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Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

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    Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

    A study to ascertain whether modern pop is any good.

    So, pasting the following Slashdot summary:

    1. Pop music has become slower—in tempo—in recent years and also "sadder" and less "fun" to listen to.
    2. Pop music has become melodically less complex, using fewer chord changes, and pop recordings are mastered to sound consistently louder (and therefore less dynamic) at a rate of around one decibel every eight years.
    3. There has been a significant increase in the use of the first-person word "I" in pop song lyrics, and a decline in words that emphasize society or community. Lyrics also contain more words that can be associated with anger or anti-social sentiments.
    4. 42% of people polled on which decade has produced the worst pop music since the 1970s voted for the 2010s. These people were not from a particular aging demographic at all—all age groups polled, including 18-29 year olds, appear to feel unanimously that the 2010s are when pop music became worst. This may explain a rising trend of young millennials, for example, digging around for now 15-30 year-old music on YouTube frequently. It's not just the older people who listen to the 1980s and 1990s on YouTube and other streaming services it seems—much younger people do it too.
    5. A researcher put 15,000 Billboard Hot 100 song lyrics through the well-known Lev-Zimpel-Vogt (LZV1) data compression algorithm, which is good at finding repetitions in data. He found that songs have steadily become more repetitive over the years, and that song lyrics from today compress 22% better on average than less repetitive song lyrics from the 1960s. The most repetitive year in song lyrics was 2014 in this study.

    #2
    Without looking at the link you start with Stumpy, that's an interesting summary. One query – does point 5 refer to repetition within any given song, or between different songs, i.e. the whole corpus of 'pop' for the year?

    My main problem with 'modern pop' is, notwithstanding the stuff in points 2 and 3, the production on most of it seems to cater exclusively for a miniscule attention span. This fear, that if a song doesn't grab a listener within the first 0.8 seconds of any part of it hitting their ears they're going to skip on to something else, means there's ever more hooklines jammed up against hooklines, virtually no space between lyrics with each practically falling over the next, wordless vocal 'hooks' and tics crammed into every last remaining gap, etc. There's no room whatsoever for the production to breathe. It makes all these songs sound incredibly dense and airless, which for me makes them genuinely exhausting to listen to.

    I'd be interested, aside from anything, in the results of a study on the sheer number of words in the average chart hit now compared with 15 or 30 or 45 or indeed 60 years ago.
    Last edited by Various Artist; 17-01-2018, 13:36.

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      #3
      And auto-tune.

      That is all.

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        #4
        Well apart from Adele and Ed Sheeran. Those I can’t explain.

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          #5
          I like Adele. But Drake's music is just tepid, lame-ass nuthin' with too much auto tune.

          I mean, I get Kendrick and that, but Drake? He's like your grandma's idea of hip hop.

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            #6
            Such a wasteland now. Some of the blame needs to be placed at the door of the radio networks. Formatted to the point of crushing banality. Top 40 radio is simply not worth the time.

            Things are no better with classic rock or oldies stations. The same records again and again.

            I used to live in New Mexico and the bartender at my local hostelry, the late, lamented Hiway Grill in Aztec, and I would talk about music. I introduced him to Harold Melvin, Link Wray, Chaka Khan and many others. He told me one night that at a party he played Harold Melvin. 14 and 15 year olds were asking him who that was, where could they find it. They had never heard of it.

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