I once heard a saying, "the future of music is not music." All through history, most recently with Autotune and previously with rap music (and further back in o

I once heard a saying, "the future of music is not music." All through history, most recently with Autotune and previously with rap music (and further back in other ways), we hear people saying, "that's not music!" Invariably, these styles establish themselves and time moves on. I mean, if you want to talk about antipathy and outright-racist music criticism and hatred being thoroughly demolished, let us look at how rap has taken over Country music, because it has. 30 years ago half of everybody didn't consider rap to be music. Do you remember people saying "(c)rap" or "hippity-hop?" It wasn't that long ago! You say music died not when Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper went down, but with the advent of one musical effect among many in the recording signal path (and I bet a lot more of your favorite artists use Autotune than you realize). Emotional connection is just what you like about the music. Many people think Death Metal has no feeling, or that Yacht Rock is dead-eyed pablum, or that any toddler could make a dance music track. After all it's just a drum machine, or cocaine, or screaming, and where's the love? >Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. It's been a long time since my phone set on shuffle allowed me to memorize the title of anything. There just isn't the repetition that fixed-format radio and "I can afford one 12-song album per month," gave people. That's how you memorize song names, or you hum it into Vocaroo and hope an internet stranger helps you out. It's absolutely irrational to blame Autotune for this state of affairs, and if anything it made songs more identifiable! It just so happens that people and song titles aren't as tightly connected anymore. I don't know how you can say that without knowing a song's title the music doesn't even exist. >it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.) That's funny because my way of dismissing her is to call her a Brenda Lee ripoff. Thus, emotion gets sucked out in many different ways. There's no accounting for taste. My free advice is to check out the stuff people don't think is music, because not-music is the future of music, and I feel there's probably always something valuable in evolution. If you don't like it, that doesn't mean you're closed-minded, but if you reject everything about it out of hand, you might be. Not that there's anything wrong with that.