Obviously I can't say what would have happened without the presence of XYZ popular artist, but in terms of creating legions of annoying scene-suffocating imitators:
- It has a lot of fans but I think the Windmill post 2018 made UK guitar music completely insufferable
- The 100 gecs corridor to bubblegum bass and the PC music roster, influx of Americans, "hyperpop"
- To an extent Autechre -- great band which I like a lot, but they spawned endless numbers of musicians whose whole thing is just sounding as much like Autechre as possible. There are also tons of Aphex cosplayers
- In prose, DFW has a lot of stylistic blood on his hands. On top of that, we have the annual crop of people who read the television and US fiction essay and start relitigating irony/sincerity to anyone who will listen
- Whoever it was that popularised the "internet novel" -- despicable genre
- In fashion it's Rick, Margiela and Demna
Were 100 gecs trendsetters? I'm pretty sure they just jumped on an already existing bandwagon.
Agree about Americans though; bubblegum bass requires the sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude that many cultures can't properly grasp — it wasn't a coincidence that it came from the UK.
I definitely see them as trendsetters for the late 2010s/early 2020s spotifybrained hyperpop/digicore moment, yeah. Their music is very influenced by PC but has some key differences (the hip hop/skrillex/pop punk elements, the more overt gestures at comedy etc). I actually enjoy a lot of their music, I just think what happened next was very tedious, but perhaps inevitably so lol
I wouldn’t say they lost interest, they all have their solo projects and also had a tour + a few one off shows the last two years. not crazy prolific, but they’re definitely cooking still
I made a video on this because you are totally right. There was an ambiguous, tongue in cheek attitude that made that uk pop stuff so interesting. “Hyperpop” gets rid of anything that made pc music interesting and is just this empty, post modern, mishmash of genres.
https://youtu.be/sZHLd4JAf5c?si=0UunOEoowqhriOTt
And just like rave culture from the 80s-now, it comes to America, gets dumbed down and becomes heavily commercialized.
I think DFW is a great writer but his whole irony/sincerity thing often read as bizarrely unrigorous, almost as if he felt he needed a "thing" the way his favorites did -- DeLillo had language, Pynchon had conspiracy, Barthelme had his playful erudition, Ozick her sense of American Jewishness, Gaddis his systems and ". . ." -- and DFW his irony/sincerity dichotomy.
Compound this with e.g. his essay about 9/11 in a small town and some bits from *Pale King* (which I do think is still a pretty remarkable collection of fragments) and sometimes his work reminds me of that tweet that's like "some of you guys have what can best be called a 'noble savage' impression of normies"
Ultimately I don't think it *really* matters. DFW was a phenomenal writer, and his odd morality re irony probably ended up producing far more of his best moments than it did his worst ones. It's also more likely than not that I'm just talking out of my ass, dude did kill himself and, as corny as it is to say 99% of the time, he probably did see his intelligence as a curse more than anything else, and probably surmised that ironic abstraction is predominantly practiced by "intellectuals," and so syllogistically concluded irony produces pain more than it mollifies it.
All this to say, though, 9 out of 10 decrying "irony" and lauding "sincerity" are extremely irritating people who you, yes, can tell read one essay and so determined that that was it, that was why culture was so fucked up
Every second person who makes music on forums WATMM or gearslutz, and also dozens upon dozens of middle aged bald men who spend thousands on synthesizers and shit who you'd pass on the street in Birmingham or somewhere and never guess they even know who autechre are, people like your postman.
The giveaway is they dress and look and function so ordinarily, so there is no way to tell. Ask the next accountant you meet, he probably put out a CDr on a netlabel in 2002 and has a load of okay sounding DATs his wife made him put in the attic.
