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Link to original post: [drupal=4498]Music: The Culture and Attitudes[/drupal]
As a preface, I'll just say that I’ve blogged about music before, I post about it everywhere, etc.; the point is, I love music and I listen to a ton of it from all different genres and periods of time.
The whole mainstream vs. underground situation in music is one that is, unfortunately, a very pervasive one for me. When I first started listening to my own library of music (when I was in third or fourth grade), I was led mostly by my older sister, who was determined to be different at the time; therefore I started out with a very hipster mindset. For one thing, I somehow came to the conclusion that I liked punk music, when in all actuality I don’t think I ever truly did. I’m open to any genre of music, but punk is a genre that doesn’t tend to sit well with me, mostly because 90% of it sounds the exact same to me, and you can usually hardly make out the lyrics at all.
In any case, I was far too much in that whole crowd of “This band is popular now, therefore it sold out,” and the like, trying to stay away from bands which could be considered too mainstream, or worse, bands and artists that were – gasp – posers.
At least, that’s how I recall my mindset; looking back at my actual music listening, I hardly knew well enough to look for anything very underground and therefore the only way I discovered music was by having it be at least remotely mainstream.
But I digress. I tended to avoid artists that were too popular until June 2010, when I broke down and bought both of Lady Gaga’s presently released albums. Ever since, I’ve listened to music that’s very popular and played on the radio as well as music of which nobody I talk to has ever heard. What pisses me off is that, even though I usually end up listening to the music in the end if I like it, how popular it is actually occurs to me initially when considering the purchase of a song or album.
The fact of the matter is this: the culture of mainstream music pisses me off greatly, and at the same time, I’d really like to punch hipsters in the face.
I suppose I’ll start with the latter as it’s easier to explain. What irks me more than anything when it comes to hipsters is not that they’re intent on liking really underground music. My problem is that hipsters tend to like to shove it in everyone’s face that they are a hipster. They make it well-known that they listen to music so underground that you’ve never heard of it, and more annoyingly, they make it well-known that they don’t like popular music.
What’s annoying about that is not that they don’t like popular music, so before any hipsters out there jump on me for attacking your music preferences, that’s not what I’m doing. The problem is that they decide that anything that is popular is automatically ****.
Um, wait, what? Generalizing and saying that popular music in the past has all been bad would be one thing, but there is absolutely no way to predict what songs will be released in the future and which of those songs will become popular. I’ll be the first to admit that people are stupid, but to say that every song that the majority of people will enjoy must suck is a ridiculous generalization. If one of these precious indie songs suddenly became ridiculously popular, would that song immediately be terrible because of it?
And yet, as I’ve come to be exposed to popular music more and more, I realize how much I hate the culture of popular music, too.
For starters, there’s the radio. I don’t ever actually listen to the radio voluntarily, because even with my own music library I’m the kind of person who will skip fifty songs before settling on a song to listen to. That’s not because I only have five songs in my entire library that I like; it’s because when I listen to music, unless I’m doing it very passively and I’m quite occupied with other things as I listen, I listen to something that matches my mood at the moment. Truthfully, 90% of the time, if people paid close attention to what songs I’m listening to, they could probably figure out exactly what I’m feeling/thinking and why I’m feeling/thinking it.
But I digress; despite never listening to the radio voluntarily, I do still find myself being forced to listen to it relatively often. I’ve been listening to the same radio station over the past two years at my workplace, and any time I go somewhere with one of my friends and he’s driving, he always puts the radio on. From the little I listen to the radio, I’ve found that the radio rarely manages to refrain from overplaying songs. Songs and artists that I could once stand have been ruined for me because I hear them played on the radio far too often; plus, again, the radio does not allow me to listen to what I feel like listening to at the moment, so on top of overplaying songs, I end up hearing them when I’m not at all in the mood for them.
Honestly, in general, I hate it when I really like a song and then it becomes popular. That sounds really hipster-y and stupid, I’m sure, but the fact of the matter is I enjoy hearing the song on the radio the first two times I hear it, then I get pissed off because a song I used to love is starting to get overplayed.
