Response to "Why is Modern Music so Awful' by Thoughty2 - The Decline of the Pop Song

you know that expression when life gives you lemons make lemonade well Schweppes should really make a strategic investment in YouTube because there is never before been housed under one roof a collection of this many lemons case in point 42 whose real name is aron named after the Aran Islands of Scotland if you're interested his content is a little tricky to describe I'd say it's the place where a received wisdom and gullibility collide with a really unrealistic deadlines with the resulting debris being his videos so let's pluck one and take a bite the truth why modern music is awful when an elegant title or the sourness of misinformation so first let's hear his thesis music is getting worse every year okay this is a pretty common bias he's tapping into let's hear a little more there is far more to this than simple nostalgia and when your parents keep telling you that the music died long ago they may actually have a point because it turns out that science agrees with them so what's happened here is Aaron's read an article we don't know which one because this started back in 2012 and the same stories were surfaced over and over again on social media and other bad publications they all say basically the same thing scientists have proven that music is getting worse and all of them point to a study titled measuring the evolution of contemporary Western popular music a joint effort by five authors representing the following fields a I complex systems modeling physics and music technology and right off the bat you'll notice the absence of a musicologist or composer with the background in research already a pretty bad sign but we'll get that much later so what went wrong how did we go from Bob Dylan to Britney Spears from Led Zeppelin to Lady gaga so this statement reveals problem number one conflating the music industry of the 60s with that of today but we'll get to that later what's really bad as what's coming next the core idea that this argument rests on which is how the study managed to measure musical quality the researchers took around 500,000 recordings from all genres of music from the period of 1955 to 2010 not exactly they assessed an existing collection called the million song data set a list of the top 200 most searched for artists identified by echo net a big data company whose technology is used by Spotify to make recommendations based on your listening habits and it's actually this recommendation technology that accounts for the majority of the data set music closely associated with those top 200 artists so what does this mean it means the music being discussed here is mainly pop rock or mb or hip-hop promoted by major labels over 50 years along with lesser-known artists chosen by the algorithm based on their similarity to this music and they meticulously run every single song through a set of complex algorithms why do you use the word meticulously this wasn't done by hand on a song by song bassist Aaron these algorithms measured three distinct metrics of each song the harmonic complexity the timbrel diversity timbrel the quality have been made of timber really showing your musical expertise there Aaron and loudness oh and just in case you didn't know recording technology and compression has got better since the 60s so music is a bit louder now there's also quite a few styles that seem to like loudness a lot like this tank called Punk I bet I bet I bet you didn't know that so tell us Aaron what are the scientists men find and while you're at it you might want to re-record those parts where you say timbre the most shocking results that the researchers found was that over the past few decades Tamra in songs has dropped drastically Tom bruh yeah that's perfect nice save you've really demonstrated your color bruh Tom bruh is the texture color and the quality of the sounds within the music although that phrase the quality of the sound is misleading Aaron goes on to demonstrate at least some kind of understanding of what timbre is although he seems to think that the more of it you have the better the music is going to be so let me just give a bit more on timbre when you pluck a string it vibrates and produces a bunch of pitches the loudest of these is called the fundamental pitch which is the note we mainly hear on top of this are much quieter pitches called overtones which resonated different frequencies and which gives the fundamental pitch it's character for example if you play a C sharp note on a violin it'll sound different to a guitar this is due to factors like the size of the instrument the way they're played the type of material they're made from etc which affects how their overtones resonate and it's this difference which helps us to distinguish one instrument from another that we call timbre now with the digital tools available to us today we can produce sounds that contain very little timbre of diversity for example the basic sine wave on a synthesizer has no overtones at all which makes it the devil and there's a whole world of samples that intentionally throw away this richness in pursuit of a digital sound which a total degenerate artist with no love of timbre might do in pursue to something new sounding and there are people out there who like termites are hell-bent on destroying the timbre doing things like harmonics on guitar so ponticello on viola prepared piano full settle there killing but what's really great here is when Aaron goes on to try and provide examples of how this sorry state of affairs came to be the vast majority of pop today is built using the exact same combination of a keyboard drum machine sampler are you kidding me a sampler you're trying to make the argument that a sampler is generic it's called a sampler because it can literally sample any type of sound imaginable it couldn't be any more diverse Aaron and computer software and computer software ah seriously did you really mean to say those words in that order if this is the way you think I'd love to hear your critique of contemporary painting these days painters are all just using the exact same stuff brushes color and ideas so now we can see that the entire framing of this problem is wrong artists often deliberately reduce timbrel richness to make their music interesting in fact the process of taking samples from older music and degrading it is part of a vital musical dialogue [Music] these type of textural choices don't just exist in isolation for no reason there are reaction to music from the past a complicated ongoing conversation yet the authors of this study are implying that by simply measuring a parameter like timbre they're able to trace the decline in musical history quantifying how music is getting worse without paying any attention to context it's like judging Ernest Hemingway unfavorably because he uses fewer semicolons than his predecessors [Music] what if I also told you that the vast majority of chart-topping music in the past 20 years was written by just two people the vast majority well I guess I'd say that's not her nonsense Aaron there have been approximately 1,100 top-ten singles in the last 20 years and the two people you're about to mention Max Martin and dr. Luke were involved in less than 1/10 of them impressive yes representative of the majority well I guess I'll say no because I'm worried you might think the answer is yes they account for the lyrics and melodies behind the vast majority of pop music today oh no Aaron please stop saying that these two men are the hidden pop factories behind virtually every single band that is played on the radio today and no they're not Aaron they're not and probably every musical act you grew up with no stop making it worse the future of all music that will ever happen was stopped also just to take a timeout I need to make an adjustment here I'm really can't look at that face anymore with that ridiculous eyebrow affectation he's putting on how am I supposed to concentrate and let's just put something more interesting there like you know yeah that'll do so from here on out Aaron continues down the rabbit hole trying to write the obituary of all music of course his timeline is all over the place first he points out that people used to appreciate their music more when they had less access to it it used to be the case that if you wanted to hear a song you had to go out and buy that one single or album over time you would learn to appreciate all of subtle nuances throughout the album and then the I would happen yeah the first portable mp3 player game out in 1998 are three years before the first iPod Steve didn't invent the mp3 player Aaron a basic Google search would have cleared that up granting access