Rant about the state of modern music

leperwitch

This is a bit of a music rant, but I’d like opinions:
It’s occurred to me that a majority of Americans can’t stand eccentric or truly individual/innovative musicians. The US is supposed to be so much about individualism, but any artist that’s too different is automatically ridiculed or neutralized in some way. I’m not even talking about outsider or avant-garde artists (Diamanda Galas or Jandek would be acquired tastes for just about anybody), but musicians who by the world’s standards wouldn’t be shunned for being “too different”, but in America they are.
What made me think about this so much is the confusion or just blatant disrespect that self-produced female electronic artists often get. Grimes has finally been “accepted” now that she’s polished her sound a bit, but before that it was “what the fuck is this?”. The comments section on FKA Twigs videos is either “WTF is this weird shit” or “I hate her for dating Robert Pattinson”. The music video for Glasser’s debut single “Apply” was shared on some wannabe 4chan meme hell site and the comments section is now flooded with “what acid trip am I on?” or “this sucks”. The most successful song Zola Jesus has is a remix of “In Your Nature”…a club remix.
Another example is how in the ‘90s, both Faith No More and Helmet made albums that were regarded as “commercial suicide” due to getting more creative/left-of-center with their musical approach. Both bands could have kept churning out “Epic”s and “Unsung”s on every album, but instead they delivered 1992′s Angel Dust and 1994′s Betty. Both albums were praised by critics and hits with non-US audiences but ignored by American masses with that same sentiment: “WTF is this shit?”. Never mind that there were catchy songs in the mix (That big sing-a-long chorus in “Wilma’s Rainbow”? The hooky dance vibes on “A Small Victory?”), it was weird. It was wrong.
Then I think about how hugely successful someone like Kate Bush was in the UK and most other areas of the world, but the US was all “whatever” towards her. Frank Zappa only had major success with a song ridiculing “valley girls”. Imogen Heap invents a pair of goddamn gloves that you can play music with, and people only know her from the “mmm whatcha say” bit being used in an SNL skit (and later an awful Jason DeRulo abortion). Bjork, who was actually pretty huge in the ‘90s, is now just shoved off into some kind of “artsy” sub-category with every album release.
Americans, it seems, like weirdness in music when it’s only in style, but not in substance. Occasionally there will be a band/artist that is genuinely strange and still gets big (System of a Down, Primus, and some could argue Lady GaGa), but cases of this happening are few and far between. What is “weird” but “acceptable” to American audiences is Nicki Minaj rapping about her ass in cartoon voices, Katy Perry in blue hair and a cupcake bra, Lil Wayne slurring words together in an unintelligible manner…but none of it has any level of artistic integrity. Oooh, Miley Cyrus dropped an album called “Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz”…so edgy, so different, right? Nah. It all bleeds into a dismal wash of bad lyrics, jarring imagery, and consumerism (and ultimately exploitation of women and people of color, but that’s another topic).
I don’t know…there’s just something really disheartening about seeing selections from Rhino Records in my “recommended channels” on YouTube where Faith No More’s “Ashes to Ashes” has 1.5 Million views and the Chippettes’ cover of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” has 155 Million views. Mike Patton’s solo work will have 350,000 views at best, but someone as basic as Meghan Trainor has millions of views (and Grammy nominations?!). Also, nobody really knowing who Grace Jones is, but everybody revering someone like Madonna for essentially ripping off her whole image. If I think about it all for too long, I get a little mellow…or angry.

