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Oh, I’m intimately familiar with this. I cannot count the number of times I’ve had to explain (unsuccessfully, as if my words were harmlessly impacting a brick wall) that “death metal” and “screamo” are actual distinct genres of music, and not just interchangeable terms meaning “any music with unclean vocals.”
You are of course correct that it’s common for the average person, with a passive approach to music and zero music theory training, to lack the ability to discern somewhat subtle differences between pieces of unfamiliar music.
What I find bizarre is the claim that pop music used to be more differentiated and varied, but that it has recently started to all sound the same.
Yes, I’m aware that some YouTubers, courting the engagement of boomers (both literal and spiritual), have produced some videos claiming to demonstrate objectively that all modern pop music sounds the same. As someone who is an avid listener of music spanning several decades, though, I’m just not seeing (hearing?) it. As you’re getting at, it’s almost certainly just that most of the people commenting here have no interest in any music produced after their mid-20’s at the latest, and thus they have no ear for it.
Depending on how you define "recently", is it really so bizarre? Why couldn't popular music be moneyballed into a
garbageincredibly formulaic product like so many other things?Again, the claim is superficially plausible as long as you don’t actually listen to the music in question. Yes, I’d be perfectly willing to believe that pop music had been reduced to an undifferentiated miasma of formulaic crap, except for when I actually listen to it that’s not the reality I encounter.
Like, I don’t read modern YA fiction, so if you made an effortful case to me that it’s all just formulaic indistinguishable garbage, I might be willing take you at face value because I don’t have any firsthand experience with the phenomenon you’re discussing. If someone who reads a lot of the books in question were to push back on your claim, though, I would have to take their claims seriously and actually investigate it myself, or else remain studiously neutral.
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I'll also add that the take I find most bizarre is when people say that modern music is corporate. Pop music has never offered more opportunity outside the structure of major labels.
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People have a lot of trouble understanding that they, too, are subject to biases. The brain perceives at the level of its baseline skill, and it stops processing information as quickly as possible. It's the source of the claim that Asians/negroes/blonde sorority girls all look alike.
It's much more fun to get on ones high horse about one's own superiority.
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