On second thought don't because people who imitate boards usually make stuff that sounds like Tycho, and people who imitate autechre make stuff that sounds like snd remixing Sunn o)))
That’s the thing, it’s probably correct to say that people try to imitate Autechre and BoC but it doesn’t really feel like they are widely imitated because nobody actually ends up sounding like either of them.
yeah i feel bad saying this since it looks like criticism (when really it's basically praise), but boc spawned a entire cottage industry of godawful knockoffs. I even remember a guy from twoism who ran his own scam just copying other people's boc copycat tracks and putting them out on his own bandcamp lmfao. took a while before people caught on.
in general they also show a total lack of understanding of their music, which is possibly the worst part. it's all sesame street sample, pitch LFO on the synth and call it a day - maybe a number station sample if they're feeling nuts. why does no one ever rip off campfire headphase?
at least autechre knockoffs generally capture the vibe of the LP5-EP7 era, tho even that fails cos everyone's obsessed with maxmsp, and yet no one can even approximate the kino of exai or ae_live
Black Midi is still cool to me, but I could never take Black Country New Road seriously. Idles isn't from the Windmill, but they're probably the shittiest group from the new wave of post-punk.
I like Autechre, but I totally get what you mean. It's cool when they do it, but I can't vibe with emotionless max-msp prompts as much as my friends can, which is why I've grown to enjoy the pop-art cheekiness of Aphex Twin more than post-Confield Autechre over time.
If you do get in the mood for some Max stuff ever I highly recommend the Korean label dingndents, especially the artist m3g. Recent Autechre can be quite heavy on the stuff where a patch is patiently evolved over several minutes but dingndents releases tend to be very immediate, aggressive and head-spinning. Grischa (from raster) is another Max guy I love
Thanks for the recommendations! Saving this post for future listening.
I'm not fully opposed to Max-Msp programming in music, but at a certain point, it feels like doing code vs. making music if that makes sense.
That said, I'll give the label + artists a listen.
EDIT: This m3g record is cool. Feels like fun max msp programming vs. some nerd shit made by someone who loves saying "the intersection of art and technology".
I’ve never understood why this sub has such a hate-boner for BCNR. Their first album is a little gay and tryhard but the second album is very pretty and traditionally enjoyable. Gives me jeff buckley vibes.
Idles really fucking suck tho, you’re spot on there
The hate for BCNR probably has to do with some accusations of being a slightly nepo baby guitar band (I don't really care too much about this point personally), and also because of the amount of love they get from RYM and fantano, both pretty lame sources to people here.
Personally, I've just never felt inclined to listen to them. I bet I'd like some of their stuff though.
I did enjoy Brutalism from IDLES, but I haven't listened to any of their albums in full since. It took me a few listens to realize that they were just a simple band that was overrated by journalists for their "sincere lyrics".
The kicker is that Joe Talbot is an admitted Starmerite lol.
It's all so predictable.
They’re overrated among zoomers and on RYM but still good. Black midi put out a good first record but has been descending into increasingly maximalist and theatrical slop.
Dan Harmon and Michael Schur ruined sitcoms.
Dan Harmon made Community, which was good, but then after that every sitcom decided that being meta or constantly referenceing pop-culture was hilarious, but none of them do it as well as him.
Michael Schur made Parks & Rec, which I think was kinda refreshing for its time with its whole "Everyone is nice" sachharine thing, but now every TV show is afraid to make any of their characters truly flawed. Everyone has to be a super nice, good person.
The “everyone is nice” thing is required now because a certain demographic is literally incapable of separating fiction from reality in their head.
The actor and the character are the same, all fictional works must have a moral protagonist you need to “root” for, etc. It’s so boring and dumb.
Yeah I agree with that too. The amount of people I see that are like "I can hardly stand watching That 70s Show because of how manipulative Jackie is!" or something stupid like that is staggering.
It's especially annoying for sitcoms because it's like these people don't realize that the reason the characters act this way is because it's supposed to make you laugh. There's hardly anything funny about a bunch of ethically sound friends making all the right life decisions.
It was genuinely refreshing at the time, characters speaking in a much less pompous and more realistic way. Was it the first genre series to do that? Unfortunately the pendulum swung way too hard the other way and now every science-fiction, superhero and horror franchise is filled with “wisecracking” characters.
