And this...live concerts are fake!
Rick Beato is great. He's made quite a lot of videos breaking down modern songs, and demonstrating their lack of musical complexity compared to popular music from just two or three decades ago.
I was watching some interviews with industry experts on AI this evening. A point that one person was making was that AI will eventually be able to be creative in the same way that humans are. It will get so good at it, he claimed, that it will be able to predict the next trends. A lot of current popular music is very formulaic and, frankly, uninspiring. Perhaps in a few years, AI will do a better job of making music than the current crop of humans?
This criticism goes back centuries about music. For instance, Mozart was criticized for using "too many notes". Similarly of Bach, or Beethoven.
The addition of the piano forte was a big stir.
Now I tend to agree that computers, or any electric instrument can be criticized similarly. We must not forget that it's all performance, make believe, Hollywood plastic banana stuff. But someone likes it, and there is always a paying audience. Ask Clive Davis.
Someone out there actually likes Yoko Ono screeching.
I personally loathe autotune. 🤮
I recall the "if it's too loud you're too old" from the younger crowd (now grey boomers) commenting about their grandma complaining about the Rock N Roll. Boomer hearing aids may need adjusting these days, right Ozzy?
In church circles it's been a complaint all since 1900 about how hymns, and now since the Jesus Movement of the early 1970's, that religious music has been terribly dumbed down. Too much performance. As familiar as I am with much of it, I can completely understand the view point. Mostly agree.
Real music, in my view, is entirely live, with no recordings or sampling. Can't hardly find it anywhere in any genre.
@centinel Good points. Here's the thing with autotune. It is not actually someone's true voice whether on the recording or live, it is a reproduction of a voice through a computer processor. Not real. You listen to pop that you hear on the radio and it's like a robot singing. You hear machine "drums", no real instruments, all computers.
The humanity is gone. When you go to a major concert now it's done with backing tracks, not truly live. They are miming! Taylor swift??....miming, and auto tune. The voice you hear has gone through a processor.
Even so called rock bands are no different. I think AC/DC and the Stones are the last of the old school truly live bands, and the Beach Boys, and they are not going to be with us soon.
A real person plays a real musical instrument and their personality and unique style is reflected through the instrument. No singers in the past needed autotune. Frank Sinatra had his unique style and way of attacking a note, just as an example. Can You imagine the Beach Boys/Beatles with autotune!? How about Aretha Franklin? How about Tammy Wynette? How about Billy Holiday? Joni Mitchel? And on and on it goes.
When a band used to record they went in the studio with their guitars/drums and played it. And when you saw them live you saw the same band members playing it live. What ever happened to real strings/horns, real orchestration on a pop recording?
All the crap pop that radio plays in the last 25-30 years is not done with one musician, one instrument or an actual voice and style of a real person, all you hear is a computer reproduction.
And the sad thing is...the audience for this, generation Z and millennials don't care. They don't care that they go to see Taylor Swift and pay $500 a seat and she is miming. That what they listen to is computer generated and not even a real voice of a singer. If Taylor Swift is such a good musician, and can play the guitar and piano why can't she play it on the recording with real instruments and have her real band back her up? I'm picking out her as she is all the rage in popularity but it's not real.
My rant is over, but on my part 15 station not one song that is synthesized will be heard. No song heard on my station is sung with autotune.
But, I live in the past. I have stopped growing.