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NonDawg I admit I'm massively out of touch regardling Taylor Swift...

Music is having a renaissance and an added emphasis on real music created by instruments, real writing, real people. The problem is it doesn't fit the "radio" standard. Don't feel bad for the youth, they've got it better in terms of real music options than I did growing up(almost 34). In 5 years singer songwriters/folk/americana will be more mainstream than pop.
Just wanted to second this sentiment. There are more ways now to be successful as a musician than there was 20,30 years ago. Sites like Bandcamp allow artists to publish records without major label backing. As long as you’re even marginally plugged into the news about a genre that interests you, you can get introduced to endless new artists. Truly a golden age for music, even though the mainstream is filled with a lot of cookie-cutter blandness.
 
But then again, I'm just massively out of touch. I never thought that would happen. I go to plenty of shows. I'm a music appreciator, but there has been such a buffer between what I listen to and what the rest of the world seems to listen to for so long, that it's not even a matter of not liking it (which I admit I don't care for it), I just don't even understand how people listen to this stuff. Like, I isolated myself from the entire progression that led up to this point.

Now befrore you break your neck from nodding in agreement, it didn't happen the way you probably think it did. If you think you can relate to me to this point, you're probably wrong. I likely hated your music before you became a curmudgeon about today's music. I'm paying the price with compounding interest for being a record store prick in my youth. You probably met one in your youth in Atlanta or Athens.

At anyrate, I don't understand anyone's interest in anything that's bringing in Grammy gold, but I do recognize why Taylor (I think she's more savy than she is a great musician), Billie Eilish, Adele (who is admittedly just flat out talented) and a few others stand out, even though I'm not sure they would have stood out thirty years ago. Yeah. I think younger Millineals and Zoomers got the shit end of the stick. I hope it gets better for their sake. I'm not saying that, mean spirited. I do think disdain for modern music is partially due to people becoming ouldes and curmudgeons... but I also think modern pop, bro country, mumble rap, butt rock also happens to be shit-tier. And it's not completely the fault of the person who listens to this musical poop.

BTW, my morning listen while I made this rant. Virtually nobody liked this, even the music snobs.

I consider myself a music aficionado with excellent taste. I've listened to everything Taylor swift has released, and I still don't get why she's as popular as she is. She's broken every record for sold out shows and has a bigger fanbase than anyone before her excluding the beatlemania years. She writes her own stuff but it all sounds extremely over produced with autotune edits. I'll never understand it.

Then again, I still don't understand why Beyonce has won more grammy's than anyone on the planet.
 
Just wanted to second this sentiment. There are more ways now to be successful as a musician than there was 20,30 years ago. Sites like Bandcamp allow artists to publish records without major label backing. As long as you’re even marginally plugged into the news about a genre that interests you, you can get introduced to endless new artists. Truly a golden age for music, even though the mainstream is filled with a lot of cookie-cutter blandness.
Yep. I think when people say “there’s no good music” what they’re really saying is there will never be another Led Zeppelin, Stones etc. And there probably won’t be. But there is a crazy amount of good music being made
 
Yep. I think when people say “there’s no good music” what they’re really saying is there will never be another Led Zeppelin, Stones etc. And there probably won’t be. But there is a crazy amount of good music being made
Good music will likely always be made, but good music doesn't 'win the day' anymore. What's getting lost in all the white-pills we're shoving down our throats here, is that 4 people in a room of 100 (and I think I'm being kind) aren't attracted like a moth to arguably bad and certainly dumbed down music.

Yeah, bad music may inspire some troubadors... but my problem isn't production one, it's consumption one.
 
As the king of the offseason, I provide a n invaluable service and you need to appreciate it.

These guys are fairly new from the Netherlands, playing live here at a random guitar store in Germany. This is talent. They just randomly appeared in my feed the other day. I've already ordered one of their live LPs to my collection.


 
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In the words of Merle Haggard…..

I thank God for Marty Stuart
Every time he's through
And thanks to Willie Nelson
And thanks to Emmylou
Hey, we gotta be more demanding
Down at the corner pub
There's too much boogie woogie
And not enough Ernest Tubb
 
I think a lot of what goes into the musical divide is those the listen to the radio and those that don't. My teenaged daughter doesn't listen to the radio much, but listens a lot to streaming services like Spotify, amazon music, etc. She listens to channels and likes and dislikes songs and of course the services start to hone into what she likes. To my shock (initially) she ended up playing a lot of the older stuff that I like. When I started turning up the volume, she was like how do you know this song? I'm like shit, this song is like 30 years old. She had no idea.
 
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But then again, I'm just massively out of touch. I never thought that would happen. I go to plenty of shows. I'm a music appreciator, but there has been such a buffer between what I listen to and what the rest of the world seems to listen to for so long, that it's not even a matter of not liking it (which I admit I don't care for it), I just don't even understand how people listen to this stuff. Like, I isolated myself from the entire progression that led up to this point.