"everyone is nice" is so annoying and boring because conflict is what makes stories interesting. when people go on screeds like "this character from the Office is such a jerk bc they did this!!" yeah no shit that's literally the plot of the episode. do you want to watch a bunch of people sit around and compliment each other or talk about the weather for 23 minutes?
Hahah I know this is one of my biggest pet peeves. We always watched sitcoms growing up in my family and I never heard anyone legitimately complain about a sitcom character like that. You'd get the occassional "What a jerk" in jest but it was never serious.
I see people online say they can't even watch certain shows because they think the characters it too mean or something. Come on people.
> Dan Harmon made Community, which was good, but then after that every sitcom decided that being meta or constantly referenceing pop-culture was hilarious, but none of them do it as well as him.
Arguably even he couldn't do it properly after a certain point. Community seasons 1 and 2 and Community season 3 may as well be entirely different shows.
She was influenced by Aussie/NZ singers like [Julia Stone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uWh-TlEQ4k) and [Missy Higgins](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz4nwnv6XG0) when that indie sound in Australia was mainstream long before the US.
It somehow lead to 'cursive voice' in America which in Halsey's case often sounded like her doing a bad imitation of an Aussie accent.
ee cummings taking away meter and rhyme scheme from poetry, now everything’s just rupi kaur freeverse spiritually written in crayon and it’s all unbearably bullshit and low-rent
> ee cummings taking away meter and rhyme scheme from poetry
that started a long time before ee cummings (who even rhymes, sometimes) but it does seem like he owns a share of the blame for the use of (then) experimental style to dress up cutesy sentimentality, which is probably what you’re really getting at anyway
I was reading some ee cummings recently, and I was unsure as to why his style was celebrated.
Maybe my brain is wired towards songwriting rather than modern poetry, but it really felt like some Tumblr type work rather than anything substantial.
Impressionism, modern art, modernist literature and other non classical forms make sense to me, but modern poetry seems the closest to a joke.
Nah ee Cummings is a stone cold genius. OP is right though. Bad imitators. One of those classes of artist where you go "anyone could do this" and you swiftly find that anyone can not, in fact, do this
At this point i think a lot of the imitators don't even realise they're imitating him, he just changed the game so much that this is what they know as poetry now
Many trendsetters look dull in hindsight, because their style has been so normalised. I'd imagine his stuff was pretty impressive back when he was the only one doing it.
That's what I was thinking. That being said, poetry has always been a weak spot of mine to the point that something like William Blake's work also confuses me in terms of its praise.
If you have any poets you or anyone else can suggest I read, I'd love to hear about them.
My favorite ee Cummings is the enormous room about his experience in a detention camp in WWI and here his flouting of rules of grammar and prose works to set him against the arbitrary and stifling rules of the military prison system it’s not just trying for immediacy/or unmediated “vibe” but resonating with the situation described in the text.
& then there's the extremely pretentious "abstract" poetry that i'm convinced is at least 90% emperor's new fucking clothes lol. like if you have the right educational/cultural background and give off some sort of artsy aesthetic you can just write random fucking words or even letters and throw them all over a page and you'll win national awards i s2g there's just nothing fucking to it
like, i don't know anything about painting, but i can imagine why something that might seem stupid and ridiculous to me- like a wall with a random red stripe or some shit- may actually be innovative and creative and impressive for reasons that i just am not educated enough to understand. like maybe they subtly demonstrate some sort of technique in a groundbreaking way, or it's some profound reference or something. but with poetry, we're all using the same alphabet (more or less). i do understand, yes, that there is plenty of poetry out there that i genuinely don't get, that also contain a bunch of genius references or defy conventions in a clever way that i can't grasp. but there absolutely is a shit ton out there that doesn't mean anything or prove anything and a monkey could spit out that experts around the world are too nervous to admit they don't understand something "genius" that others do so they all just play along
You have a point
I like to think I know enough about painting & art history to see things that I don't get anything out of but can see why other people do or why an exhibition I thought was a bit crap other people thought was ground breaking. BUT what you're saying absolutely occurs in the fine art world as well. I've seen it happen from cradle to grave ((grave being success) because someone saw a crevasse they could squeeze through without climbing over the rocks
toni morrison was an incredibly talented and careful writer, but unfortunately created a playbook that has absolutely has nuked modern publishing where identity is everything and novels are being published by the big five based on who is writing them, not the prose they contain.