Also, in the process of writing this blog and considering this further, I’ve realized that a good portion of the reason I dislike that is because of the hipsters. It’ll be a perfectly good song that I legitimately enjoy, and then it becomes popular, and all of a sudden everybody likes it and the bloody hipsters all decide that if you like the song you’re just conforming and that, because the song is popular, it’s automatically ****ty anyway.
What annoys me besides that, though, is that I’ll find a personal meaning in a song, and when it becomes popular…all of a sudden that gets messed up in some way. For example, I heard and loved Katy Perry’s “Firework” before it became a single, before the majority of people knew it existed, and on one particular day when I was feeling really nervous and insecure, that song got me pumped up, motivated, and made me feel more confident.
Now that it’s a popular song that everyone has heard, that’s been covered by Glee, and that’s played constantly on the radio, it was a motivational anthem for everyone, and then became one for nobody because everybody knows the song. Even worse, because it’s popular and everyone’s heard it, I’m sure at least a handful of people reading this decided that I’m pathetic for being motivated by the song because its lyrics are “fake”, stupid, or something to that effect.
The other thing that irks me about popular music tends to happen mostly with older songs; it’s that attitude that people have where they decide that everyone likes a song or artist, and if anyone says otherwise they must be lying and are just trying to be a hipster.
As someone who really doesn’t enjoy music from The Beatles very much, I find this to be a particular problem. I don’t dislike The Beatles, and there are a handful of songs from them that I like, but their music, for the most part, doesn’t make me feel anything, and therefore I don’t enjoy listening to their music. Everyone assumes that everyone has to like The Beatles, but why? Just because the majority of people enjoy their music, that means I must too?
And I’m sure I just offended at least one person because I like Lady Gaga but not The Beatles.
For that matter, speaking of The Beatles, I'd like to address the whole argument of new music versus old music.
People who have the attitude that "all music nowadays sucks" or "music past *insert date here* is all terrible" piss me off a lot. As a whole, anybody who makes generalizations in music pisses me off. You cannot define music by the date it was released, and you certainly can't define it by what arbitrary genre distinction it receives.
The first half of that is that people like to pretend that old music is so much more awesome and meaningful than music today, which is only about sex and drugs, unlike music from back when.
For starters, music back when is not as amazing as people like to pretend it is. I'm not generalizing old music at all, because there's certainly some great older music -- I do listen to old music mixed in with my newer music -- but you can find just as much of a lack of meaning in music from older days if you stop looking at it through rose-tinted glasses.
I don't think I even need to pull out examples to make the point that there is a ton of music from the '60s and '70s about drugs. Also, I'm subjected to a ****ton of crappy '80s music on the radio at work, and I don't see anything great about a song that just talks about wearing your sunglasses at night.
Also, there's "Y.M.C.A.," which everyone and their grandmother knows and dances along to. I'm not really sure how factual this is because I've seen/heard mixed reports on the matter, but there's some evidence to suggest that it's about gay men getting together at the YMCA for sex, and even if that's not what it was written about, it certainly gained that meaning for some. Which makes it all the more funny that all of these grandmothers are dancing along to it.
There's other songs that fall into the "old and popular but not really all that meaningful" category, like "December 1963 (Oh, What A Night)", and I could go on trying to find examples of it, but I think you get the point; there's just as much bad old music as good old music.
To get back to my point about generalizing music, to give a cutoff date for good music is absolutely ridiculous, especially with the way music has evolved. There is more music than ever out there today, and to say that no music past the year 2000 is good is absolutely ludicrous. It's the same thing with people generalizing genres; there's far too many songs inside a genre and not enough clear-cut definitions of each genre to say that you dislike an entire genre. I keep telling my friend that about country music, and yet she refuses to believe that there's even a single country song that she could like.
I mean, it doesn't help that nobody even knows what country music really is anyway. I certainly didn't fully understand what country music is until I actually started listening to it myself. I first started listening to Taylor Swift (add that to the list of female pop singers people will hate me for liking) and her music seemed pretty country to me, until I listened to real country and realized that...it's country-pop, and leaning more to the side of pop than country. Then I saw people commenting on the "Country Road" version of "Born This Way" that Lady Gaga released, which I'm still unclear on as to whether it was supposed to be country or not, saying that Lady Gaga is the only one that makes country sound good and she was more country than Taylor Swift with one song, not realizing that neither of the two are actual country. But I digress. I don't see the point in making much of a distinction between genres anyway, just listen to what you like.