Now befrore you break your neck from nodding in agreement, it didn't happen the way you probably think it did. If you think you can relate to me to this point, you're probably wrong. I likely hated your music before you became a curmudgeon about today's music. I'm paying the price with compounding interest for being a record store prick in my youth. You probably met one in your youth in Atlanta or Athens.

At anyrate, I don't understand anyone's interest in anything that's bringing in Grammy gold, but I do recognize why Taylor (I think she's more savy than she is a great musician), Billie Eilish, Adele (who is admittedly just flat out talented) and a few others stand out, even though I'm not sure they would have stood out thirty years ago. Yeah. I think younger Millineals and Zoomers got the shit end of the stick. I hope it gets better for their sake. I'm not saying that, mean spirited. I do think disdain for modern music is partially due to people becoming ouldes and curmudgeons... but I also think modern pop, bro country, mumble rap, butt rock also happens to be shit-tier. And it's not completely the fault of the person who listens to this musical poop.

BTW, my morning listen while I made this rant. Virtually nobody liked this, even the music snobs.

Any Taylor Swift questions should be directed to @BaileyDawg79
 
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I 'get' it, I just sort of think her popularity is largely due to filling a vacuum. There is no doubt about her spell over 12 year old girls though.

I suppose what baffles me the most is that someone who seems so pedestrian by 80's and 90's standards, is occupying so much of the bandwidth today. She's arguably as big as Elvis or the Beatles ever were... or at least Michael Jackson or Madonna without any attribute that really stands out. Mind blowing... at least it is to me.
She doesn't have a spell on just 12 year old girls, but most of their mothers as well. Her audience is pretty vast. She's pretty young, but has been in the music biz for a long time.
I don't care for her music, I'm more of an alternative and classic rock guy myself.
However, I totally respect her music writing abilities, showmanship and business savvy.
 
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Any Taylor Swift questions should be directed to @BaileyDawg79

Sir you have beaten that horse to death.

Hustling Lets Go GIF by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
 
Good songwriting, regardless of the musical genre, matters.
So very true. Some of us from earlier eras are afraid to be the old man yelling at the sky and fall into the trap that "my particular era is the only music." But it does seem like the sheer craft of song writing, that once came from the stage early in the twentieth century, then from the Brill Building with folks like Carole King and other geniuses, then of course the Beatles, is pretty much dead. The best songwriters often didn't perform at all, and the best lyricists wrote no notes. Just a whole lot of genius around in the sixties and seventies, and so much of that stuff still sounds good. Maybe the current music will, too. But I know a lot of folks who are millennial and later who really love old music.
 
Yep. I think when people say “there’s no good music” what they’re really saying is there will never be another Led Zeppelin, Stones etc. And there probably won’t be. But there is a crazy amount of good music being made
"there's no good music" usually comes from someone of a certain age, no matter the generation
 
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"there's no good music" usually comes from someone of a certain age, no matter the generation
To me, the question is more how to find the good new music without sifting through all of the music that I do not care for.
I have been resisting my daughter’s plan to take me to a Mountain Goats concert for months now.
Of course the last three artists I’ve seen in concert are Cocker, Dylan, and Willie so I am sure I qualify as an Oulde.
 
She doesn't have a spell on just 12 year old girls, but most of their mothers as well. Her audience is pretty vast. She's pretty young, but has been in the music biz for a long time.
I don't care for her music, I'm more of an alternative and classic rock guy myself.
However, I totally respect her music writing abilities, showmanship and business savvy.
Let’s be careful praising her “business savvy,” as her total lack of business acumen is how we ended up with an entire series of “Taylor’s Version” albums…

She got dunked on by her original manager…
 
These guys are fairly new from the Netherlands, playing live here at a random guitar store in Germany. This is talent. They just randomly appeared in my feed the other day. I've already ordered one of their live LPs to my collection.


Need to go find a singer this guy is not it. Other than his inability to sing I like them/him.
 
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Yep. I think when people say “there’s no good music” what they’re really saying is there will never be another Led Zeppelin, Stones etc. And there probably won’t be. But there is a crazy amount of good music being made
Agree 100%. Problem is, when Zep, ACDC, etc were around, it was in your face. Now you have to really work to find the good stuff. Its there, but you arent going to find it on the standard stations.
 
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Let’s be careful praising her “business savvy,” as her total lack of business acumen is how we ended up with an entire series of “Taylor’s Version” albums…

She got dunked on by her original manager…
Her lawyer probably worked at K&S. Amirite
 
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To me, the question is more how to find the good new music without sifting through all of the music that I do not care for.
I have been resisting my daughter’s plan to take me to a Mountain Goats concert for months now.
Of course the last three artists I’ve seen in concert are Cocker, Dylan, and Willie so I am sure I qualify as an Oulde.
It's a good point you make, especially in the age of streaming and self-production. I'm an older adult too but I'm also a musician so I keep up with a lot of different genres and trends. It's a lot of work to sift through it all no doubt.
 
