Top 3 reasons why modern music sucks

Unofficially, it's said that the music you connect with and listen to for the rest of your life happens between the ages of 13 (right before high school) and 25 (after graduating college), and that you absolutely will not listen to anything else after that.

Well, I call b.s. on that mainly because music goes through its trends where at times some of it is great while at other times it just plain sucks. And right now were in one of those 'suck' periods.

I went through the first 5 of the Billboard Hot 100 just to see if there was anything in there that I, a guy in my late 30s (meaning someone TOTALLY out of the popular music demographic), would actually like.

Here are the current top 5, and my opinion on each:

1. Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke featuring T.I. + Pharrell
   Rich's opinion: Blah.
   Weird clash of jungle-like beat with Motown vocals and 70s flavor. Doesn't work at all. This song tries a bunch of different styles, and fails at all of them.
2. We Can't Stop by Miley Cyrus
   Rich's opinion: Sucks.
   Starts off with this creepy detuned voice, then the main vocal comes in which sounds auto-tuned and monotone as hell, the over-pronounced kick drum noise is REALLY annoying... this is just bad.
3. Radioactive by Imagine Dragons
   Rich's opinion: Huh?
   Very weird clash of styles here. The electronic drums totally ruin this song which otherwise could have been great. I don't get what the producers of this song were trying to do at all here. The vocals carried the song just fine, but that beat is such an immediate turn-off to ridiculous levels. Oh, and one minor note on the video. This is the kind of stuff that gives kids nightmares. Not kidding. Very, very wrong in every way. The creep-out factor just goes way beyond the line.
4. Get Lucky by Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams
   Rich's opinion: AWESOME!
   Yes, great. Why? Everything is done right. This is a great song. Nothing is too overdone, everything is mixed right, and the disco influence is done 100% correct. I genuinely do like this song.
5. Treasure by Bruno Mars
   Rich's opinion: Eh.. okay.
   This is obviously a disco tune in every way, but it's trying way, way, way too hard to be disco. It's okay at best. Not great. Just okay. Get Lucky got it right in every way, but this one missed the mark by trying too hard.

You can tell that I dig the songs with a much more organic sound to them compared to ones which are over-produced electronic pieces of garbage. And it just goes to show that even at my "old" age, modern music is something I can connect to if done right.

What are the top 3 reasons modern music sucks?

These 3 reasons expound on my opinions above.

1. Clashing styles don't work.

Songs that can't decide what they are just plain suck. Listeners appreciate songs where it's very easy to tell what genre they fall into. Songs #4 and #5 above do that very nicely, but #1, #2 and #3 don't. When you have a song that can't decide what it is, it's not memorable, confuses people and just doesn't work.

2. It's obvious the music industry (still) hates rock and roll.

The music industry for the longest time has been trying to kill rock and roll forever. Make no mistake, they want it dead. Why? Because pop music is easier to sell. The industry could not care less how many dedicated rock fans there are out there because at the end of the day they prefer to churn out garbage that's a quick, easy sell.

In addition, the industry prefers to sell music that appeals to the widest possible audience, which brings me to reason #3...

3. "White people" music is expressly forbidden in all forms.

I'm just going to call it as I see it here. Any music that leans towards a Caucasian audience is something the industry avoids like the plague, but the funny part is that there are many who aren't Caucasian that would really enjoy NEW proper rock songs. And by "proper" I mean "not electronic junk" where you can actually hear overdriven guitars, real acoustic drums and so on.

On my YouTube channel and Facebook page, I have several fans, both domestic and international, who aren't "lily white" people whatsoever. These are people who really like rock music and absolutely fall into the 13-to-25 age demographic. But as far as popular music is concerned, there's nothing for them out there that they can connect to.

What I see is this growing gap of rock fans that want the music industry to just die off altogether because they're sick of the plastic pop crap. While I can personally hear some good groove in a couple of the songs I mentioned above, this gap I speak of hates every single song I mentioned and wants them gone.

As Ozzy Osbourne once sang, you can't kill rock and roll. Try as the music industry does, rock is just something that they can't kill off. They've tried, failed and should just embrace it again. If they don't, then the industry will die off due to their own stupidity.

Published 2013 Jul 27