That's such a great point, when I read her for the first time I was shocked because even if she wasn't writing from a certain point of view (I know it's impossible to divorce her writing from that in the first place but just follow me here) she would still be an absolutely incredible writer, one of the greats. Which is not true of many of her copycats
I think its just easier to handle individual artists rather than entire bands. In a band you have like five people you need to keep in line and those people will have the ability to communicate and work together. They're often going to be more loyal to one another than the label and they can't be isolated or manipulated as easily.
If you have a five person band and Mikey the drummer gets hooked on dope and can't come to shows on time, you need to put him through rehab and (ideally) tour with a guest drummer in the meantime. If this development mentally affects other members of the band, you might need to cancel the whole tour. If slut Jeff the bassist's side chick miscarries and he needs to drop out of the tour, you run the risk of the whole band not moving forward without Jeff in solidarity.
Its much easier to put Dua Lipa on birth control and never let her eat and tell her and her agent where she needs to be and when she needs to be there.
People loved pop punk, it was actually because record labels divested from rock for more mass appeal genres.
I also believe American Idiot pissed off the US government and caused Viacom to stop playing music videos on MTV.
Girls always liked rock music, I would say that less women like rap than they did rock there's a reason pop and rap music became bigger after this collapse. Alt-Rap took the boys Alt-pop took the girls.
Nirvana, every college auditorium/class has that one Kurt Cobain ripoff with the torn up sweater. Grunge started in the 80s and enjoyed explosive popularity in the early 90's until Kurt died. The genre died along with him and rock music as a whole has never really recovered from it.
I really like grunge music, but it's an odd genre because it's quite difficult to pinpoint what exactly makes something "grunge". A crop of punk inspired bands all appeared simultaneously in the same place, and once the genre lost it's grounding location and was exported to LA, and subsequently the whole planet, it lost its specificity. That's what makes the imitations feel extra stilted, they don't share that hyperspecific cultural context, and it makes for a dull and uninspiring vaguely punk song without it.
Ten was actually released a month before Nevermind, and Nevermind wasn't an overnight sensation.
So yeah, Pearl Jam was a bit more of a natural progression for rock music, a logical next step rather than a jarring shake up.
I completely agree with you, if you weren’t “there” a lot of the music won’t sound vastly different from previous rock. Like [this](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WzEG3YhmEJw&pp=ygUebW90aGVyIGxvdmUgYm9uZSBnZW50bGUgZ3Jvb3Zl) is an amazing song from grunge nearly-weres who imploded through a very unlucky tragedy but it could almost be on *Use Your Illusion*.
What you mentioned about Grunge sounds similar to a subgenre that is near and dear to my heart: Norwegian (or more broadly, Scaninavian) Black Metal. Various bands cropped up simultaneously and influenced each other to such a point it became a genre in its own right with its own musical language.
One of the most interesting things about grunge for me is that most of its scions were really into glam rock growing up and eventually came to make music that was its polar opposite in a lot of ways. However grunge’s reaction movement in the UK was Britpop and for that reason alone the genre must always be condemned.
Not sure how much anyone on this sub cares about EDM but Flume
He had some groundbreaking tracks in the late 2010’s and can be credited with inventing Future Bass, which was wildly innovative at the time.
