The BBC revived the tradition of the Christmas Day Top of the Pops again this year, and I witnessed it out of curiosity. Apart from watching Jools Holland’s programme when it’s on (mainly on fast forward), I have little contact with what the young folk might be into these days. What is the state of popular music in 2018?
Well, I can tell you, it’s appalling.
The first thing you notice is the vocal style that many of today’s artists are affecting to varying degrees. The missus and I are quite good at doing an impression: it involves moving your tongue back in your mouth and squeezing the vocals out through the smaller gap thus created. You also need to warble with your throat exaggeratedly. The kids seem to think it’s cool.
And the other thing you notice is the ‘tune’. On TOTP the other day, I would say that more than half the songs featured the same anodyne chord progression (if you can really dignify it with that term), just performed with slightly different production styles, rhythms and degrees of bombast – indistinguishable from the stuff you get in the Eurovision Song Contest. Truly, today’s music creators have lost the ability to dazzle the ears with a brilliant melody or even ‘riff’.
It really is just an ‘industry’ going through the motions, and kids indiscriminately lapping up whatever they are given. It isn’t just me getting old; it’s an absolute, objective decline in the ambition of pop music, musicians and listeners.
The Rational Audiophile 