The music of the 2010s. - Best decade in music ever amirite?

[W00K #17]

One thing I've really really loved about this decade is the "new oldschool" wave in underground/alt country and folk and bluegrass. Country music is rather unlistenable if you turn on a top 40 station, but the more underground stuff is just awesome. Folk and bluegrass are never really played on the radio, but theres been a very strong resurgence of great artists in those genres in recent years

Guys like Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers, and Jason Isbell, I'll still be listening to their songs decades from now.

 

[Freya]

Decade #2 where rap/ hip hop garbage continued to be more popular among the kids than rock.

Gross.

 

[Absolutego]

Decade #2 where rap/ hip hop garbage continued to be more popular among the kids than rock.

Gross.

It's time to admit that trend isn't reversing and rock fans are the millennial equivalent of jazz nerds.

 

[Freya]

It's time to admit that trend isn't reversing and rock fans are the millennial equivalent of jazz nerds.

Ugh.

I've listened to the hippest and most innovative jungle jive around and it all sounds like something you'd hear playing at a clothing store. The gayest and dumbest rock song still manages to be better than it.

How unfortunate.

 

[Blini Cat]

This decade was very bad for radio music but very good for underground music.

That's the thing, it's really easy to say this decade sucked because of what you might hear on the radio, but really if you dig a little online you can find the most ridiculous diversity of amazing music. It's hard for me to even characterize the decade with a sound because there is so much stuff out there.

This decade's worth of generic pop music makes me want to be dead. Worked retail while I was finishing up school and the same shit would loop on the radio for eons. It made you feel like you were slowly losing your mind.

I know shitty music exists in every decade but it feels like it gets worse and worse the more it goes on.

I've heard that as of recently, pop songs stay at the top of the charts for way longer periods of time. Whenever I go out, I routinely hear pop songs from 5 or 6 years ago. I think it's some combination of there being such a wide range of music (more choices mean the very big names stay at the top because everything is so niche except mainstream pop), as well as an increasing centralization of things like radio stations where they control the songs being played set to automatic playlists.

 

[Tour of Italy]

This decade was very bad for radio music but very good for underground music.

I was pleasantly surprised to have 70-80% of the music on my Spotify playlists end up being stuff that I never would have discovered without the service. Most of it had no way in hell of being played on traditional radio. And it’s all fairly tame in terms of specialized niche appeal, although I do have my weirdo vices.

Honestly my biggest surprise was having free music everywhere forever subsidized by a combintion of venture capitalists doing it at a loss and people who hate ads enough to go premium.

In terms of my aforementioned autistic niche tastes:

It was a good decade for Chiptunes. Nothing revolutionary, but modest growth in a subgenre I love but never would have expected to take off.

Before 2010, Anamanaguchi was basically the only game in town, but now we’ve got Slime Girls, an0va, Chipzel, (T-T)b, Kubbi, Knasibas, Danimal Cannon and more. It’s reached the point where you’ve got folks like Hyper Potions who likely don’t program on actual hardware but the sound and spirit of it is there.

A contender for my album of the decade is 2013’s The Black Box by aivi & surasshu where they harmonize piano with chip sounds (again, not sure if it was actual hardware). It blew me away and it’s still in my rotation.

It’s a shame they sold their souls to do the soundtrack for Steven Universe of all things. I would have liked to have seen what at least one more album would have looked like if they didn’t have to tie the music to animation.

On a related note, the 2010’s are the year where video game cover music exploded. It still mostly has limited appeal to autistic nerds, but it’s burst into the mainstream more than ever. Someone mentioned Lindsey Sterling, and she’s one of the tipping points for this, but there’s no shortage of YouTubers and obsure artists tapping into that sweet nostalgia by being the first in the search results.

I’m biased by experience, but I miss the sincerity of the early scene, rough though it often was. MAGfest now at over 20,000 attendees and 40 acts is a completely different beast compared to MAGfest at 800 fans and like 8 bands. Bands that as of 15 years ago were legitimately kids when the games they were covering came out.

That said, I’m not even into the music hardly at all anymore, but I still prefer newer MAGfest lineup over the low-effort assholes who think they’re clever for playing the Zelda theme while improvising piano chords.

Anyway. Yeah. Game music. It just feels weird now. I guess I’m not alone in just not being able to get excited by a rock cover of Chemical Plant Zone, but it’s weird to think of a time when I was.

This post got weird but whatever.

 

[The Crow]

The best music to come out of this decade is really regurgitated stuff from past decades.

