I hate every single modern song and I can’t put my finger on why!

[CherriesAndBerries5]

(To start, this isn’t me trying to be ‘edgy’ I just genuinely don’t understand!)

I’m 28 and I love music. I listen to a huge range of music. I like indie and rock and also dance and fun songs.
I also have some awful dance and pop songs that I absolutely love! I know there were some really cheesy pop songs in the 10s and some I absolutely love. There are some rap songs that I enjoy too.

However… there’s not a popular song out there right now that I don’t absolutely despise. Most songs I have to turn off when they come on. And I don’t understand why because is it really much different to some of the songs in the 10s that I was indifferent to?

What I don’t understand is how all my friends are loving and singing along to all of it?

Lose control by teddy swims? God awful.
Beautiful things by benson Boone? I have to turn it off.
Too sweet by Hozier? One of the most dull and boring songs I’ve ever heard.
Tipsy? Fucking irritating.
Pink pony club? The most bang average song I’ve ever heard, why is everyone raving about it???

I’m not sure I can put my finger on it, I am open to listening to all sorts and I’ve always liked most songs but why do I hate every single one now (and why does everyone love them)??

It’s because most pop music is boring as fuck nowadays. But there’s plenty of other genres out there and there are still bands making good music. I say bands because it’s safer to explore bands as such a high proportion of solo singer-songwriters currently fall into the boring as fuck category.

Most pop is crap, designed to be consumed quickly. No intros, just bang, straight in, catchy chorus, full of buzzwords and artificial relatability.

Not much more than advertising jingles really.

It’s also the singing for me. What happened to just singing the actual note and moving on? Every single note now has to have vibrato apparently,

if it isn’t full of “oOoOoOoOoOoOoO” and vocals that are all over the place warbling and woOoOoOoing then apparently that means the artist is a crap singer.

Don’t get me wrong, it takes an immense talent to control your vibrato completely and it has its place. But nothing makes me feel like a song is more butchered than when it is just vibrato and nothing else (looking at you Cynthia Erivo, who destroyed defying gravity with a million vibrato).

Too fast

I remember hating most popular music in the 80s. All the synthesiser stuff. I liked the alternative scene, post punk but it wasn't played much on the radio. The fun was in going into record shops and flicking through all of the albums til you found something that looked interesting, then getting them to play it in the shop.
Music improved in the 90s
I've no idea what's in the charts now, and no desire to find out either. There's so much good stuff out there that there's no need to bother with chart stuff.

It’s true, the dirge put out there by the industry is bland, deliberately made to appeal to the masses by being as samey as possible, auto turned, increasingly ai produced, soulless, joyless, dull…

There’s loads of great music out there if you dig deeper and turn away from what the industry is forcing you to listen to. Try some independent artists who are doing what they want to do without being told what to do. My life totally changed for the better when I found Ren, and from him The Big Push, Skinner Brothers, Chinchilla, and so many great hardworking talented people. Went to a smaller festival this summer and watched 30+ fantastic alternative artists and bands, all doing their thing with often little support from the ‘industry’ (which only wants to churn out more identikit Sabrina Carpenters). There’s loads out there but you have to find it. It’s fun once you do.

@CherriesAndBerries5 I wonder if you're into a particular genre and maybe haven't found the modern stuff?

I really like "pink pony club" because I find it has a cabaret vibe. It wouldn't be out of place in a 1940s film in a way.

Do you like Sam Fender at all? If it's older music that you like, I get a strong Springsteen and Killers vibe from him.

Can you not remember your grandparents thinking what the young listen to isn't music? I'm 50 and mine did. It was all noise to them.

Sam fender is real

I like Sam Fender.

CMAT, Mitski, Self Esteem, to name a few amazing artists, and the new Pulp album is superb. Maybe take a look at meta critic, choose some albums and listen to them from beginning to end

The singing sounds kinda weird these days. The belting is off the scale. It’s a particular style. Possibly enhanced by tech (which I don’t understand - I trained in opera/classical…)

In terms of mainstream pop, you don't seem to get many stories these days of working class groups of friends who wrote songs in their mums' kitchens and rehearsed in their dads' garages and played their first gigs in dodgy pubs. Everything seems so top-down and managerial now; a production line.

Yes they were . 😆

Try Indie and 6music type fare.

Because they don't all have 'nanana' in the lyrics these days like the music from your teens did

How can you not like the new Pulp single???

]] There's always been pappy pop songs around, you've just got to pick through the crap to find gems, same as always!

Rick Beato is on it.

yes - back in the day, the young bands lived at home or with mates, and they didn’t go to college or university. They’d either be on the dole or did low paid jobs for a few months at a time. Most big bands and artists from that era were gigging from an early age but living on very little money. Lots of youngsters still play musical instruments but being in a band is no longer a rite of passage.

A - it is all auto tuned
B - even the old stuff is remastered and auto tuned. So sounds wrong.

Get your old cds or vinyl out and have a listen. It sounds proper.

Apart from the overproduction and the autotune and the lack of creativity and the melodies with the complexity of a nursery rhyme, it's just all so fucking EARNEST.

Yeah, I think this is really a thing now, OP. It's weird.

I listened to a top 10 pop songs on Spotify list the other day. The majority were awful. The few that were less awful reminded me of better songs. None of them will be remembered in 20 years.

By way of contrast, if you look at the top 10 charts for any month from 1965 to 1975, you typically find a few, or more than a few, that are still being played today. Many have several classic, iconic songs.

Things I notice about the majority of the songs at the moment; the lyrics have very little content. There have always been some songs like that, but very few seem to have anything thoughtful or even poetic or clever. There is nothing like the kind of lyrical content you'd get from a band like The Police, for example. There doesn't seem to be much structure, or change, they are just kind of flat, and samey within the songs. There is no momentum, you don't feel you get anywhere. No build up of tension with a resolution. A lot have weird, mannered voices and atrocious diction that you couldn't hope to decipher.

And there is a real lack of people playing actual instruments with any facility. SO much of it is clearly electronic. But then there are a few popular bands my kids listen to where they seem to play instruments, but honestly - they are not very good. It's mostly quite basic.

I saw a video the other day that pointed out that there are very few bands on the top pop charts, and most that are there are older bands. The kind of thing you are describing where a bunch of people get together and there is a musical synergy seems almost non-existent. Instead a company gets and artist, pairs them with a professional songwriter, producer, and session musicians, and they create a product.

What I find interesting about this is they seem to produce quite a lot of shit, and very little that is really good, compared to the old method. So why do it that way?

This 💯 % !

All five of the songs you list are particularly annoying, OP!