That’s my old lady rant for the day.

in-this-psychodrome

They’ve actually done studies on this and the results are really interesting - the kind of music that J. Random Person off the street (in any country) is most likely to enjoy on a first listen has a simple melody, an uncomplicated rhythm, and a chorus that is simple enough that they’ll know it word-for-word by the end of the song. Humans are wired for simple, rhythmic music. Think football chants or christmas carols - these are simple things that everyone can learn in five minutes then clap and sing along to. Most Americans don’t know our national anthem because it’s long, slow, melodically complicated and difficult to sing, in addition to using archaic words. But most Americans DO know the chorus (but only the chorus) of the song “This land is your land” or “America the Beautiful” because they are simpler, easier-to-sing-along-with songs.
Now, demographically speaking, the only people who actually buy music are teenage girls. I know that’s not literally true, audiophiles buy music and fans of particular bands buy music, but teenage girls are the only group who will consistently buy a whole album because of the single, or who will buy everything a band produces because they have a crush on the singer. The music industry figured this out with Elvis and The Beatles and has been cashing in on it since - which, by the way, it the whole reason that magazines like Tiger Beat exist; it was started to cash in on teen Beatlemania. Because the music industry and the music-support industry (magazines and merch) know this they have very specific types of music that they will support and market, which basically boils down to boy bands and pop divas; anything outside of that gets shoved out to the sidelines. And hey, what do teen girls like? Social acceptance, which is why so much of the music sounds/looks the same - anything too out-there and they’ll lose their customer base because teen girls are worried about being judged.
So the music with all the views and sales HAS all the views and sales because it’s being heavily marketed to a specific consumer group as a potentially high-selling product. The book publishing industry deals with the same thing; you end up with authors who sell huge numbers so they get a ton of marketing or you end up with these genres that are reliably good sellers (YA dystopias, for example) and those get a ton of marketing while authors who aren’t established have to push sales themselves just like bands that don’t fit the mainstream sales model have to push sales and market themselves.
Now, a lot of the stuff you’ve brought up is from a time when anti-conformity was the popular thing; Bjork was popular in the US at the same time as Alanis Morisette and Nirvana and so on, when music had this big backlash going against over-produced pop. That eventually swung back around and people pushed back against the experimental singer-songwriter thing because it got boring and commercialized too (See: Nickleback). We’re in a heavily-produced-pop moment right now but the fact that Imogen Heap is actually known for ANYTHING in this market is remarkable (same goes for Lorde, MIA, and so on).
The OTHER thing that ties into this is that people (in general) stop listening to new music at about age 34, so oldies stations exist to supply music to people who aren’t interested in learning new songs to sing along to - the local oldies/rock station here used to play a lot of Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, and Beatles music - now they’re playing a lot of Metallica, Nirvana, and Black Sabbath and the 60s-70s stuff has moved on to the “soft rock/classic rock” stations. I can guarantee you that in ten more years that oldies/rock station is going to start playing Blink 182 and Marilyn Manson and Metallica is going to end up on the soft/classic rock station.
Also did you notice that list is all male musicians? Women, by and large, don’t survive that transition to the older radio stations because the demographics of those stations are almost exclusively middle-aged men who Clearchannel (the radio conglomerate in the US that decides what 500 songs (literally there’s a list, it’s only about  500 songs) are allowed on the radio) doesn’t believe that men will listen to a station that’s more than 10% female-created music (especially not hard or experimental music).
So the problem boils down to the fact that the music industry is run by a bunch of old dudes marketing to teenage girls and the music licensing industry is run by a bunch of old dudes trying to market to middle-aged men. The solution is to support indie stations (we subscribe to an NPR affiliate specifically because they have an industrial show we want to support), indie record companies (buy music on physical media) and seek out music that you like and introduce your friends to it then pay to go to shows.
And it has ALWAYS been this way, by the way - seriously back to when music was sold as sheet music to play on an instrument at home there has always been a marketing push for what is going to sell the most units, not what is actually better. So it is up to the consumer (as it’s always been) to find what’s good instead of what’s popular.
And one more thing - Clearchannel stations still play Epic on a pretty regular basis here, but I’ve literally never heard anything off Angel Dust on the radio. It was, in that sense, a commercially suicidal album - but Angel Dust is constantly listed as one of the most influential albums of its era and that NEVER gets said about the more commercially popular The Real Thing. There’s a reason the record companies loved Mike and wanted him to be the pinup of the month - it sold records and continues to get airplay to this day. But at least the fans had better reasons to keep buying their later (and I think better) music without the record company marketing behind it.
And that’s my old lady rant for the day ^_^