People all over the Internet like to constantly degrade young people and “popular music,” complaining on random YouTube videos and personal blogs that “today’s music sucks.” I won’t lie and say that I enjoy every song that rises to popularity, but this is also the reason as to why I don’t listen to the radio.
Let’s just pretend for a moment that all modern music does suck. I have a solution.
Don’t like it? Ignore it.
Based on that statement, the solution to avoiding the sort of eardrum-shattering, vomit-inducing noise that past decades apparently never brought is to stop paying attention to it.
I, for example, do not like Justin Bieber’s music. I, therefore, do not listen to Justin Bieber’s music. I avoid him and his scandalous paparazzi pictures altogether. To each their own. Obviously, his music isn’t something I enjoy, so I don’t listen to it. No one forces me to listen to it, so I have no problem avoiding it.
No one forces you to listen to things you don’t want to listen to.
It isn’t hard, really. There’s nothing more I can say about that.
What I do want to say is that modern music does not suck. There is so much music being created on a regular basis. With over 35 million songs on iTunes itself in 2013 (and millions more, now, three years later), it’s impossible to have heard even one-eighth of those songs, so to lump all music created after the turn of the century into one giant, negative stereotype is both ignorant and unprecedented.
In making this sort of assumption, you exhibit your complete lack of regard for artists from all over the world who create all sorts of music but who are relatively unknown due to whatever circumstances stand that prevent them from seeing “fame.” Popularity is not what defines an artist; all it does is make the artist more accessible to the general public, which seems to be where the negative ideas of modern music stems from. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with popularity, either, but it also doesn’t mean that popular music is required listening.
And there’s a difference between “popular music” and “modern music,” isn’t there? Where for the former may be mainstream radio music and whatever may be listed on the Billboard charts, the latter is just music made in the present. The biggest way that I can differentiate the two is by looking at concerts, wherein “popular” artists sell out shows at venues that can hold the same amount of people as a sports arena can, and “modern” artists hold $20 shows in smaller venues that can usually fit no more than 1,500 people.
To say that today’s music differs from that of, like, the 1960s is different from saying that today’s music is just “bad.” Of course the music is different. The people are different, society is different, and the technology that is available to create music is different. If there’s more of a synthetic sound to pop music, it’s because of the technology, and anyway, isn’t pop music (because that’s the majority of what we have) meant to be this sort of fizzing, upbeat, time-of-your-life affair?
Furthermore, I think it’s interesting to note that people haven’t ever really liked mainstream music to begin with. Humans are petty and resentful and want to feel unique, so even when The Beatles turned up in the 60s, people didn’t like them. Today, non-fans of the "boy band" are considered “tasteless” and “unrefined,” as if my not enjoying the two hundred or so songs that they have floating around makes me some sort of Neanderthal. (There, I said it: I don’t care for The Beatles, and I like modern pop music. Take that, music critics!)
What “good music” ends up coming down to is personal preference. With this is a person’s ability to look beyond YouTube’s most watched videos and local radio stations, and it is discovering that there are talented artists all over the place. One band cannot speak for the entirety of modern music; all it takes is a couple of steps back and the realization that music is a changing, artistic endeavor and that your musical superiority is unnecessary.
