Exactly, then I could go to concerts when the members where in their prime

Bohemian Rhapsody is from the 70s!

And they are both considered Pop music, so a comparison is fine. That's what this thread is about after all, altough I agree that those are 2 songs from very different tiers.

Fair 'nuff. My mistake.

I still find the comparison to be unfair. You're comparing a song that doesn't have a chorus to the chorus of a song (I think? I can only assume that's the chorus.) All I'm saying is - Justin Beiber isn't the end-all be-all of pop today, and isn't a representation of such. The music that's bashed these days and compared are all club bangers where Bohemian Rhapsody is a power ballad. We're purposely exaggerating a problem that doesn't exist to try to change something that doesn't need changed.

So then what are you implying?

Because really, the difference between composing something on a computer or composing it on a traditional instrument is like the difference between using power tools to make a bird house or using manual tools to make a bird house. The end product really doesn't have much to do with what was used to build it.

You should look more closely. Many bands have a similar style to older rock, of all types. Classic Rock is an illusion anyway. There are little to no similarities between the music of Kiss and Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and Pink Floyd, etc. yet they are all given that banner. I assure you that you could find a modern band that is similar in style to each of those bands.

Try Them Crooked Vultures or The Dead Weather. There's no sense in being too lazy to look for bands you might like and then saying "Classic Rock should come back".


OT: My views on this are the same as what I said in the "Decline of Art" thread. Pop has always been terrible, watered down, and accessible. The music industry is more of a behemoth now, but the principle still applies. There are many thriving communities of artists independent and otherwise that make talented and artful music. Just seek it out.

Yeah, but it's the same kind of nonsense that leads old people to say "we never bothered with all that health and safety lark - we just used to climb trees without worrying about it", to which the response is, "and that's why thousands of people used to die falling out of trees." People just parrot stuff without really thinking about it.

So when people say "modern pop is bad", they're usually only talking about http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4H_Zoh7G5A, when there are http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elyk9MBY72U of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehSJ3e8_NgU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up7pvPqNkuU.


OK, let's just take the years 1986-1989:



I think it's the too-much-choice thing. Back when there was only Radio One (in the UK), there were only three shows for "alternative" music - The Evening Session, Out On Blue Six and The John Peel Show. You had to take time out to tune in, or you'd miss out, and there were only a handful of new records being released that week for you to hear. For pop, you had Top of the Pops, and that was how you'd hear the songs you'd later buy.

These days there are thousands of radio stations (mostly on the internet), and literally hundreds of thousands of releases in a year. It's physically impossible to hear them all. There's no voice of authority for new music - not like Melody Maker and the NME used to be - so people rely on aggregator sites to try to filter things through, which by their nature means that the most popular result is necessarily the most bland. You get a site like Pitchfork, and the review scores are quite literally decided by a committee, so the consensus pulls everything back to the middle and discourages risk-taking by either reviewer or artist. You end up with polite coffee table music like Coldplay or whatever.

As for pop, your only real source for hearing it is from the tiny snippets you hear in adverts, so they write the song as a showcase for that 10-second snippet, which results in blander songs that lack structure. Not all, mind - as I argued above, there are plenty of great songs out there. You just have to stop relying on aggregator sites and ringtones to find them.

Personally, I've bookmarked a few blogs that I check out regularly, and just keep clicking on youtube links until I find something I like. I also flick through to a music channel on TV every few days and just keep it on in the background for as long as I can stand. Most of it will be utter rubbish, but almost every week I'll hear something I like, and that's all I'll remember of pop music next year, so I'll think that this year was way better for music than 2013.

Someday, when I'm old and gray, I'll tell my grandchildren about how we used to be respectable in the old days; and sat at our computers for hours at a time, talking about things on internet forums.

I didn't say there wasn't any good music (regardless of my feelings toward some of the examples), just that in my opinion it was rather more threadbare during that time period than it was before or since.