Popular music is just awful.

I grew up listening to great bands like Zeppelin and Queen, people who created complex pieces that even experienced musicians have difficulty performing. As I got older I discovered the great artists who inspired them, people like Robert Johnson, Django Reinhardt, real top-level talent who revolutionized their genres with creative approaches to music which hadn’t been seen before. I went from looking through Dylan’s lyrics to looking through Woody’s lyrics. I saw real creativity and genius there.

Nowadays popular music is written by a team of people and it still can’t produce an interesting melody. In the age of solo pop stars the art of incredible vocal harmony like you’d see from the Andrews Sisters has been lost. The lyrical content is plain and unchallenging on any level. Every song, without exception, is in 4/4. You have to really go out of your way to listen to increasingly obscure groups in order to even hear a syncopated rhythm. Finding a song in the top 40 that uses even somewhat interesting chord progressions is almost impossible, it’s like they’re allergic to things like 9th chords and augmented chords outside of obscure music like math rock.

What happened? Where is the melody? Where is the harmony? Why is the rhythm so universally plain and simple? Why are even the decent singers autotuned? Why does every pop recording that actually uses real instruments sound like it was performed by people in different studios completely separate from each other? Where are my Bbsus13 chords? Why do people act like this mind numbing background noise is genius work deserving of awards and sold out stadiums? If you’re really that into repetitive and boring 4/4 music with no variation, just buy a drum machine and listen to it on a loop.