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Let’s be careful praising her “business savvy,” as her total lack of business acumen is how we ended up with an entire series of “Taylor’s Version” albums…

She got dunked on by her original manager…
She's definitely not as big as she is because of business saavy. She writes good pop songs. Not everyone likes them (and she is not in my listening rotation), but a whole lot of people do - respected artists included.
 
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E
We listen to a lot of hip hop in my house, which my wife developed a fondness for when she graduated from UGA and moved to NY in ‘95. Mostly the older music, but we really like Anderson Paak and some of his peers.

Drake is boring, pretensious and uninspired. He’s the Eric Clapton of Hip Hop (ducks behind a stack of old albums).
Eric Clapton is boring and uninspired? He's a legend in the music community, so I'm stumped on this one. How does Drake even end up in the same conversation?
 
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I'm pretty confident that, in due time, AI will do a better job at composing music and lyrics than is humanly possible. Finding a human who can perform what AI generates will be key, until the inevitable day arrives where AI will also perform music better than any human can.

AI will have the same impact on football game plan creation and play calling. When you think it through, you'll understand that humans will eventually become the weakest link at some point. Humans are just too human, frought with mistakes and imperfections that will compare disfavorably to the technological future state.

The upcoming reality with AI will be similar to when men using pencils and paper were eclipsed by machines at doing math.
 
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I went to a Kesem/UGA event yesterday and a Taylor Swift song came on and ALL the ladies (kids, counselors, adults, different races, etc) were singing or mouthing the words. I mean it seemed almost subconscious for some of them. We had a sleepover for a group of 8 year old girls a couple of weeks ago. They only listened to Taylor and they knew every word. I know realize what a phenomenon she has become
 
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I went to a Kesem/UGA event yesterday and a Taylor Swift song came on and ALL the ladies (kids, counselors, adults, different races, etc) were singing or mouthing the words. I mean it seemed almost subconscious for some of them. We had a sleepover for a group of 8 year old girls a couple of weeks ago. They only listened to Taylor and they knew every word. I know realize what a phenomenon she has become
Sounds like the makings of a cult.
 
Let’s be careful praising her “business savvy,” as her total lack of business acumen is how we ended up with an entire series of “Taylor’s Version” albums…

She got dunked on by her original manager…
She's a self made billionaire. So sure, she was naive at one point, but it seems she made a pretty good recovery. Wouldn't you agree?
 
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I was stuck in the 80s and early 90s forever. Now that my kids are older, love music, and go to shows, I decided to download the top five songs from Apple Music of every show they go to. It’s been a fun way to learn new music and connect with the kids. Some of the bands suck, but i found my joy, lany, John cragie, the band Camino, valley, Noah kahan, and even a rainbow kitten surprise song that i like. I even hum along to a few Taylor swift songs.

On a side note my daughter texted me a few days ago saying she couldn’t decide if she was pulling for Taylor swift or roquan smith🤦🏽‍♂️🤦🏽‍♂️🤦🏽‍♂️. I said, be a smithie
 
But then again, I'm just massively out of touch. I never thought that would happen. I go to plenty of shows. I'm a music appreciator, but there has been such a buffer between what I listen to and what the rest of the world seems to listen to for so long, that it's not even a matter of not liking it (which I admit I don't care for it), I just don't even understand how people listen to this stuff. Like, I isolated myself from the entire progression that led up to this point.

Now befrore you break your neck from nodding in agreement, it didn't happen the way you probably think it did. If you think you can relate to me to this point, you're probably wrong. I likely hated your music before you became a curmudgeon about today's music. I'm paying the price with compounding interest for being a record store prick in my youth. You probably met one in your youth in Atlanta or Athens.

At anyrate, I don't understand anyone's interest in anything that's bringing in Grammy gold, but I do recognize why Taylor (I think she's more savy than she is a great musician), Billie Eilish, Adele (who is admittedly just flat out talented) and a few others stand out, even though I'm not sure they would have stood out thirty years ago. Yeah. I think younger Millineals and Zoomers got the shit end of the stick. I hope it gets better for their sake. I'm not saying that, mean spirited. I do think disdain for modern music is partially due to people becoming ouldes and curmudgeons... but I also think modern pop, bro country, mumble rap, butt rock also happens to be shit-tier. And it's not completely the fault of the person who listens to this musical poop.

BTW, my morning listen while I made this rant. Virtually nobody liked this, even the music snobs.

Agree 100%, guess im old and biased , but today’s music just sucks period. I was fortunate enough to grow up during the late 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Stones, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, The Who, Kinks, Clapton, Beatles, Crosby stills, Nash, Neil Young….i could go on and on. Even the County genre was better, Dwight Yokum, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, Johnny Cash.

