2 ms·

I'm no fan of autotune and I agree with your statement that a lot of music these days lacks a sense of personality that makes it hard to distinguish from others

I'm no fan of autotune and I agree with your statement that a lot of music these days lacks a sense of personality that makes it hard to distinguish from others. One thing I'll add is that we're at our greatest point of exposure to the worst music of our era. Every era has a surplus of low-quality, unoriginal, or maddeningly trend-focused music that gets a lot of exposure. In time these lackluster records will be filtered out and mostly forgotten. In time people will look back on this period with a fondness for the great songs of the era that have endured and forget about the works that failed to differentiate themselves. As such, it's easy for us to look back on the music of the last 70 years and think that things were better then because we don't have daily exposure to the lackluster songs of those past decades.

felipeccastro 4y ago
This is a great point, but I wonder if it's all there is to it. I grew up in the 90s, yet for a long time preferred music from 60s to 80s (I like some things from all decades, but not as much), and I know a lot of people that find the same, regardless of when they were born. I've heard many arguments against this "nostalgia", including the always present "there's still great music, you just need to know where to look" (almost always without any specific examples). Perhaps there's a case to be made that these older songs are still listened so much today, even by those who weren't alive back then, because by some abstract measure of soul satisfaction they were better? I'm careful with this hypothesis as I don't want to be unfair with newer generations of artists, but I don't think it's so crazy to consider either. For example, the last 10 years or so have been greatly influenced by social media and fear of saying the wrong thing and being "cancelled". Of voluntarily silencing ourselves. How wouldn't that impact the artistic output of this generation? Couldn't this be a reason for a lot of modern music "lacking a sense of personality"? I feel with social media we have gone pretty far into investing in appearances alone, and I think I'm not alone in this belief. Maybe the next years will be marked by more and more people sharing a wish to return to the overlooked authenticity which we used to call "art with a soul".

felipeccastro 4y ago

This is a great point, but I wonder if it's all there is to it. I grew up in the 90s, yet for a long time preferred music from 60s to 80s (I like some things from all decades, but not as much), and I know a lot of people that find the same, regardless of when they were born. I've heard many arguments against this "nostalgia", including the always present "there's still great music, you just need to know where to look" (almost always without any specific examples). Perhaps there's a case to be made that these older songs are still listened so much today, even by those who weren't alive back then, because by some abstract measure of soul satisfaction they were better? I'm careful with this hypothesis as I don't want to be unfair with newer generations of artists, but I don't think it's so crazy to consider either. For example, the last 10 years or so have been greatly influenced by social media and fear of saying the wrong thing and being "cancelled". Of voluntarily silencing ourselves. How wouldn't that impact the artistic output of this generation? Couldn't this be a reason for a lot of modern music "lacking a sense of personality"? I feel with social media we have gone pretty far into investing in appearances alone, and I think I'm not alone in this belief. Maybe the next years will be marked by more and more people sharing a wish to return to the overlooked authenticity which we used to call "art with a soul".