As an '80s baby, I had the privilege of growing up with some amazing music: Punk, New Wave & the birth of Hip Hop in the '80s gave way to Grunge & what most consider to be the Golden Era of R&B, Rap & Electronic music. Every genre had its innovators & stars, all of which got plenty of airplay & spotlight on MTV, VH1 & in music magazines like Rolling Stone. You could even call into your local radio station & request your favorite songs for the DJ to play. These artists tended to write their own music, play an instrument (or two) & make deeply thought-out concept albums that could be played from front-to-back without skipping any songs because they were THAT good. Artists of the '90s heyday included:
Nirvana, R.E.M., Michael Jackson, Alanis Morrissette, En Vogue, Sinead O'Connor, Boyz II Men, Sublime, No Doubt, Fugees, Notorious B.I.G., Seal, TLC, Sheryl Crow, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Oasis, The B-52's, Prince, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Mary J. Blige, 2Pac, PM Dawn, Selena, Soundgarden.
(And that's not even counting more "underground" artists like DAFT Punk, The Prodigy & Aphex Twin that didn't get much airplay on some mainstream stations. Those influential bands could take up another whole article, but for the sake of making a point I'll stick to better known artists).
What I didn't know is I was witnessing the last era of great pop music that would ever exist.
That's not to say amazing music is not being made today, but it certainly isn't receiving airplay, recognition on The Grammys or Billboard Music Awards or attention via other media. So it's not part of the popular culture & thus might as well not exist because we can't all enjoy it together & make shared memories with it as the soundtrack to our lives like we did for pretty much all of modern history.
This seems to be one of those issues everybody notices but can't quite put their finger on, yet we've accepted because we have no choice. Some (inevitably younger folks) get indignant, claiming today's music is just as diverse & high quality as the music of decades past if only we'd "give it a chance". They say we're just "out of touch" and have no idea what we're talking about or that we haven't kept up with today's pop music, vaguely asserting that there's amazing stuff out there but never quite seeming to actually produce any examples. Then the conversation turns to "music taste is subjective" which is totally true, but at what point is a "song" not actually music but just commercially profitable noise? The death of distinct genres & the homogenization of music into a mishmash of electronic-hip hop-pop-dance singles & off-key ballads is one problem with today's pop; we'll get into more in a minute.
None of this may matter to you if you're not an audiophile--someone who values music for the artistic aspects rather than entertainment value. I define it this way: Music-as-entertainment is merely something to sing along to or play for background noise while you do other things such as host a party; music-as-art alters your mood & takes your imagination and spirit to other places. Almost like a drug. Those who listen to it for entertainment alone won't fully appreciate what I'm talking about here. If you care about the quality, sound & complexity of your music, read on.
Defining "Good" Music
Everybody has their favorite (and least fave) genre of music. The tendency to be biased toward music that you came of age to--that is, grew from an adolescent to a proper teen--is also real. Associating great memories like your first relationship, taking a cruise in your first car, becoming Prom Queen, losing your virginity or winning your first All-State Football tournament with a certain song or album is natural & we're all prone to that kind of bias. But I want to make it clear that's NOT the case for me. I came of age in the 1998-2001 period & had already been disenchanted with popular music for 3 years by that point. Let's take a look back at that era and see what was popular on the Top 40 charts, shall we?
N*Sync, Britney Spears, Spice Girls, Puff Daddy, Limp Bizkit, Creed, Sugar Ray, Mystikal, Mandy Moore, Nickelback, Ja Rule, Avril Lavigne, Will Smith, R. Kelly, Ricky Martin, Nelly, Jessica Simpson, Hanson, LFO (aka Lyte Funkie Ones), Kid Rock, Lil' Bow Wow, Unkle Kracker, Lil' Romeo, BBMak, Staind.
I'll stop there. You get the picture (I hope). It was a far cry from the artists topping the charts just a few years earlier. By the late '90s & early 2000's, popular music was all about the teeny bopper boy/girl band, Butt Rock (i.e. Creed, Nickelback, Hinder & other gravel-voiced soundalikes), bad Ska-Alt Rock knockoffs like Sugar Ray & Smash Mouth & that gawd awful Nu-Metal that helped make Woodstock '99 a rape-filled shitshow of epic white dude proportions. And we can't forget the rise of Crunk Rap/Southern Hip Hop like Ying Yang Twins & D4L's "Shake That Laffy Taffy".
The mid-'90s saw the deaths of both Hip-Hop & Rock's biggest stars: Kurt Cobain in '94, Eazy-E & Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon in '95, 2Pac & Bradley Nowell of Sublime in '96 & the Notorious B.I.G. in '97. In my childish naivete I thought those deaths were responsible for music's downfall but now I know something much bigger was at play. After all, we lost Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix & Jim Morrison in 1970-71 and great music did not grind to a halt.
