too old?

nyarlothothep

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

I think its come round full circle, from rock to metal and punk, now look what's mainstream, fxuking wet blanket bed wetter music, its all so polite and nice, we're back in the 50's, Pat Boone and Doris Day dressed up a little raunchier.
A band like the Sex Pistols, how far would they get? Gone are the days when you just hired the biggest nutters and hoor millions of kids buy it, its all carefully manufactured and controlled.
Simon Cowbell has done to music and I don't even want to finish the Hitler analogy.
Are kids into anything heavy? Not many I would say. Yes, there's still a metal scene, but is it still the same fans since the 80's/90's?
When I went to school, it was Iron Maiden, AC/DC and so on, now people like to sit at home and drool into their popcorn while watching X Factor.
In other words, where's dem new metal fans at?
Obvious old crank alert here.

Absolutely! And I think it's because music, art, virtually every area of society has become corporatised and the corporate philosophy is the anathema to anything involving creativity, imagination, aesthetics etc. I mean even in feudal times they had some taste. But this is going off the point. I think also that today's generation probably sucks. I mean I would rather hang out with hippies from the late 60s than people from the 1910s or 1930s. So today's generation seem more akin to what you say, the people of the 1950s except even then they had rock n' roll! I also think that it might have something to do with geography and culture. People on the continent are much more open minded about music with some get up and go, compare that to the British Isles where people turn their nose up at rock in favour of "sheep" music, because Irish/British people are generally very passive and conservative, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's reflected in their musical tastes. Despite the plethora of great British rock bands I think rock is more inherent to the ethos of America where guitar soloing and riffs are more appreciated than here, because there is a cultural discourse running throughout the history of that country relating to individualism, so there's a greater appreciation for "showing off" or what I like to call musicianship and creativity. Whereas here people like bands like Elbow and Doves, I'm not even sure they can be classed as rock or just as dull music for dull people, informed by the sacred principle thou shalt not solo or do anything remotely interesting to upset the musical apple cart. Which again kind of reflects the temperment of people in this part of the world.

Anesthetize

tl;dr version of the last few posts of the thread:

"Waah, waaah, nobody likes guitar solos anymore."

nyarlothothep

Particularly wah guitar solos and you can never have too much wah, probably the best pedal invention known to man.

Anesthetize

nyarlothothep wrote: »

Particularly wah guitar solos and you can never have too much wah, probably the best pedal invention known to man.

Until Kirk Hammett tainted it

Cold War Kid

This "too old" stuff in relation to what music you listen to is so stupid.
You like what you like. It's especially stupid in relation to people in their 30s. Might be a bit more understandable in relation to people in their 50s but it's still silly to feel there's a "rule" in relation to what music you listen to.

dr.fuzzenstein

Anesthetize wrote: »

tl;dr version of the last few posts of the thread:

"Waah, waaah, nobody likes guitar solos anymore."

It's more like "people like sh*t music".
Some people prefer music with balls. Not corporate crap to please the accountants.
But we will also accept hammond organ solos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFqPMzFV5fM

Bayran

grumpynerd wrote: »

I dunno it seems like teens and twenties are the years for caring about cds and electric guitars and angry music about deep stuff.

You sound like an old codger you do. If you are feeling old then just buy a paddy hat and a set of fluffy slippers and step back from life. Let us enjoy it and stop posting depressing stuff on boards, especially the metal forum. We don't need any of that around here. By the way sepultura are still great, and I'm older than they were back then too.

Anesthetize

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

It's more like "people like sh*t music".
Some people prefer music with balls. Not corporate crap to please the accountants.

That's the way it's been for decades. I personally wouldn't change anything about the way music is today. If you are looking for recent music that floats your boat, for example music with balls (although I prefer music with brains), then get on the internet and look for some or attend music festivals. If everyone was listening to rock and metal it would take the fun out of it to be honest.

Regarding guitar solos, I find most of them boring and predictable. What made them less popular was nearly every single rock and metal band having guitar solos for the sake of having guitar solos until they became a tired cliche. Don't get me wrong I love a well-placed and meaningful guitar solo what the likes of Dave Gilmour, J. Mascis or Iron Maiden would do, or some noisy, guitar-mutulation like Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman, or some all-out psychedelic madness like Earthless. But Jesus Christ I wish most rock and metal bands would have done something more interesting with them.

Lyaiera

The only people saying music today is terrible are not making any effort. There's plenty of great bands around. The charts were never a great indication of what was going around.

nyarlothothep

Ah yes, the "culture never goes through recessions, it's always a consistent flat line of quality" brigade strikes again. With so many bands on the internet there is a lot of noise, so great bands have a much harder time getting their music out because of the signal to noise ratio. Also name some supposedly great bands of today, because I expect most of them will probably be lacklustre metal by numbers or niche interest bands. The internet has truly been the worst thing for music. Back in the day people swapped tapes, there was a sense of ownership, of pride in what you had, now you can just download from over and there, and there's no sense of effort, no physical copy to remind you that music has value. The result was that those tapes generated word of mouth that had more substance, whereas now, if 5000 people download your music it counts for very little.

stateofflux

There is no 'too old' in metal. its one of the most age tolerant genres going. The loyalty to bands is also unique.

Links234

nyarlothothep wrote: »

Ah yes, the "culture never goes through recessions, it's always a consistent flat line of quality" brigade strikes again.

Nobody here has ever said anything remotely like that, if you're going to argue with people, you're gonna have to respond to what folks are actually saying. We can't have much of a discussion otherwise.

