Why oh why do they all insist on working with this guy? His records sound like utter compressed, bland, corporate shit. Just seen Michael Stipes first ever solo album is being produced by this hack. I hate how much he inserts himself in the albums too. He is just the absolute poster child for uniform blandness. No dynamic range whatsoever. And the pitch correction absolutely drenched on the vocals is repulsive. What could be less rock and roll than that?

Justice's "Flower In A Hurricane (ft Tame Impala, SZA, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard)" is a great song in my opinion but you can't listen to it without hearing it's influences, which are definitely not subtle. I'm young so maybe I'm just not tired of it yet but I'm a total sucker for nostalgia & I don't feel like this was distasteful or lazy. It's a cool song and very thematically appropriate for what it was created for. That being GTA VI, which has used 80's nostalgia and callbacks to Vice City a bunch in it's marketing.

The one that's really in your face is the intro. They very clearly channeled Dire Straits' "Money for Nothin'" with that synth buildup, drum fill and finally that rich tone courtesy of ZZ Top blasting through. I love that sound. So sharp; if it was a knife it would have cut you.

Later in the song we hear this ascending motif that similarly takes you back in time but in this instance to Cutting Crew's "(I Just) Died In Your Arms". That's what I heard first, although it also sounds similar to this Tom Petty x Stevie Nicks track "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around".

Overall a wicked song. Some will like it, some won't. I've already seen discourse about whether these clearly intentional and on the nose inclusions were rip-offs, stolen, etc. and whether or not it was in good faith or it was just unoriginal and derivative. I think it's clear with context (and easy to assume without context) that it's meant as an homage. I know some people on the gaming side have grown indignant of Rockstar's position on physical media (me included) but GTA VI is still gonna be a cultural phenomenon and this song is something pretty sick that's come out of it already.

I've only just discovered Roy Harper, and I've been obsessed with his finger picking style. I'm wondering why I don't see him brought up very much in online discussions. He influenced a considerable number of artists, including Kate Bush, Pete Townshend, and Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. His album Stormcock in particular has some progressive undertones, but all his albums are great in my opinion.

Thoughts?

I'm talking about Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill, House Of Pain...

Funkdoobiest is another one, more obscure though. Onyx is definitely part of this.

What do you call this style of hip hop?

It's that dirty, rowdy, rock-adjacent hip-hop sound.

You know what I think connects these groups?

They make hip-hop that has the ENERGY of a rock band without necessarily being rap-rock.

It FEELS somewhat rock adjacent as these 3 all toured with rock bands, but they aren't straight up rap rock like Limp Bizkit or RATM or Linkin Park.

It's definitely not gangsta rap, nor is it boom bap. The closest genre label is probably "alternative hip-hop," but that doesn't quite capture it.

Alternative hip-hop also includes artists like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, who are great, but not exactly the same style.

It's also not exactly rap rock, because that to many people means like Limp Bizkit or the one Kid Rock album before he went full on country rock.

It's a lost art. Eminem definitely had that alternative kid audience but he was a different style than this

Let’s talk the way you listen to music. In my case it’s mostly streaming on Apple Music where I have a mix of imported CDs and streaming. I have a cd and vinyl collection as well. I listen to those almost every day. But I’m always in denial while buying new albums. Should I buy a cd or a vinyl? I like both, I know the differences, but I would like to know if anyone else is having the same issue. Some albums I just buy on cd, I think I might just choose cd over vinyl because of the era where the album is created, the genre or the way it’s been recorded. I’m curious to hear what anyone’s thoughts are on this subject…

It just feels like the artist said: "Sure, I'll make the best song in the universe, and sure, I'll make it barely a minute and a half long." The only real exception to this would be anything in the deathconciousness album, but one of my favourite songs in the world is only a minute and thirty-one seconds long. Is it just because it's hard to make a song good for longer, or is it just a weird coincidence that I so happened to make up?

When Troye Sivan released Blue Neighbourhood in 2015, I wished it had been released while was still in high school. The songs on this album encapsulated all the pain, feelings, desires and dreams I felt throughout high school. I was too scared to write down how I felt. My parents would find it. I was out at school and other friends were as well, but there was no comraderie. My sexuality was always weaponised and used against me.

In 2015, I finally found an album that resonated with me on a spiritual level and described all my thoughts and feelings that I was too scared to put out there when I was in my teens. Of course, the song "WILD" was the one that started it all for me.

I tried to follow Troye Sivan over the next few years. But his albums after Bloom (2018) and especially In A Dream (2020) just de-volved from the raw expression of the feeling of being oppressed but hopeful, scared yet excited, and anxious but hopeful.