to thousands of songs on one device which eventually led to streaming wrong again Aaron Napster was doing it before the iPod or the iTunes Store was released basic Google check Aaron today we flick through songs on Spotify without what sports to each song subtleties and unique talents do we where's your proof for that Aaron and hold on isn't the whole point of your video that music today doesn't have these qualities you know because it's like in the timber what the kids are today really just don't understand is you gotta have the timber this has caused musicians and record companies to favor punchy bass lines that demand our attention oh man nonsense compounds on nonsense I don't know where to begin here Aaron I lived through rave culture in the early 90s this band called scooter I don't know if you've heard of them but trust me you could hear their awful punchy bass lines coming through the walls Aaron the early 90s were a bit like this ern punchy bass isn't new Aaron okay so I think it's becoming clear that a point-by-point rebuttal won't be necessary especially considering that Aaron left out quite a lot of stuff that was in the study let's take a little break from him and skip straight to the source so the introduction to the study states pretty large scale ambitions can we spot differences between new and old music and is there an evolution of musical discourse and as mentioned before they noticed the following tendencies over the last 50 years loudness increased while harmonic complexity and timbre richness decreased and based on these findings the report submitted the following summary our perception of new music is essentially rooted identifying simpler pitch sequences fashionable timbrel mixtures and louder volumes so there are a lot of flaws in this some obvious some not let's start with some of the obvious ones first there are far more important components of music than loudness harmony and timbre namely structure and context these were not considered as part of the study because the million song dataset wasn't set up to measure any of them and rather than find a way that's the part where a musicologist could have come in useful the authors just stuck to the limited data available to them so it's incomplete it could only at best be described as an unfinished curiosity in no way thorough enough to be culturally significant then there's another problem the source material which is commercial pop music spanning the last 50 years for the purpose of an experiment this is a flawed control since the pop music industry has completely transformed over this period all one has to do is look around at the fragmented musical landscape that exists on the Internet today and observe how different it is to mainstream pop to give one example you have styles gaining in popularity that deliberately use copyrighted material to evoke novel feelings of nostalgia like vaporwave or as an act of defiance like the music of the bran flakes stuff that by design can never be accepted into the main stream and that's another thing isn't the term mainstream a little outdated it seems to me that there are a million tiny interconnected streams a chaotic world of small-scale artists and visionaries and then there's one big dumb lake where experimentation and forward-looking art doesn't happen where being a tired cliché is considered a virtue so given everything I've just said is this study seriously trying to tell us that by analyzing the big dumb lake a lake that looks nothing like it did 50 years ago we can make sense of what's going on everywhere else give me a break and now that I've danced around all the things the study doesn't do let's tackle what it does do and why we need to be very careful about using its findings to make judgments about goodness or badness the most eye-catching finding in this study is of course the claim the harmony is gradually reducing in complexity there are many problems with this but let's start with a straightforward compositional exercise first listen to this [Music] okay so I doubt that was a particularly surprising musical moment since it's a pretty standard progression in the minor key but now listen to this so as I'm sure you noticed the only difference from the first example was the absence of a final chord but hold on how do we know that the final chord was missing well on the one hand it's because the first example led you to expect it but it's such a common progression that you would have expected it anyway since it's part of a basic harmonic grammar we all understand we can say that there's a hidden chord which the music is obviously pointing to which we all understand was deliberately withheld and this aspect our contextual expectation is extremely important we've been listening to music all our lives and though many of us can't describe it in theoretical terms we have a keen sense of what's being implied this is why I said earlier that context is more important than harmony if we were to judge both these examples by simply counting the chords we see then the first example would be the second this study would consider the first to have greater harmonica complexity but we know this isn't true because in the second example the home-court is obviously there we just don't hear it and now we can see where this study really falls over because as I'm sure you've already guessed the second example is actually a much more complicated piece of music than the first why because we the listeners are being required to engage more is the missing home-court this this or this and also were been forced to ask ourselves a contextual question why why didn't I hear what I expected my brain is thinking and modern music works like this all the time constantly referencing or inferring content that it doesn't play implying harmonies we don't hear it can be done by setting up rhythmic expectation or by pointing in an obvious melodic direction and with that in mind there's actually an Eminem song I've always been interested in that has this really strange repeated harmony in the verse which is compounded by his flattened internal rapping then when the chorus comes along I always found it strange how much harmony is left to the imagination I've always found this odd in my brain the weird harmony in the first [Music] gets carried into the chorus another small point for monic diversity doesn't account for plagiarism if you had 20 songs that all use the same 60s progression say 1 6 4 5 that's not 20 songs that are harmonically rich it's 20 songs all doing the same thing the text in this study didn't make it clear whether they accounted for this at all my suspicion is that they didn't or couldn't and one last point the whole idea of considering complexity to be important is a rejection not only if modern minimalism but also with classical music what do I mean well if you do a little digging around in the history of art you'll quickly notice a trend that veers back and forth a never-ending pendulum swing between complexity and simplicity for examples the elaborate Rococo movement of the 18th century which was overthrown by the austerity of neoclassicism bizarre architecture which was replaced by Bauhaus and later on Brutalism oil the dense writing of William Faulkner followed by the no-nonsense directness of Ernest Hemingway Lee and of course let's not forget Baroque music with its intricate polyphonic writing and it's complicated harmonic sequences which was followed by the simplicity of the classical era clear melodic lines and simpler harmonic progressions yes that's right if this study was conducted between the 18th and 19th century it would have come to the same conclusion it has today harmonic complexity is declining and consequently music is getting worse every year and the culprits Haydn Mozart and Beethoven those degenerates so that about does it for this study and for its misinformed advocate at 42 a bad argument made worse by the corroding acidity of lemon flavored bile which with a bit of effort we've managed to repurpose into a nice informative lemonade that'll be one like please and if you need me later on just ring that bell over there I love anyway how can people feel comfortable putting such a little effort into 2.4 million subscribers 2.4 million subscribers why am i bothering with this video SI nonsense if I can be getting right hold on a Tentacruel here in 1825 a master composer called Schubert created the greatest song ever written it was called Ave Maria a wondrous feast of timbal complexity but little did this composer realize that some people didn't like his song they were called the eight own lists a group of anti musical nihilistic villains led by the crazed Austrian Arnold Schoen burg if you like my diatribe subscribe

