Is music getting more miserable?

craner

craner

Beast of Burden
Rave coincided with the Gulf and Balkan wars and a recession. The UK economy was quite grim in '92.
 
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paolo

Mechanical phantoms
What about gangnam style. that's really upbeat and it's like the biggest track of the last decade
 
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muser

Well-known member
yep thats upbeat, you could say its happy or whatever, but its a different kind of joy. There no elation in gangnam style, just dance moves
 
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
yyaldrin said:
Rustie is quite colourful.
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Rustie helped cause Trap, TBH, so no matter how sparkly his synths might be I HOPE he's in emotional turmoil right now.

@ Ben UFO; there's just a lot more of a positive vibe in K-Pop/J-Pop than in western pop, I think that's why teens in the west who are not really into things that sound different from regular pop but want to feel different gravitate towards that. It has the optimism they need, that they can't get out of western pop.
 
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datwun

Well-known member
CrowleyHead said:
Rustie helped cause Trap, TBH, so no matter how sparkly his synths might be I HOPE he's in emotional turmoil right now./QUOTE]

I still think people who don't like the 'BIG BASS BOOM SURROUNDED BY FLICKERING HIGH HATS' trope of trap are absolutely insane.

Also, don't quite get the tie of misery and hedonism, surely hedonism is one of pop's raison d'être-s? Though at it's best pop combines getting mashed and having a great time with, at the very least, a self-willed belief that getting mashed and having a great time can change the world.

I think the world is pretty miserable at the moment. The Tesco's horse meat thing's lead to a lot of discussion of food poverty in the UK, which is an insane thing to exist in the year 2013. Lots of articles about changes to the education system that make all the stuff Mark Fisher was chatting about in Capitalist realism even worse. Reading my local paper there was a big thing about half of a local hospital being sold off to a private company and loads of the maternity beds being axed ect, lots of stories about empty high streets. Europe's fucked, Japan's fucked, America's fucked.

Interestingly, Africa seems to be less fucked than before - insane GDP growth, spread of mobile phones and internet technology making massive changes across the continent. Maybe that's why afrobeats seems to be so genuinely optimistic?

Otherwise it seems that the question is less 'why isn't pop confronting this stuff' as much as 'why isn't anyone confronting this stuff' / 'why hasn't there been a revolution yet'.

For what it's worth, one of the things I like about Jackin is that it seems genuinely full of joy, the producers revelling in these sounds. It's like the science of making people loose their shit.
Obviously it's totally depoliticised, micro-capitalisic, 'live for the weekend' stuff though.
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Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I don't think you can draw too direct a link between socio-economic conditions an cheerfulness, tbh. Tropicalia, for instance, was mostly done while living under a fascist military government with most of the people making it under constant threat of imprisonment or deportation, but it's among the most manically cheerful musical movements I can think of.

To clarify stuff a bit... Zhao: would it be fair to characterize the hedonistic vs happy distinction in your first post as being something like the difference between "I'm going to party and get wrecked and have a good time" vs "I'm just happy to be alive"? Or something else? I'm kind of suspicious of any argument that just relies on characterizing people's emotional responses to stuff as authentic vs inauthentic by an appeal to intuition / self evidence, because you're basically just going to end up regurgitating your existing prejudices...
 
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muser

Well-known member
think about all the boom bap shit, i really will never be down with it but its alot happier. They were still folks cutting each other up for a dollar so wats going on.
 
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I'm saying the Wee Glaswegian caused all the other anemic euros to suddenly get a hard on for repetitive high-hats, and Trapaholics DJ tags and gun shots because he's been filling his DJ sets full of it for years now, more or less. It was inevitable that people would only focus on the dumbest elements.

Also, rap is not miserable at all, but again, so many people hear no fuck all about it. No shots intended.
 
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