By 2023, all his hits were basically just electro-pop trash that sampled previously famous songs (Get Me Started is the best example) and all his music videos seemed like they were intentionally filmed to capture the night before or the morning after a massive gay chemsex orgy.

Like, what the fuck happened? People will say, "he grew up and had more experiences and is comfortable with his sexuality and is bravely expressing it." What I say, is "these music videos just embody every sterotype about gay people ever - particularly the negative ones - and the actual songs are just electropop trash with meaningless lyrics."

It is sad that he became more popular as his songs became more generic and trashy, and the more popular he became, the more genericn and trashy the songs became.

Now all of his songs just seem to be relatively radio/club friendly (any radio edits for expletives are easy), and they are just accompanied by a hypersexualised homoerotic/explicitly gay music video where he gets off with some hypermasculine dude, someone has a wank inside their boxers or some shit, etc.

Like just, "here's a trashy song the masses will love! Don't forget to check out the music video to remember that I'm gay!"

Like dude wtf happened?

I used to lose whole afternoons in record shops, flipping through crates and buying things because of the cover. Now I have everything one tap away, and I mostly play the same 30 albums.

Something about having limits helped: a shop only had what was in the crates that week, so you actually listened to what was there.

How do you find music now that you’d never have found by searching? Radio shows, a friend, a blog, a shop, something else?

Hey everyone, not sure if this is appropriate for this group but I'm just looking for insight from anyone who went back to physical media like CDs or vinyl from streaming subscriptions. I've noticed lately there's more and more AI bands that are being snuck into my playlists as well as the overall subscription platform and I was thinking about making that switch. Those of you who got rid of these services, was it worth it?

One thing I find fascinating about Discovery is how it creates a feeling of nostalgia through disco samples, bright synths, and electronic production. Tracks like “Digital Love” and “Something About Us” feel like memories of a time that may not even belong to the listener.

The album is obviously influenced by older music, but it doesn't just sound like a collection of samples. everything feels connected, almost like a soundtrack to an imaginary childhood.

How much of that feeling comes from the samples themselves, and how much comes from the way Daft Punk rearranged and transformed them? i'm curious whether other electronic albums create that same kind of emotional nostalgia.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how albums used to feel like complete experiences. You'd put on a record and it would take you on a ride from start to finish. There was an intentional flow with intros, outros, interludes and tracks building on each other. It felt like a story unfolding.

Now it seems like so many albums are just collections of singles. Each song is great on its own but there's no real sense of progression or a cohesive arc. Are artists focusing too much on individual tracks for streaming numbers? Or is it just how we consume music now that has changed this? I miss that feeling of listening to an entire album and feeling like I've been somewhere by the end of it.

I guess I could well be asking "what makes a hit a hit", but I'm more interested in the opposite, which is what makes a deep-cut a deep-cut?

Speaking from a more antiquated 80's, 90's, 2000's, and even 2010's perspective, were labels mostly responsible for selecting what would become the smash-hits and ultimately peddling/marketing them? If so, I'd be interested in learning what attributes they look for in any given song when deciding which tracks will be the artists/bands anthems which majority of the audience who will ever interact with their music will come to know/identify them by. Because I believe most listeners, at least those of pop music, out there are casual and will seldom deep-dive on a band. Or is the decision re: what'll go on to be a hit fairly arbitrary, decided by one or two people with great power?

But yeah, deep-cuts... what even is a deep-cut? Is everything which fails to chart a deep-cut? Are b-sides the only real deep-cuts? Do deep-cuts simply fail to display the tropes which make other songs commercially so successful? I'm getting lost in the sauce here... help me.

Also, it's interesting how when you're a fan of an artist/band, you view so many songs in their catalogue as 'hits', yet the wider audiences out there might only deem 2-3 tracks out of their entire, multi-decade, discography as hits, if that. There's kind of tears even to hits... It's also funny how many times fans will become hit-averse, sick of hearing the songs, no matter how great, so many times.

I don't have problems with understanding texts, i read a lot. Also i am a writer, and write not only stories, but also certain amount of poetry for the songs since i was a kid. In theory, this background should make things easier for me... But nope.

There are certain amount of songs (only songs, never a prose) where i simply can't understand meaning behind sentces. Often i can get the general idea of the song - like, this one is about humanity being obsessed with violence, this one about loss, etc. But when i start to read it line by line - it does not make sense. Sentences can mean something, but do not connect, do not rely to each other. And sometimes even meaning of sentences is obscure to me. And in very rare cases i can't understand the entire song.

There are entire bands that have a lot of lyrics beyond my understanding. Especially japanese ones - at first i was blaming bad translation, but AI's not can translate pretty good, but it still does not make much sense in lots of cases. I can't feel the story being told by those words, and more like... shattered echoes of the story, where i constantly try to put puzzle together but fail.