Is Taylor Swift talented? Sure. But i would take Madonna over her all day long. I grew up in Athens but dont give a rats ass about REM, Swimming Pool Qi’s, Pylon or all of those other “cool bands” that were saturating Athens back in the 80’s.Traffic, Uriah Heap, Humble Pie, Blue Oyster Cult, Foghat, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Skynard, Marshall Tucker Band…..I could go on and on. We will never see an era like that again in our lifetime. Now its all choreographed dancers, with little or zero substance in actual songwriting amnd playing instruments.
 
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I grew up in Athens and my music view is dominated by that mindset. However, I have daughters who are industrial engineers and live in Texas and North Carolina. They flew around the country last year and attended a couple Swift shows and enjoyed the experience. They were not alone. They probably had a dozen friends who attended these shows as well. These were not drive to the Omni or Lakewood shows that I used to do. These trips probably cost them $5k each in tix, plane tix, accommodations, outfits, and extras. I was talking to them over Christmas about the funny post 3yearletterman made about TSwift and how the Swifties came out of the woodwork dogging him out not knowing it was satire. The financial analyst daughter spent 30 minutes talking about the economic impact a Swift show had on a city and the region. Every Swift show is greater than a Super Bowl in impact. Arenas or Stadiums and civic gov fight to get her to come to their town. A large % of a show's audience are not local to that area, it's just where they were able to get a ticket. It was truly eye opening. This girl is a marketing and $$$ machine. Her tour last year generated $5-10B and her PPV that came out around Christmas will be the highest viewed and $$ money maker on any streaming platform. She's bringing those fans to the NFL so they can watch cameras cut away to show her for seconds every time Kelce makes a play. This is a prayer sent from Heaven for the NFL. If another network aired a live TSwift concert opposite the Super Bowl in 2 weeks, her viewership would dwarf the game. I couldn't name you a single song she sings. I recognize her music because it's everywhere and you just don't know it unless you're part of that world.

On another note, when she and Kelce hit splitsville, she'll write a whole album about him and crush him and the NFL like an ant.
She is obviously talented, but all of her music sounds the same To me. The stuff they call “country music” now is just straight up pop music garbage for the most part, guy with Timmy Tebow haircuts playing bro-country poppy shit, I took my daughter and her friends to swifts 1989 tour a few years back, it was painful. Very sterile and generic. My first concert was on May 8th, 1977 at the Stege , tickets were $6.00 a piece but my mom worked with the university Union at Memorial Hall and they were working with Alex Cooley at the time-so they were free to me. I was 14 year old at the time and it was the most eye-opening experience in my life. Neil Young can write better songs in his sleep than most artists today,

I ran into Mickey thomas at the Marriott hotel in south Beach back in 2014,we rode the elevator up to our respective floors and I personally thanked him for the music he gave us during our youth (Jeffreson Starship/ Elvin Bishop Band, i told him “Mickey, your music never gets old, even my kids listen to it” his response” That’s why they all is “classic Rock”,,,,,,it never gets old. BTW, Mickey sang lead vocals on “Fooled around and fell in love:“ with Eklvin Bishop and hails from Cairo Georgia.
 
But then again, I'm just massively out of touch. I never thought that would happen. I go to plenty of shows. I'm a music appreciator, but there has been such a buffer between what I listen to and what the rest of the world seems to listen to for so long, that it's not even a matter of not liking it (which I admit I don't care for it), I just don't even understand how people listen to this stuff. Like, I isolated myself from the entire progression that led up to this point.

Now befrore you break your neck from nodding in agreement, it didn't happen the way you probably think it did. If you think you can relate to me to this point, you're probably wrong. I likely hated your music before you became a curmudgeon about today's music. I'm paying the price with compounding interest for being a record store prick in my youth. You probably met one in your youth in Atlanta or Athens.

At anyrate, I don't understand anyone's interest in anything that's bringing in Grammy gold, but I do recognize why Taylor (I think she's more savy than she is a great musician), Billie Eilish, Adele (who is admittedly just flat out talented) and a few others stand out, even though I'm not sure they would have stood out thirty years ago. Yeah. I think younger Millineals and Zoomers got the shit end of the stick. I hope it gets better for their sake. I'm not saying that, mean spirited. I do think disdain for modern music is partially due to people becoming ouldes and curmudgeons... but I also think modern pop, bro country, mumble rap, butt rock also happens to be shit-tier. And it's not completely the fault of the person who listens to this musical poop.

BTW, my morning listen while I made this rant. Virtually nobody liked this, even the music snobs.

Like her or not the girl is talented. Few can write their own lyrics anymore and she is tremendous at it. I'm not her biggest fan but I will acknowledge that she has serious talent.
 
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