I mean, people can say whatever they want about music, but old music is no better than new music. Sure, there was no autotune back in the '60s, but not everything nowadays uses it either. If you want to close yourself off to music you may potentially enjoy by generalizing, that's up to you, but I don't see how anyone has to gain from that. And just like the hipster mentality, I hate the fact that I should feel bad for listening to new music (even though, again, I have plenty of older music as well).
Here’s what it comes down to, and I’ve said this at least a million times by now so you’ve probably heard it from me before; music is an entirely subjective thing. You can argue about voice, you can get technical about chord progression and all of that crap, but it’s ultimately meaningless, so stop worrying so much about what everyone else does and just listen to what it is that you like. I listen to music that makes me feel something, so yes, I listen to Ke$ha, because even the ridiculous partying songs can get me pumped up even though I have never once “partied” in my entire life and have no desire to do so. Of course, because I’ve mentioned Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Ke$ha for the sake of examples in this blog, people will probably latch onto that and not realize that the music I tend to enjoy the most is more slow, melodic, and mellow.
It’s like I said; I listen to music that makes me feel something. I don’t care what genre it is, and I don’t make arbitrary distinctions to limit my music library; if it makes me feel something, then I’ll listen to it.
To sum up this blog, I’ll say this. For one, hipsters piss me off, because they generalize popular music and then act like they’re better people than the majority just because they’re “different” and “don’t conform” and are listening to unpopular music. Also, the popular music culture pisses me off because nobody knows what it means to overplay songs, and everyone manages to suck all of the significance out of songs once they become popular.
To close off the blog, I’d like to cite three of my favorite quotes which happen to be particularly relevant to this topic.
----------
"Some say it's too country / Some say it's too rock-and-roll / But it's just good music if you can feel it in your soul." - Tim McGraw, "Things Change"
"Music is worthless unless it can make a complete stranger break down and cry." - Frou Frou, “The Dumbing Down Of Love”
"Everything everybody does is so -- I don't know -- not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and – sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everyone else, only in a different way." - Franny, Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger)
As a preface, I'll just say that I’ve blogged about music before, I post about it everywhere, etc.; the point is, I love music and I listen to a ton of it from all different genres and periods of time.
The whole mainstream vs. underground situation in music is one that is, unfortunately, a very pervasive one for me. When I first started listening to my own library of music (when I was in third or fourth grade), I was led mostly by my older sister, who was determined to be different at the time; therefore I started out with a very hipster mindset. For one thing, I somehow came to the conclusion that I liked punk music, when in all actuality I don’t think I ever truly did. I’m open to any genre of music, but punk is a genre that doesn’t tend to sit well with me, mostly because 90% of it sounds the exact same to me, and you can usually hardly make out the lyrics at all.
In any case, I was far too much in that whole crowd of “This band is popular now, therefore it sold out,” and the like, trying to stay away from bands which could be considered too mainstream, or worse, bands and artists that were – gasp – posers.
At least, that’s how I recall my mindset; looking back at my actual music listening, I hardly knew well enough to look for anything very underground and therefore the only way I discovered music was by having it be at least remotely mainstream.
But I digress. I tended to avoid artists that were too popular until June 2010, when I broke down and bought both of Lady Gaga’s presently released albums. Ever since, I’ve listened to music that’s very popular and played on the radio as well as music of which nobody I talk to has ever heard. What pisses me off is that, even though I usually end up listening to the music in the end if I like it, how popular it is actually occurs to me initially when considering the purchase of a song or album.
The fact of the matter is this: the culture of mainstream music pisses me off greatly, and at the same time, I’d really like to punch hipsters in the face.
I suppose I’ll start with the latter as it’s easier to explain. What irks me more than anything when it comes to hipsters is not that they’re intent on liking really underground music. My problem is that hipsters tend to like to shove it in everyone’s face that they are a hipster. They make it well-known that they listen to music so underground that you’ve never heard of it, and more annoyingly, they make it well-known that they don’t like popular music.
What’s annoying about that is not that they don’t like popular music, so before any hipsters out there jump on me for attacking your music preferences, that’s not what I’m doing. The problem is that they decide that anything that is popular is automatically ****.