Brostep, Trap, and Big Room House have to be some of the most idiotic trends in music this decade. Synthwave, Vaporwave, Future Funk (its debatable whether or not this is an actual new genre since its really just old 80s boogie/funk samples that were given the Daft Punk treatment, but whatever, I'm counting it) and the thrash metal revival, on the other hand, were pretty cool though.

 

[Syaoran Li]

It's time to admit that trend isn't reversing and rock fans are the millennial equivalent of jazz nerds.

Eh, I don't think it will ever get that bad since rock was mainstream a lot longer than jazz was in the grand scheme of things and you still hear rock played on mainstream radio and TV (even if it's mostly older stuff) and there's also distinct subcultures within the wider rock scene such as Metal, Goth, Punk, and Alternative, each with their own distinct musical styles and fashion aesthetics along with each one having their own unique subculture ethos.

Combine the fact that there's an increased appreciation for retro culture and the issue of music diversifying so much in the past two decades that mainstream pop and rap is losing a lot of the influence it had.

I also would not be surprised if the decline of rock music was largely driven by the Millennials and the Early Zoomers as a part of the wider backlash against the Boomers, as the Baby Boomers were the first generation to really drive forward the ascension of rock music as a cultural zeitgeist.

I'm not sure if we'll see a fully mainstream rock revival, but I'm also not going to completely rule it out either.

It's anyone's guess as to what will happen when the Millennials become as hated as the Boomers are right now and how that will affect music and pop culture.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

That's the thing, it's really easy to say this decade sucked because of what you might hear on the radio, but really if you dig a little online you can find the most ridiculous diversity of amazing music. It's hard for me to even characterize the decade with a sound because there is so much stuff out there.

That's something that's hard to get across to literal Baby Boomers: there's tons of new genres and new works made in old genres that are just as good as the old stuff. It just doesn't get played anywhere they would hear it.

Something people in general also don't appreciate is that this is the best time to be a fan of any genre. You have unlimited access to your music. If somebody would genuinely prefer their music to be popular more than to have more access to it, they're a pillock and their real desire is social validation.

The best music to come out of this decade is really regurgitated stuff from past decades.

I'm not into that sort of music, but I would agree that the good stuff is mostly old genres. It's just that in my case, those genres are things like the different kinds of rock'n'roll and indie rock/punk rock.

It was a good decade for Chiptunes. Nothing revolutionary, but modest growth in a subgenre I love but never would have expected to take off.

Before 2010, Anamanaguchi was basically the only game in town, but now we’ve got Slime Girls, an0va, Chipzel, (T-T)b, Kubbi, Knasibas, Danimal Cannon and more. It’s reached the point where you’ve got folks like Hyper Potions who likely don’t program on actual hardware but the sound and spirit of it is there.

A contender for my album of the decade is 2013’s The Black Box by aivi & surasshu where they harmonize piano with chip sounds (again, not sure if it was actual hardware). It blew me away and it’s still in my rotation.

It’s a shame they sold their souls to do the soundtrack for Steven Universe of all things. I would have liked to have seen what at least one more album would have looked like if they didn’t have to tie the music to animation.

On a related note, the 2010’s are the year where video game cover music exploded. It still mostly has limited appeal to autistic nerds, but it’s burst into the mainstream more than ever. Someone mentioned Lindsey Sterling, and she’s one of the tipping points for this, but there’s no shortage of YouTubers and obsure artists tapping into that sweet nostalgia by being the first in the search results.

I’m biased by experience, but I miss the sincerity of the early scene, rough though it often was. MAGfest now at over 20,000 attendees and 40 acts is a completely different beast compared to MAGfest at 800 fans and like 8 bands. Bands that as of 15 years ago were legitimately kids when the games they were covering came out.

That said, I’m not even into the music hardly at all anymore, but I still prefer newer MAGfest lineup over the low-effort assholes who think they’re clever for playing the Zelda theme while improvising piano chords.

Anyway. Yeah. Game music. It just feels weird now. I guess I’m not alone in just not being able to get excited by a rock cover of Chemical Plant Zone, but it’s weird to think of a time when I was.

This post got weird but whatever.

Maybe that's what our decade's real musical legacy is. Not a specific genre, but rather a way of relating to music. We're much more invested in incidental music now, and remixing (using preexisting music like an instrument itself). With regards to the last point, it's like something I believe about art and culture in general: 2010s culture and art is meme/Internet culture.