Channel: Tantacrul

Views: 655,075

Rating: 4.8118787 out of 5

Keywords: Thoughty2, The TRUTH Why Modern Music is Awful, Bad Music, Tantacrul, Decline of pop music, Pop music is bad, Why is pop music so bad?, Musical tastes, pop music, music getting worse, music used to be better, popular music, why pop music sounds bad (to you), thoughty2 music, why modern pop music is bad, why is pop music so bad now, modern music is garbage, music isn't getting worse, modern pop songs, Why is Modern Music so Awful?, Arran, Response, thoughty2 music response

Id: VfNdps0daF8

Length: 18min 18sec (1098 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 08 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I've see Adam Neely's video on this general topic but I'll definitely watch this one after work.

This issue is really as simple as: popular music has always been simple. The old mountain songs of Ireland are special and authentic and yet somehow pop music is tasteless and uncultured.

The reason we think music has gotten simpler is we don't listen to the bad songs from the past, but also because I think people don't even know what simplicity is. Elvis was simple.

What is an issue is how streamlined production has become, but all that means is there's more simple music being produced in attempts to get the next hit. There is also more complex music though. There's just more music overall because technology makes recording, scoring, and production accessible, which is good.

[u/peanutismint]

I hate how these faux-intellectual channels (Thoughty2) try to dumb down research studies for the Instagram generation; their understanding is so flawed all they end up proving is that clickbait works.

[u/juloxx]

Media Consolidation. It is a real thing. 90% of the media used to be split between 50 Companies, now its owned by 6. This is a real, tangible reason as to why we hear a shittier quality of music, there is less diversity. Companies can manufacture a superstar overnight, and just play them out between all the stations they own, rather than each station bringing its own flavor

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It all fell apart during Billy Clintons aboloshing of FCC regulations via the telecommunications act I believe.

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[u/vomitHatSteve]

Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Those degenerates!

Hah!

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I remember when the video he's critiquing started blowing up. I was pretty annoyed by all of his (awful) points

[u/AM90042]

Thank you for this

[u/TheRealJakeABoo]

I can't take anyone seriously that wants to give me a lesson in what's bad and what's good. I've met so many douche bags over the years that got their music theory degrees at Community Colleges, and just love to tell me how everything I love or hate is wrong. I shutter when I meet those people.

[u/[deleted]]

Just what the doctor ordered. Thank for this!

[u/spoken210]

Music is art. Art Is subjective. Argument over :)

[u/MrRedTRex]

lmao this was excellent. Thoughty2 got his back blown out. I'm glad OP went after the eyebrow affect also