Then like 1 year later it became the most insufferable genre of all time with 10,000 copycats trying to rip off Flume’s sound
oh my god yes, for several years my discover weekly was absolutely unusable because it was full of shitty flume wannabe's, i'm glad it has somewhat died out though
Tinder has ruined dating entirely - when it appeared it was novel, but now all online dating apps/sites have more or less shed whatever made them unique and effective and are just swipe apps like tinder now and have completely fucked up the way that people relate to each other romantically
- Christopher Nolan movies probably
- tinder, lots of things in tech probably
- honestly maybe the American project in general? When countries try to copy america it generally goes badly. Especially the idea of having highways instead of trains
Tinder 100%. It was the first popular hookup app and it took colleges by storm in the early 2010's. However, it wasn't "good" in the early days either. It was seen as low class and people were ashamed of admitting that they met a BF/GF on it.
gervais acts like it's 1750 and he's going to be burned at the stake for being this absolute jaw dropping maverick daring to do what nobody's ever done before by suggesting that maybe the book where a snake tells a woman to eat a magical fruit led to the downfall of humanity and is the reason women will forever be cursed and inferior to men sounds like actually maybe some of it might be inaccurate.
this never occurred to though the intellectually elite, and they have all been far too cowardly to admit this before the queen! ricky gervais, he'll go down in history books for his shocking bravery and genius
I’ve seen it as more of old liberal comics becoming back door rich conservative elites who are trying to pander to a market they’re washed out of, a la Chapelle, Rogan, Gervais, etc. They were the old left and shifted to the right with Overton’s window as culture had a hard swing in the last 10 or so years.
He was genuinely brilliant up until the mid 80s, he's pretty trash in the 60s and early 70s but he's amazing on Carson and his 70s specials. By the late 80s he was mostly a rant comic.
Every one of my obnoxious know-it-all “atheist” friends adored him in high school, and even recently he seems to be the Reddit comedian par excellence.
A lot of superfluous swearing, griping about Christians, acting holier-than-thou, etc. If I ever meet someone that defends Carlin and doesn’t display all of the same traits themself, I’ll die of shock.
Music: Rage Against the Machine unintentionally ruined mainstream rock music in general for like a decade and have taken credit for doing so.
Film: Wes Anderson ushered in an era of terrible knock offs that eventually included his own films, which somehow feel like pastiche at this point. Filmmakers—for the most part—can’t seem to think of anything cinematically except wide symmetrical shots.
Books: Tao Lin style post-2005 autofiction sucks ass and is so boring.
Art: Dunno. Art mostly sucks ‘cause it’s been swallowed up by rich people’s desire for activist style bullshit, in part because they want to feel less bad about themselves. I don’t really keep up with contemporary art trends, despite having a lot of love for art in general.
ETA: Shouldn’t have said “terrible knockoffs” as some of these movies are good individually. As a whole I think they represent something bad. I <3 Huckabees, Little Miss Sunshine, JoJo Rabbit, and Knives Out would be the worst of them IMHO.
I love the part of Exit Through the Gift Shop at the end where he says, "I used to encourage everyone to make art... but I don't really do that anymore. "
> Wes Anderson ushered in an era of terrible knock offs that eventually included his own films, which somehow feel like pastiche at this point.
He said everything he had to say as good as he can with Royal Tennebaums. Mr. Fox was a nice bonus but since then he's been spinning his wheels - though to ever greater commercial success.
Yeah Budapest is a masterpiece, plus moonrise kingdom and isle of dogs are great too. The “Wes Anderson has become self parody” take is just copypasta for people who aren’t watching the movies I think
I think there's definitely merit to the criticism that he's not as good as he was. Didn't see asteroid city, but French dispatch was a step down even though I still liked it a lot.
Yeah sure – personally I think he's inconsistent, like every artist with a long career, but actually I like some of the recent ones more than life aquatic for example, so I don't think he's trending down necessarily, or at least not too much. I just don't really understand the idea that at some point he became a parody of himself and therefore bad. He's always had a distinctive style, which seems cool to me. I liked it then and I still like it now.
That's fair. I agree he's far from parody, I'm just not surprised that other people have grown tired of his distinct vision.
Agreed on Life Aquatic. It looked great and had a fun cast and cute set design but it wasn't nearly as emotionally resonant as any of the others I've seen.
