New Music, Lower Quality


With the dawn of the internet, technology has gained a foothold to influence all aspects of Western life. It has ingrained itself inside the “pop culture”, allowing music, art, and sciences to change in the blink of an eye due to the exponentially increased speed of communications. Specifically, the internet has had a very significant role in the spreading of new types of music such as hip-hop and electronic dance music. In the past twenty years, these modern styles of music have been favored by pop culture, and as such have come to dominate the music industry. However, instead of increasing the quality of music as an art form (as one might expect, due to the increased quality of everything else that technology has to offer), the opposite has happened. As pop culture shifts to favor rap and dance music, the quality of music in our culture is decreasing. The music itself has become less complex and louder, lyricism is set aside as being of minor importance, and vocal technique is discarded and replaced by rapping.

Oftentimes, people of older generations can be found criticizing modern music. Either it is too loud, or they just simply think that older songs are “better”. The youth generally berates them for this by saying they are being too judgmental or less open to change. A group a researchers in Spain, however, has proven that older folk are right in saying that songs are too loud and that they are not of as high quality as older songs. By studying hundreds of thousands of songs from the past fifty years, these researchers have found a series of trends in modern music. They discovered that music has consistently been decreasing in complexity, meaning chord progressions and the harmonies over them have been getting much simpler. They also found that the “timbre” of songs have been decreasing as well, meaning that less variety of sounds are being used, as well as that the loudness of songs has increased immensely. When measuring the loudness, they used the “intrinsic loudness”, or loudness that the songs were originally produced at. Summed up, this means modern songs have become simpler and boring, and the music industry has tried to make up for it by increasing the loudness. Music has also become less complex through the over-use of repetition. With the advent of dance music, pop songs have become heavily focused on the “beat” of the song. However, to be able to dance to a song, it must be familiar and have a consistent beat, which leads to the same beat being played over a simple chord loop for the entire song. While this may have good uses in the dance industry, it lessens the quality of the music immensely as the beauty is stripped away and replaced by a mind numbing lack of creativity.

One of the other inferior qualities that today's music possesses is the lack of focus on lyrics. Lyrics are one of the most important parts of a song; in previous years, musicians would not be taken seriously without good lyrics. However, nowadays there are successful “musicians” whose lyrics are sloppy, dumb, repeated way too many times, and sometimes make absolutely no sense. These horrendous lyrics can't be contained to one genre, however, they are most prevalent in rap and pop. For example, the song “This is Why I'm Hot” by the rapper Mims rose to be the number one song in America in 2007. The main lyrics in the chorus were “I'm hot cuz I'm fly. You ain't cause you not. This is why, this is why, this is why I'm hot, hot.” Not only do the lyrics make no sense whatsoever, but the song goes on to repeat the line “This is why I'm hot, hot” over and over again, as if one time wasn't bad enough. Another example is a line from pop singer/rapper Nicki Minaj's song Masquerade in which she states ,“Imma call you afro cause you never bald.” Although this is one of the only lines from any of her songs that does not contain a curse word or some sort of slang term for male genitalia, it still ends up sounding ridiculous nonetheless. It does not take a genius to figure out that many songs in today's music have taken no creativity or skill to write. Before hip-hop and dance music became popular in the past twenty years though, this type of lyricism would not have been tolerated. There are still lots of famous musicians that are excellent songwriters, but the fact that someone like Nicki Minaj could make millions of dollars with lyrics like that is a sad reflection of the state of our pop culture.

The spiraling downward of the quality of popular music in recent times seems to be directly correlated with the introduction of rap. Since being supported by popular culture, rap has exploded into the music scene, taking over top charts and radio stations alike. While I do have respect for good rap as an art form, the fact remains that it takes considerably less skill and practice to master it. Rap is centered around rhythm and lyrics, which is also an essential part of singing. In either form of music, the musician must feel the rhythm, go along with it, and be able to create lyrics that can effectively convey the emotions of him/her. The difference is, the majority of singing is also based on technique. With rap, one must learn to be able to have good breath support to be able to rap for extended periods of time without taking a breath. For singing, not only does the singer have to have good breath support, but they also must be in perfect pitch while controlling the dynamics of the song and traversing as many as four octaves in a single song. In proper singing technique, the singer also must have excellent control over dozens of muscles in their body, all the way from their jaw and neck to their abdomen and lower back, and most importantly their diaphragm. These techniques may take a singer dozens of years to fully master, while the technical side of rap is much less complex and focused. As far as technique and skill is concerned, rapping is glorified talking.

Music has never before been so out of sync. It has taken a turn for the worse, with complexity, lyricism, and technique all going down the drain. If pop culture keeps influencing and shaping this new music, they will go on to ruin what good music is still out there. Identifying the problem is the first step, however, and if we can identify that its quality is decreasing, then maybe we can find a way to stop it. Music is part of our heritage, and it is our duty to preserve it as an art form so that others can come to enjoy it as well.