is okay I guess). I never knew an indie band called Passenger

that's a hilarious article

Is there a term for the Rag'n'Bone Man objectively the second worst noise in the world voice?