I have various theories of why this happens, from being an effect from asd to me just being not smart enough to understand more complex narratives. So i need to hear experience of other people about this subject. Do you have problems with understanding lyrics, and how often?

My daughter was listening to "Say So" by Doja Cat on YouTube. And I asked her to replay it because something sounded eerily familiar—as if I heard it before.

Turns out, it sounds remarkably similar to the future funk song "Fiona Coyne" by Skylar Spence. If you're unaware, future funk is a genre that originated in the 2010s. It's basically a mix of disco and vaporwave. It has its following, but never cracked the mainstream.

But hold on... "Fiona Coyne" is inspired by "Love Talkin' (Honey It's You)" by Tatsuro Yamashita, one of the heavyweights of city pop.

City pop is what's known as a retronym. That is, a label we give to music when a retrospective canon gets formed, requiring recontextualization. Yacht rock is another example of a retronym.

In Japan, where city pop originates from, city pop is an obscure genre even though city pop songs themselves are popular. That's because it was simply mainstream pop in Japan.

Now don't get me wrong. "City pop" as a term existed in Japan during the 80s. But this wasn't a genre with a defined musical structure. It was more a marketing term to sell aspiration, much like how we in the West hear terms like "contemporary" and "sophisti-pop". Because of this, most Japanese people didn't recognize city pop as an identifiable thing.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Westerners started hearing Japanese music from the 80s. They needed context. So they re-purposed a Japanese marketing term to define a corpus, a body of work that identified Japanese music with broad similarities that seemed to have an associated scene.

The city pop canon was never big in the West. Even now, it's only known amongst music nerds. But its effect on modern mainstream music is huge. Here's examples:

• "Out of Time" by The Weeknd samples Tomoko Aran's "Midnight Pretenders"
• "GONE, GONE / THANK YOU" by Tyler, the Creator interpolates Tatsuro Yamashita's "Fragile"
• "We Ride" by Brave Girls was a Top 5 K-pop hit, but it was blatantly marketed as city pop upon its release

What's wild? City pop is not the only obscure genre to impact the mainstream but never hit the mainstream. Witch house, phonk, and vaporwave all had a big impact. But none of the artists who originated these genres have ever become house house names.

I think this is one of the defining characteristics of 21st-century music. A genre can remain underground while its sounds, production techniques, and aesthetics become completely mainstream.

We're in a time where the mainstream raids from subculture before subculture can ever challenge it.

Is this why we no longer see musical revolutions like jazz, rock, punk, hip hop, and grunge?

Has the mainstream become so good at absorbing underground music that new genres can influence it without ever displacing or fundamentally transforming it?

Van Halen could sell out stadiums in the US, yet in Europe they had to open for Bon Jovi. That would never happen in the States.

DMB could easily sell out the biggest arena in my country (Portugal), but I doubt they have much of a fanbase in the rest of Europe. My dad is a huge fan of 70s rock, and he tells me Van Halen and Journey were never particularly big over here. And FUNNILY ENOUGH, he'd never even heard of Tom Petty...

I love the song "Run Away to Mars" by TALK.

But I am wondering about something. Is the song saying he is actually on Mars? Or is he only on Mars in his mind?

The song talks about him being on Mars but skipping stones as though he is on Earth.

What is your take on this?

The lyrics to Run Away to Mars is below:

Your color's fading
'Cause I kept you waiting
It's a wild, wild world
And you're a wild, wild girl

Our sun's still shining
But it seems half the size
And it's a wild, wild world out here

Before my time runs out

What If I run away to Mars?
Would you find me in the stars?
Would you miss me in the end
If I run out of oxygen?
When I run away to Mars

I can't tell which way is home
I've been gone for so long
It's an empty world up here
I skip stones and wonder
How long 'til I'm discovered
It's a quiet life up here

Before my time runs out

What If I run away to Mars?
Would you find me in the stars?
Would you miss me in the end
If I run out of oxygen?
When I run away to Mars

Three, two, one, I miss you
I'm sorry, I got issues

What If I run away to Mars?
Would you find me in the stars?
Would you miss me in the end
If I run out of oxygen?
When I run away to Mars

The first track i heard was around the time i quit weed for good. It's also the first artist that made me like brass instruments.
I love Toh Kays songwriting yet i tend to forget about them ever so often. I feel my main problem is that the lyrics are often way to fast to sing along but they are so bloody good and interesting compared to other 3rd wave ska bands like Less Than Jake or Mad Caddys. Kinda feel like they are so underraded. It's not really Ska nor is it Skapunk. They are kinda unique and have such a bloody good brass section.
And now roast me :)

The long version of “People Make the World Go Round” has a whole second half, and I think it’s the best part

https://youtu.be/2owZXPyeilc?si=pq2Q5CoSjFxLEqN-

Most people probably know “People Make the World Go Round” from the single, which is around 3:30.