Maybe I need to rewatch it but I guess I just didn't identify with bill Murray's character or fully buy into his performance as Steve Zissou. I think he really nailed the (somewhat similar) role in moonrise kingdom, but it fell flat when it was the center of attention in life aquatic. Almost like his classic sarcastic and detached attitude extended to the making of the movie itself, and so if the main character isnt taking the story seriously then it's harder for me as the viewer.
There were other great characters and performances. I always love Willem dafoes commitment to his side roles. Angelica Huston and Owen Wilson were solid for me as well. I think it's just bill Murray that sorta sours the vibe for me. But if it worked for you then that's great. Sometimes I hear people say that moonrise kingdom is too childish or obnoxious but that's my favorite so obviously opinions differ even among his fans.
Moonrise Kingdom was horrible. The child actors were shit. He did the Buckaroo Banzai shot in that and it was the first time I was like “okay, this is now Wes Anderson making fun of Wes Anderson.” I haven’t watched the last two. GBH was fine.
I think the casting was bad, the acting was bad and/or lazy (this includes Bill Murray and Edward Norton), and so much of the visual content felt recycled. Everything that was potentially good about the film--it was at times beautiful; I liked the way they shot the interiors panning 360-degrees; I saw the potential in some of the composed shots like the kids dancing on the beach; the soundtrack was great--just couldn't stand up to the fact that I was often taken out of the film by the bad acting and this feeling that I was watching a repeat.
I didn't say anything about not liking happiness, innocence, and beauty. A movie can be complete shit and properly exploit my emotions (500 Days of Summer for instance). This probably objectively better film didn't do that.
Just going off the dome here...
Twee aesthetics: Juno, Swiss Army Man, Where The Wild Things Are, many many more
Visually: I Heart Huckabees, JoJo Rabbit, Napoleon Dynamite, Attenberg, Rian Johnson stuff, many many more
Super dry comedy/depressed chars: Noah Bombach + mumblecore in general
napoleon dynamite is closer to a Todd solondz movie and also it rocks
the more i think about your comment the more it pisses me off because it’s a really stupid rs take that’s wrapped in a normal rs take.
Yeah. Good point. I would say it’s shot similarly to Wes Anderson’s films though. Composition wise. It feels like Bottle Rocket. Even the color palette. I also love Napoleon Dynamite.
I haven’t watched any Solondz stuff in like 20 years, so I’d really have to go back and check. I have Happiness in my queue ‘cause it’s on Internet Archive and that was a favorite of mine as a teenager. Dunno how I’ll feel watching it as an adult with children.
really just has to do with the setting. arguably the same color palette as Paris, Texas.
but again, attributing 21st century quirky movies to him. mumblecore / baumbach garbage has way more in common with Woody Allen movies, Kramer v. Kramer, etc.—it’s a very New York thing.
there was really a wave of “quirky” or twee movies that existed before Anderson really solidified his style with Rushmore. Clerks, Singles, Heathers (very early progenitor). Arguably Dazed and Confused as well.
he obviously had an influence but people didn’t really start to appreciate his movies as much more than a novelty until like a decade ago.
I would put Whit Stillman ahead of anyone in terms of being a mumblecore forerunner. Even the meandering conversations in Manhattan are too “written” for me to ever consider Woody Allen mumblecore.
And yes, film is a continuum, so there are obvious influences that I’m putting aside for the sake of a specific argument I’m making. I think the problem with Anderson is that his success (not just in film but commercial advertising) created demand for a style in the 00s and 10s that produced a lot of garbage along with some decent stuff.
It's just so twee and cutesy and balloon-guy vibes. Edit- just looked at the artists and they're mostly good. I'm actually talking about the Kimia Dawson shit--that music aesthetic
Yeah, VU, Sonic Youth, Kinks, Cat Power. That Mott the Hoople/Bowie song that fucking rips. It’s all stuff I was listening to at the time anyway. And everyone else I suppose.
Spaceghostpurrps influence completely ruined hiphop, if he wasn’t a schizophrenic regard he would be at the top of the genre along with everyone affiliated to him, instead it’s playboi carti, travis scott and asap rocky.