So what the fuck happened?
Did I just get old, or did music quality actually go down the crapper? Remember, I wasn't old by that point. I was an adolescent-bordering-on-teenager. Prime music loving years. I always wondered what could account for this sudden shift toward formulaic, dumbed-down music aimed solely at tweens & cavemen. How did we go from "every song no matter the genre is my favorite" to "I can't stand a single thing on the radio!" in the span of 1-2 years?
Pinpointing the Culprit
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| Clinton signs Telecommunications Act into law |
Enter the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a bill signed by none other than Bill Clinton. While the details of this bill are complicated & encompass more than just music/radio, I encourage you to do some deeper digging. Basically, this bill deregulated the airwaves in an unprecedented way, taking control away from local DJs and giving it to megacorporations like Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) whose sole focus was the ads rather than the music itself. These corps used focus groups to decide which songs to play between the ads to keep listeners' attention rather than playing music that's, you know, actually good. Calling in to request your favorite song quickly became a thing of the past because DJs no longer controlled what songs got played. No more spontaneously mixed-in jams heard over the weekend at the club or while the DJ was traveling. Just nauseatingly repetitive corporate playlists made by some CEO in an office.
Now it's all about targeting the music to the demographic most likely to buy shit. That would be tweens--particularly girls in the 12-14 age range. Hence all the boy/girl band music: Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish, BTS & other specially-groomed teen stars. Sure, those types of artists have always existed but they used to exist as part of a larger and more varied landscape of music made mostly for adults. And as for the quality of music itself, there's literal proof of the decline in lyrical complexity over the last few decades. Check out the documentary "Before the Music Dies" (2006) for a full explanation of the situation we're in. It's probably even worse by now, actually.
To further drive the nail through the coffin, shows like American Idol & its more "organic" (yeah right) alternative The Voice became popular around 2002, proving that the only way to the top was by conforming to a highly generic image, sound & format. No more organically formed bands doing it the old fashioned way--now you were gonna have to audition in front of stuck up suits doing extremely sterile covers of other artists' songs. If you didn't sound enough like the original artist, prepare to get destroyed. But more importantly, if you weren't young, beautiful, clean-cut & groveling you'd better expect to get your ass handed to you by the incredibly cruel judges.
The Fallout
The overuse of autotune, the nauseatingly repetitive choruses (Beyonce's "Who run the world? Girls"; Bieber's "Baby baby baby, Oooh" x1000), unbearable embellishments like "cursive singing" & the millennial whoop make today's music physically painful for people like me who remember how soulful, intricate & complex popular music used to be. (Being autistic and having sensory issues probably doesn't help matters, but one needn't have those to find this offensively shitty music unbearable). For someone who used to genuinely love every song I heard on the radio as a kid, I can honestly say I haven't enjoyed a song played on the radio since 2003. That's almost 20 years. So you can see why it might bother me. We have Spotify, Youtube & countless other ways of discovering music now--great. But not everyone has endless time to search for obscure bands & assemble playlists. And even if they did, it's just not the same as when great music was part of the mainstream popular culture for pretty much all of modern history. That's a hill I'll die on.
Before you let anyone make you feel like a delusional old fart for saying music was better "back in the old days," show them this article. While they're entitled to their opinion, they should also know the facts before repeating tired old tropes about romanticizing the past. I would posit that this goes deeper than musical tastes: it's symptomatic of the fall of our society. Dramatic? Maybe, but when quality art & music cannot be found through mainstream channels--all of which are controlled by giant media conglomerations--the soul of the nation starves. Whether you realize it or not, we NEED art to flourish as a society. And on the flipside, art is the cultural thermostat that reads the health of a nation... our collective moods, emotions, political & social wellness. Judging by our popular music, we haven't been in a good mood since the turn of the millennium.
This same phenomenon has come to pass with big-budget movies in the past decades as well: the dumbing down of plots, remakes of remakes, over-dependence on CGI to dazzle audiences in the absence of decent writing & childish movies for adults (the Harry Potter series, Twilight & all the Marvel & DC comic superhero films). And of course reality TV replacing sitcoms & other types of shows that require the hiring of actually talented writers. Ditto journalism. Go back & watch an episode of 20/20, Frontline PBS or 60 Minutes from the 1970s or even the 1990s and then watch one from today. The decline in quality is startling. I won't even get started on the quality of Netflix's so-called "documentaries".
For all this talk of how enlightened we are & how far technology has progressed, we don't seem to have noticed that our institutions have been crumbling beneath us for the last half-century. How much of this is due to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 vs. our ever reduced attention spans I can't be sure, but I do know that bills that deregulate industries & allow huge corporate mergers are a big part of the problem. And both parties are equally to blame for allowing it. These are the consequential decisions we're not being given a vote on--the political changes that rarely even get media coverage. And We The People the ones who pay.
R.I.P. music
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