Um, wait, what? Generalizing and saying that popular music in the past has all been bad would be one thing, but there is absolutely no way to predict what songs will be released in the future and which of those songs will become popular. I’ll be the first to admit that people are stupid, but to say that every song that the majority of people will enjoy must suck is a ridiculous generalization. If one of these precious indie songs suddenly became ridiculously popular, would that song immediately be terrible because of it?
And yet, as I’ve come to be exposed to popular music more and more, I realize how much I hate the culture of popular music, too.
For starters, there’s the radio. I don’t ever actually listen to the radio voluntarily, because even with my own music library I’m the kind of person who will skip fifty songs before settling on a song to listen to. That’s not because I only have five songs in my entire library that I like; it’s because when I listen to music, unless I’m doing it very passively and I’m quite occupied with other things as I listen, I listen to something that matches my mood at the moment. Truthfully, 90% of the time, if people paid close attention to what songs I’m listening to, they could probably figure out exactly what I’m feeling/thinking and why I’m feeling/thinking it.
But I digress; despite never listening to the radio voluntarily, I do still find myself being forced to listen to it relatively often. I’ve been listening to the same radio station over the past two years at my workplace, and any time I go somewhere with one of my friends and he’s driving, he always puts the radio on. From the little I listen to the radio, I’ve found that the radio rarely manages to refrain from overplaying songs. Songs and artists that I could once stand have been ruined for me because I hear them played on the radio far too often; plus, again, the radio does not allow me to listen to what I feel like listening to at the moment, so on top of overplaying songs, I end up hearing them when I’m not at all in the mood for them.
Honestly, in general, I hate it when I really like a song and then it becomes popular. That sounds really hipster-y and stupid, I’m sure, but the fact of the matter is I enjoy hearing the song on the radio the first two times I hear it, then I get pissed off because a song I used to love is starting to get overplayed.
Also, in the process of writing this blog and considering this further, I’ve realized that a good portion of the reason I dislike that is because of the hipsters. It’ll be a perfectly good song that I legitimately enjoy, and then it becomes popular, and all of a sudden everybody likes it and the bloody hipsters all decide that if you like the song you’re just conforming and that, because the song is popular, it’s automatically ****ty anyway.
What annoys me besides that, though, is that I’ll find a personal meaning in a song, and when it becomes popular…all of a sudden that gets messed up in some way. For example, I heard and loved Katy Perry’s “Firework” before it became a single, before the majority of people knew it existed, and on one particular day when I was feeling really nervous and insecure, that song got me pumped up, motivated, and made me feel more confident.
Now that it’s a popular song that everyone has heard, that’s been covered by Glee, and that’s played constantly on the radio, it was a motivational anthem for everyone, and then became one for nobody because everybody knows the song. Even worse, because it’s popular and everyone’s heard it, I’m sure at least a handful of people reading this decided that I’m pathetic for being motivated by the song because its lyrics are “fake”, stupid, or something to that effect.
The other thing that irks me about popular music tends to happen mostly with older songs; it’s that attitude that people have where they decide that everyone likes a song or artist, and if anyone says otherwise they must be lying and are just trying to be a hipster.
As someone who really doesn’t enjoy music from The Beatles very much, I find this to be a particular problem. I don’t dislike The Beatles, and there are a handful of songs from them that I like, but their music, for the most part, doesn’t make me feel anything, and therefore I don’t enjoy listening to their music. Everyone assumes that everyone has to like The Beatles, but why? Just because the majority of people enjoy their music, that means I must too?
And I’m sure I just offended at least one person because I like Lady Gaga but not The Beatles.
For that matter, speaking of The Beatles, I'd like to address the whole argument of new music versus old music.
People who have the attitude that "all music nowadays sucks" or "music past *insert date here* is all terrible" piss me off a lot. As a whole, anybody who makes generalizations in music pisses me off. You cannot define music by the date it was released, and you certainly can't define it by what arbitrary genre distinction it receives.
The first half of that is that people like to pretend that old music is so much more awesome and meaningful than music today, which is only about sex and drugs, unlike music from back when.
