Not just you Lucky. Been thinking the same thing for years now. And it's not an "age" or "generational" thing either.
1) Exception would be country. Has always been, is now, and always will be the most popular muscic in the USA.
2) Hip Hop/Rap doesn't even count as music.
3) No group today compares to the greats that came before. Rolling Stones, Beatles, The Who, The Band, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Lynyrd Skynyrd, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,.
4) I'm sure some of the younger members will disagree.
TO
I'll start from the bottom and work up. Basically every decade, or every other decade, says that the decade that follows them (or every decade till they die) is a subpar musical generation. Because it is not what they grew up on and not what they are used to.
Much like when Google changed and I went ballistic. Once we are comfortable with something we will work extra hard to dislike anything different, it is a dissonance thing, our brains HATE cognitive dissonance and will fight it whole hog.
Some of the bands you named I really liked, some of the bands you named I would love to beat in the face with a shovel. Just like in modern times there are bands like that. I've admittedly only been alive for a little over 2 decades (nearly 2 and a half!) but I've found in my short lifespan that every five years there are some bands I like and many bands I dislike. I understand that most music is designed around a simple theory of catches and repetition, that is fine with me, since I'm not forced to listen to any of it I don't punish them.
Popular Rap and Hip Hop are no different than Popular anything else, they use a cookie cutter system to return profits. It's a business model, I don't condemn them for it. But to discount the entire genre is just nonsense. There are absolutely amazing prose to be found in Hip Hop songs (and I've heard a few in Rap). They are no different than the poets that read "just a little too fast" at theatre showings. While by large I don't enjoy the genre there are some amazingly talented individuals who should not be discounted because of stereotyping.
In an effort to not by a hypocrit I won't say that all country is terrible. I will note that MOST of it follows the same profit based system that hip hop, rap, and popular music follows. They look for a niche and they milk it till the darn cow dies. Every 4 years the rhetoric changes but the overall scheme of hyper patriotism, occasional homophobia, and hyper gender roles tend to surface in all the most succesful music. That's not always true! There are some country singers I've found to be very insightful, interesting, musically gifted (a term I rarely use for country singers), and basically folks I'd love to meet.
But generally I think Country gets a free pass when it should be fairly harshly scrutinized for being far more about cookie cutter money making than just about any other genre. This is coming from someone who grew up with parents OBSESSED with the genre, so I had many years to dissect it
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Overall I'd say that music these days to us is just like music "in those days" to the generation before it. Every generation the exact same statement is made and every generation people ignore the redundancy of it all.
History is beautiful in how redundant it is. The same series of events carry out with slightly different nouns and verbs like a multi millenia mad lib. It makes sense though given that our tool of dissecting the universe has been largely the same since the very first piece of history was written (and longer than that even).
Just my 2 cents.
The TL;DR being that there is nothing wrong. Just like when two generations ago (from me) were ranting about your favorite music there was nothing wrong with it
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), and I still don't have a clue what makes good 'art'. Wandering around the V&A Museum in London with my girlfriend a few months back, I realised that many of the paintings and sculptures had no effect on me at all - but some of the more 'everyday' objects, clothing, furniture and the like, had a very profound effect on me. I also visited an exhibition of Cold War art design at the same museum about 18 months ago, and the architecture and the objects such as cars and electrical goods seemed more pleasing than the 'art' in the conventional sense. So maybe there is something hard-wired into each of us that is moulded by the eras we grow up in.
), Black Sabbath, Iced Earth, Iron Maiden, etc..., but there are some really good "Death Metal" bands out there such as Amon Amarth, Gojira, etc.
