Modern Music

It’s kind of dissapointing

When you think of modern music a lot of artists come to mind. Depending on what kind of music you listen to you may think of anyone from Cardi B to Shawn Mendez. If you compare todays music to older generation’s music you might think that there’s a lot less talent involved, today I’m here to tell you why you’d be completely right to think that.

Here’s the issue, the entire music making process has evolved so much even in the last 15 years. Unfortunately, though the evolution of the creative process, a lot of the talent involved has been replaced with technology. One of my favorite genres of music is classic rock, bands like Boston and Led Zeppelin, bands that wrote and recorded everything from the drums to the instrumentals to the vocals. Today almost all instrumentals in modern music are replaced with VSTs (virtual instruments). Vocals have taken the biggest hit though, trust this coming from someone who makes their own music, you need absolutely no vocal talent to sing well thanks to a handy program called autotuned. You can literally sign off tune on purpose and try to sound as awful as possible, and autotune can make you sound like a robotic opera singer. As a musician I take advantage of many of these electronic tools. I use VSTs because I don’t have a recording room full of instruments to do everything legit, and I sometimes even use autotune to correct my voice when singing in a difficult pitch. These different tools do have their good sides, like the fact that instead of needing a whole recording studio, you can make music in your basement with a laptop and a microphone. I just find it unfortunate that people have taken advantage of them to the point where there’s almost no actual talent needed to make a billboard top 100 hit.

If you’d truly like some proof of how sad the music industry is these days, I’d recommend you check out a couple songs that made it on the billboard top 100 hits. Assuming you don’t mind a little (or a lot) or profanity, and you’re willing to lose a few hundred brain cells, look up “Gucci Gang” by artist Lil Pump and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

I just thought I’d take a second to complain about the state of music and the disappointments I’ve had recently. However there is still hope, there are some artists out there that see the value and importance of putting true effort and talent into what they create. All we can hope is that these artists continue to grow in popularity and influence the industry as a whole.

-Braden Schmidt 11-18-2019