When did crap like this start qualifying as music?

Modern rap is nothing but the same old worn out message of wanting money, partying in the club, and having sex. There is no redeeming quality to it anymore whatsoever. I don't even consider it music, to be honest.

He's one of the worst no talents out there ! How they put Rap in the Music awards was beyond me. I can see the Beastie Boys as they actually had lyrics and music but you're right ! That stuff is just plain CRAP !

I don't know. I listen to some "weird" music, so I can't talk. I guess.

when some people decided to make it qualify

I rather disagree with your assessment JA. I hear a strong connection between the music and the speech. It took a while to become recognizable but becomes stronger and stronger.

Oh yeah.  Drake.....lol


He's garbage.   

I wonder if pop music is running out of ideas. It's been around since the 1950s, with Rock & Roll. There is a lot of new, interesting rock music about but it's more modern jazz than rock and you have to search for it.

As I see it, having been brought up on The Beatles (well, Mum would rather have brought me up on Brahms!), and listening now to records from then:

The early '60s pop was rather bland and unadventurous, rock-&-roll, based, but soon branched into a huge variety of styles from straight pop songs about love or its lack, the Motown Sound, Progressive Rock, folk-rock and much besides.

The late-'70s saw the growth of disco music, with its boring "tish-boom, tish-boom" drum-beat but at least fairly lively lyrics and arrangements.

Punk celebrated inability to play or sing anything properly, and anyway Punk fashion was largely the creation of Vivienne Westwood but taken over musically by the manipulative Malcolm Maclaren.

Then came the inevitable reaction with the New Romantics at least demonstrating a will to learn to play their instruments and try to sing melodically, even if the results were highly synthesised and consequently often soul-lessly clinical.

Since then we've had two basic styles:
 1)   Drum-&-Bass ("boom, boom, boom..." all beat, no rhythm, no melody, no worthwhile lyrics), Rap (men moaning aggressively) and a rash of arcane sub-genres based on blending these. They all sound the  same, especially from petrol-heads' Citroen Saxos fitted with 500W sound-systems and the obligatory twin exhausts without silencers.
2) So-called Boy / Girl - Bands who are not bands at all but song-dance troupes, and solo artistes of similar style, sometimes misleadingly called "R&B" when there is no discernible connection to Rhythm and Blues beyond being a pop genre.
Neither style wants to admit or strive for real musical talent. Indeed, they seem to celebrate mediocrity and a wish to stay mediocre-to-bad. The pitch-corrected results are often so formulaically manufactured it's hard to tell artiste one from another, or believe the performers can have any careers in music once the record-producers have done with them after their five years of fame and photos in Hello magazine.  

Throughout it all, earlier styles soldier on. A surprising number of 1960s pop bands are still touring, albeit with few of their original members who are all now in their 60s and 70s. Well-played covers of Rock-&-Roll, Liverpool Sound or Motown hits still fill live-music or disco dances. Genuine R-&-B, and Heavy Rock, are still steadily popular. 

"Prog Rock" has shifted ground somewhat, by influencing modern jazz, although the results are not easy to find and you are very unlikely to hear any on the run-of-the-mill commercial pop radio stations. On BBC Radio, you're far more likely to hear such avant-garde music on R3 than R1, which used to play all styles but long ago narrowed its mind to the pop-charts and dance-club material. Ditto with music from countries other than the UK and US.

I wonder if popular music runs in roughly 50-year cycles.

Late-Victoriana and Edwardian times saw the rise of the Music Hall in Britain, slightly similar shows in France; with songs that were not for the respectable drawing-room get-togethers around the pianoforte. The US saw the rise of jazz and blues, and though these Afro-American styles were accepted eagerly in the UK, they became hampered for some decades commercially in their home nation by the racism of mainstream radio-stations and the advertising-agency sponsors.  

Mid-20C popular music was dominated by American: mainly the Big Band, or Swing, and crooners, the former being safely white but influenced by the Afro-American music of the Deep South and the industrial cities. Slowly though, these fit-all styles slowly stagnated in good musicianship let down by anodyne, often very patchy, arranging. Besides, a new species had evolved, a creature called "The Teenager", and that wanted something of its own, not merely its parents' Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby back-catalogues and the safer areas of Country & Western to accompany dressing like their parents.

So starting the second roughly 50-year phase, in the 1950s, 12-bar blues erupted as Rock & Roll, to the dismay of parents who thought this Armageddon - and it caught on in Britain too, very quickly, perhaps for two main reasons.  The first, in the UK, was the country slowly recovering form the pinched, uniformitarian, post-War 'Austerity' years. Secondly, the ethnic origins of any given style including jazz and blues was generally of little importance here. Paul Robeson may have been a victim of Senator MacArthy and his clowns, but his British fans stayed loyal, and heard him both sing Ole' Man River and mean it.

This 'ere Rock-& Roll was bad and dangerous though, fulminated against by aging intellectuals like Malcolm Muggeridge - maybe they were secretly jealous of never having a youth of their own beyond physical years.

Then in the early-1960s came The Rolling Stones - playing only covers while displaying dangerously rebellious traits to the despair of parents - and The Beatles - rather more clean-cut but playing practically all their own, highly-original music you often hear now in brass-band and orchestral arrangements.

In the US, at last music became inclusive in the 1960s, and the best of the Tamla Motown sound, with strong lyrics, deep instrumental backing including quite complex drum rhythms and bass lines, became one of the last 50 years' peaks in pop. 

So now? Fifty years on again? Is popular music stagnating in a morass of ephemera; of women with no singing voice or microphone technique, men who can only shout repetitive rhymes, and digital-sampling of others' works by people with no wish to learn musical skills?  

What will mark the next 5 decades?

Drake sucks. Nuff said. 

When one has poisoned one's mind with crack and cheap alcohol such garbage is the best to be had. 

People have been complaining about "the crap music of today" about as long as there has been music...and young people...;-D...


James Bond: "My dear girl, there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!"



This post was edited by OldSchoolTheSKOSlives at January 4, 2017 4:23 PM MST

They have indeed, Oldschool, they have indeed! :-)

Not just pop music either: many of the now-established orchestral styles by major composers had to fight off harrumphing from the critics of the day when they first burst upon their contemporary concert-halls. 

"As soon as you turn forty."  :)

Err, actually Alf, doesn't it stop qualifying as music when you turn forty?

I didn't wait even that long - the first wave of pure disco music arrived when I was still in my 20s, with its monotonous "tshh-thud, tshh-thud" hi-hat-&-bass-drum beat, and I was not impressed! 

I thought the music of Saturday Night Fever grim, and felt the Bee-Gees had sold out, until hearing such material again more recently and thinking it a breath of lively fresh air and youthful exuberance after all the depressingly self-reductive miasma of rap-with-a-silent-'c' and Beyonce's Best B-side Back-catalogue.

If I'm right that pop has reached its own fifty-year plateau, like predecessor popular-music styles, I wonder what AM-ers will be deriding in 2067?