With so many bands on the internet there is a lot of noise, so great bands have a much harder time getting their music out because of the signal to noise ratio. Also name some supposedly great bands of today, because I expect most of them will probably be lacklustre metal by numbers or niche interest bands. The internet has truly been the worst thing for music. Back in the day people swapped tapes, there was a sense of ownership, of pride in what you had, now you can just download from over and there, and there's no sense of effort, no physical copy to remind you that music has value. The result was that those tapes generated word of mouth that had more substance, whereas now, if 5000 people download your music it counts for very little.

Look, I'm gonna show my age here, I'm 30. Good god I feel old saying that, but when I was a kid I had a walkman and cassette tapes, I even tape traded to a degree but bar a few Metallica and Guns'n'Roses albums that was pretty much all that was available to me. Those were not halcyon days, they were absolutely ****ing horrible! Listening to tapes that were copies of copies of copies, the only thing you could get your hands on was what your friends could get your hands on, and then you'd have tapes that would degrade over time or worse, get eaten by the casette player for some unknown reason and then you'd have to try and salvage it by getting out the pen and trying to wind it back in. Ah my poor Master of Puppets tape, you were not long for this world.

This was not fun! I can't imagine how horrible it would be if we were still stuck with something like tape trading, or god damn tapes at all. You seriously need to take off the rose-tinted glasses, take out the rose-tinted contact lenses, wash out the rose-tinted hair colour, change out of that rose-tinted suit, pull down that hideous rose-tinted wallpaper and step into reality, because despite whatever joyous nostalgia you have attached, those days were the worst.

Edit: Ooh, I posted that at 13:37! :eek:

Remember 1337? Hey, remember that? That was the golden age of internet memes, back when we all played Counters Strike in Beta, and everything was 1337. What have you got nowadays? Nothing, that's what. Memes died at 23.59 on the 31st of December 1999. No good internet memes any more, don't bother pointing them out to me they're all crap anyway.

Anesthetize

nyarlothothep wrote: »

Ah yes, the "culture never goes through recessions, it's always a consistent flat line of quality" brigade strikes again. With so many bands on the internet there is a lot of noise, so great bands have a much harder time getting their music out because of the signal to noise ratio. Also name some supposedly great bands of today, because I expect most of them will probably be lacklustre metal by numbers or niche interest bands. The internet has truly been the worst thing for music. Back in the day people swapped tapes, there was a sense of ownership, of pride in what you had, now you can just download from over and there, and there's no sense of effort, no physical copy to remind you that music has value. The result was that those tapes generated word of mouth that had more substance, whereas now, if 5000 people download your music it counts for very little.

Define 'great' for me please? I honestly don't care whether a band has 22 listeners or 22 million listeners, if I love their music that's all that matters to me. The signal to noise ratio is less relevant than you think with websites like Rate Your Music or Metal Storm providing easy ways to filter out the good stuff. And I think the internet has been a blessing for music. I probably wouldn't have discovered most of the bands in my music collection if it wasn't for the internet. I also don't think how much you love an album should be measured by materialism.

nyarlothothep

When people had physical copies they appreciated that music more in terms of the effort they went to get it, the fandom was more secure. Today's generation of 18-25 year olds are extremely conservative in artistic tastes, this is the age of the new right, the neo liberal discourse has had a unaminous victory and that's reflected in aesthetic production too, everything has become blandified. So young people's tastes are no longer a reliable measure. I just turned 30 too and I think that despite all our generation's failings we still had semi decent music from 1999-2007. After that, the world belongs to wimp music for the new 1950s generation. I disagree with you Links, I used to enjoy playing tapes on my walkman and later CD walkman and minidisc, it made you appreciate the album as a work rather than skipping between songs. Things were harder but more rewarding back in those days. As entertainment I would have a guitar, a stereo and a tape of Cream and Nirvana to work with. No iphones or ipads or apps and we were better for it because we actually had to engage with what we were learning. Back then, I had to install are Jerome flash player on my website which I made in Dreamweaver, nowadays you can just hyperlink to Soundcloud and do it on Wordpress. In the old days you had to learn how to it from scratch and it was more rewarding. These days you have programs that come up with drum tracks for you, based on the data in your songs but back in the day one had to do all the drum programming from scratch, it was great. 90% of technology is superflous to the fundamentals one learns with the bare necessities at one's disposal, you don't give a laser cutting tool to an apprentice sculptor until they learn how to sculpt in clay. The old days were objectively better, music is dominated by bland metal bands like Avenge Sevenfold and Disturbed and they're irrelevant anyway as the greater mass of young people would listen to them and turn up their noses in disgust, wanting instead the soft, MOR music of Pat Boone. The 1960s were the pinnacle with the space race, civil rights movements and the birth of rock! The narrative was progressive, optimistic, forward looking, now it's dominated by the myopic concerns of bankers, corporations and a toxic mixture of nihilism and consumerism, you can't get anywhere with that except reinvigorating the status quo, hence the decline of rock, it's an anachronism in a uniquely conservative time that demands conservative music and other forms of entertainment.

Sklarker

In my 40s and have started getting slagged a bit at HR/metal gigs...thought you were me dad/you look like my lecturer and bouncers asking for id and breaking their holes laughing!! Into heavier stuff now than when i was younger. Shoot me now if Coldplay etc is what I have to look forward to as I get older

Grayditch

I still think the rock and metal is the least agest scene I've ever seen.

donegal_man

Grayditch wrote: »

I still think the rock and metal is the least agest scene I've ever seen.

Agree 100%, I'm in my mid forties now and have been to gigs where the age of the crowd would have ranged from teens to people in their sixties.