For starters, music back when is not as amazing as people like to pretend it is. I'm not generalizing old music at all, because there's certainly some great older music -- I do listen to old music mixed in with my newer music -- but you can find just as much of a lack of meaning in music from older days if you stop looking at it through rose-tinted glasses.
I don't think I even need to pull out examples to make the point that there is a ton of music from the '60s and '70s about drugs. Also, I'm subjected to a ****ton of crappy '80s music on the radio at work, and I don't see anything great about a song that just talks about wearing your sunglasses at night.
Also, there's "Y.M.C.A.," which everyone and their grandmother knows and dances along to. I'm not really sure how factual this is because I've seen/heard mixed reports on the matter, but there's some evidence to suggest that it's about gay men getting together at the YMCA for sex, and even if that's not what it was written about, it certainly gained that meaning for some. Which makes it all the more funny that all of these grandmothers are dancing along to it.
There's other songs that fall into the "old and popular but not really all that meaningful" category, like "December 1963 (Oh, What A Night)", and I could go on trying to find examples of it, but I think you get the point; there's just as much bad old music as good old music.
To get back to my point about generalizing music, to give a cutoff date for good music is absolutely ridiculous, especially with the way music has evolved. There is more music than ever out there today, and to say that no music past the year 2000 is good is absolutely ludicrous. It's the same thing with people generalizing genres; there's far too many songs inside a genre and not enough clear-cut definitions of each genre to say that you dislike an entire genre. I keep telling my friend that about country music, and yet she refuses to believe that there's even a single country song that she could like.
I mean, it doesn't help that nobody even knows what country music really is anyway. I certainly didn't fully understand what country music is until I actually started listening to it myself. I first started listening to Taylor Swift (add that to the list of female pop singers people will hate me for liking) and her music seemed pretty country to me, until I listened to real country and realized that...it's country-pop, and leaning more to the side of pop than country. Then I saw people commenting on the "Country Road" version of "Born This Way" that Lady Gaga released, which I'm still unclear on as to whether it was supposed to be country or not, saying that Lady Gaga is the only one that makes country sound good and she was more country than Taylor Swift with one song, not realizing that neither of the two are actual country. But I digress. I don't see the point in making much of a distinction between genres anyway, just listen to what you like.
I mean, people can say whatever they want about music, but old music is no better than new music. Sure, there was no autotune back in the '60s, but not everything nowadays uses it either. If you want to close yourself off to music you may potentially enjoy by generalizing, that's up to you, but I don't see how anyone has to gain from that. And just like the hipster mentality, I hate the fact that I should feel bad for listening to new music (even though, again, I have plenty of older music as well).
Here’s what it comes down to, and I’ve said this at least a million times by now so you’ve probably heard it from me before; music is an entirely subjective thing. You can argue about voice, you can get technical about chord progression and all of that crap, but it’s ultimately meaningless, so stop worrying so much about what everyone else does and just listen to what it is that you like. I listen to music that makes me feel something, so yes, I listen to Ke$ha, because even the ridiculous partying songs can get me pumped up even though I have never once “partied” in my entire life and have no desire to do so. Of course, because I’ve mentioned Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Ke$ha for the sake of examples in this blog, people will probably latch onto that and not realize that the music I tend to enjoy the most is more slow, melodic, and mellow.
It’s like I said; I listen to music that makes me feel something. I don’t care what genre it is, and I don’t make arbitrary distinctions to limit my music library; if it makes me feel something, then I’ll listen to it.
To sum up this blog, I’ll say this. For one, hipsters piss me off, because they generalize popular music and then act like they’re better people than the majority just because they’re “different” and “don’t conform” and are listening to unpopular music. Also, the popular music culture pisses me off because nobody knows what it means to overplay songs, and everyone manages to suck all of the significance out of songs once they become popular.
To close off the blog, I’d like to cite three of my favorite quotes which happen to be particularly relevant to this topic.
----------
"Some say it's too country / Some say it's too rock-and-roll / But it's just good music if you can feel it in your soul." - Tim McGraw, "Things Change"
"Music is worthless unless it can make a complete stranger break down and cry." - Frou Frou, “The Dumbing Down Of Love”
"Everything everybody does is so -- I don't know -- not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and – sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everyone else, only in a different way." - Franny, Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger)