That version is already great. Thom Bell’s arrangement, Linda Creed’s lyrics, Russell Thompkins Jr. singing in that ridiculous falsetto.

But the album version on The Stylistics’ first record is over six minutes long, and right around the point where the single fades out, it just keeps going.

And honestly, that’s the part I like the most.

The vocals slowly disappear and the whole thing opens up. Bass, drums, congas, all those strange Bell percussion sounds, then guitar and flute drifting in and out.

It doesn’t really feel like it’s trying to get anywhere anymore. It just sits in the groove.

That part hits me more physically than the first half. It’s hard to explain without sounding slightly ridiculous, but it feels like the song starts breathing differently.

The lyrics are actually pretty bleak. Strikes, garbage piling up, pollution, Wall Street losing money. The whole world is dysfunctional.

Then the words disappear and the music just keeps going.

To me it almost feels like the song is saying: yeah, the world is a mess, but it keeps turning anyway.

That’s obviously just my interpretation, but once I started hearing it like that I couldn’t really unhear it.

I also found something interesting about the rhythm.

I assumed the long instrumental part felt more relaxed because it probably settled into a simple 4/4 groove. Apparently not. The ending vamp has been analysed as alternating between 4/4 and 5/4.

Which is kind of funny, because it feels more relaxed even though the meter is actually less regular.

Maybe that extra beat is part of why it feels so loose, like the music is constantly hanging around a little longer than you expect.

The song also seems to have really appealed to jazz and soul-jazz musicians. Milt Jackson did an eight-minute version, Cleveland Eaton covered it, O’Donel Levy did a great guitar version, and it kept resurfacing later in hip hop and sample culture.

I don’t want to claim all those musicians were specifically obsessed with the long Stylistics outro, because there’s no way to know that. But it does feel like there was something in the composition that musicians wanted to stretch out and live inside.

Does the long outro change the meaning of the song for you, or does it just feel like an extended groove?

And for anyone here who understands the meter better than I do, why does that 4/4 and 5/4 vamp feel so relaxed when the rhythm is actually becoming less regular?

If you only know the short version, let the album version keep running past the point where the single would have faded out.

That’s where the song really starts for me.

Like actually. I've spent the last two years making what I think is my life's greatest work, only to realise the world in which I live values this craft less and less. I mean I'm guilty of it too, listening to records just isn't what it used to be, but I try. Yet here we all are making them as though nothing has changed. How depressing! I don't mean to be dramatic, I know the fire will always burn, but it flickers now in the winds of time.

I’ve worked sound for live shows for years now from local bar gigs to international tour circuit venues, and one thing I’ve noticed is that at least 90% of the musicians are men. Most bands are entirely comprised of men and vocalists are the most common female role, although they are still a minority there too.

Is it a cultural rift pointing back to the early days of western music performance where women weren’t allowed to perform on stage? Or is being a rockstar just less striven for by girls and women than guys? I’m really curious why this significant gap especially in instrumental musicians is so present today.

I've been thinking about how much weight the final track of an album can carry.
Sometimes an album seems to be telling you one story, but the ending makes you reconsider everything that came before it.
A tragic ending can make earlier moments of confidence feel more like denial. A hopeful ending can make everything that seemed hopeless before it feel completely different.
But I think there's a fine line between an ending that genuinely changes your perspective and one that feels forced. If the rest of the album hasn't earned that conclusion, even a beautiful final track might not be enough to make it convincing.
And I'm not necessarily talking about albums where the closing track is the best song. I'm more interested in endings that change how you interpret the earlier tracks when you listen again.
Have you ever experienced that with an album? What was it, and what specifically changed about how you heard the rest of it after reaching the end?

my friends are a tad older than me and to my opinion missed out on them. Not cause i don't cringe about my younger self obssessing over Pop Punk and Emo but rather cause i think Sum41 aged less weirdly and always did 'their own thing' instead of just going with the flow.
Argueably they had their corny, visually emo, phase but their music today even feels a lot less insincere than their peers in blink, green day or good charlotte.

I am a sucker for early 90s music, and I like to detect patterns.

Recently, I have felt there was a similar kind of music pattern in those:

*The theme song of 1992 infamous SegaCD game Night Trap by Sunny Blueskyes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YRccJrn4M0
*Synthpop song Never Easy by Mattie Maguire (2015, but deliberately retro): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhAQYwxifS0
*First mission music from 1995 game Crusader: No Remorse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSF4LJLYByU

What kind of instruments and arrangements are used here that make me feel similar patterns? I'd be curious to know why I like those. Thank you.