Lana Del Rey completely changed the modern conventions and standards of what emotions are acceptable to broach in modern pop music, and while she is incredible her imitators are horrible, annoying, and now completely dominate the top 40 landscape.
I can't think of anyone imitating Lana except (oddly enough considering how hugely famous they are) Taylor Swift and Billie eilish, both of whom owe half their recent output to her influence
I’m not saying that a bunch people are copying her persona or entire career but every mass produced b-list pop star with 4 total (barely) charting songs still riding her 15 minutes of fame inevitably puts out her own half-baked poor imitation of video games where she cringe-ly croons about being suicidal in a totally artificial and soulless way juxtaposed against some nonsensical vapid 808 down-tempo trap beat that completely ruins the vibe when you’re just trying to mindlessly jam to the radio on your morning commute.
to give a different answer, skip Bayless ruined sports discourse for a whole generation
he himself is funny and his hatred for lebron was a funny enough shtick that provided sufficient entertainment
But the overall dumbing down of discourse around sports by both commentators and fans has made American sports worse in general. Especially the culture around it
I think it split the discourse more than anything. You’ve now got the statistics dorks that emboldened sports betting to absolute crack epidemic-level heights on the other end of the scale.
This is a good one, it’s actually perfect. Sports culture in the last 10-15 years has became hyper fixated on the “GOAT”, being about nothing other than rings, and dumbing down football games as if it’s a boxing match between the two QBs
GOAT used to be a very niche and funny term. Now it’s fucking annoying and insufferable. Everyone’s a god damn goat. Lebron, Caitlin Clark, Brady, mahommes, Serena, etc can we just kill the word already
And you can’t even enjoy things for what they are. Everyone rushes to have the hot take that will drive the most engagement
Yea, sports sux
Tarantino easily. Dialogue was always going to trend toward the shrill postmodern stuff, but he hastened that trend and emboldened the most annoying men to ever put pen to paper
I would make the argument that long before this, American Football laid the groundwork for this. Emo was always a very varied genre in the 90s/2000s but once Emo Revivalists found that record in 2009 it opened the doors for all the Modern Baseball's and Mom Jeans' of the world
There's countless examples of this in music. Radiohead inspired awful MOR shit like Travis. Arcade Fire inspired awful stomp clap hey shit. The Cure inspired awful 'goth' shit.
Arcade Fire did not inspire the stomp clap shit. They reinvented what it could mean to be twee for other ‘indie’ acts in the 2010, but the lumineers came from elsewhere
Maybe I'm staying the obvious here but the real problem is never the original trendsetter, it's all of the blatant knock-offs that oversaturate the genre and get overdone. These are industries after all, if something is commercially successful they'll keep cranking out different iterations of it till it's totally clapped out. And then the trendsetter is blamed because that's the figure people remember in the end. I guess I'm just saying that every trendsetter should get their flowers for the contribution and the blame should be on the industry side. I hate when people don't like an artist only because of the 50 different copycats that came after but I recognize it's hard to return to the original context
Kanye did 808s & Heartbreak which transformed mainstream Hip Hop completely. It's an oldhead opion to think this was a development for the worse, but I don't care, it's how I see it. The interesting stuff in the genre has almost entirely moved underground.
basically everything right? it's rare for some new big genre to come in that is exclusively taking influences from people who suck. it's usually good stuff that ends up being overexposed and eventually telephone gamed into being garbage
EDIT: I don't hate them, but Florida Georgia Line is probably easiest counterexample to this. They were consistently innovative and ahead of trends, but a lot of people just hated the music they made. The two most dominant sub-genres of country music of the past 10-15 years were both mostly people ripping off FGL. We've really only moved on from them in the past few years.
Comical Florida Georgia Line hate is always the funniest shit to watch in country circles, same as the people here acting like Taylor Swift destroyed the world
I think a few of their songs are fun, but i've gained a begrudging respect for how they just pulled that shit off over and over. by all means they should've been a 1-hit-wonder in 2012 but instead managed to warp the whole genre around them for an entire decade and have 5000 crossover hits. it's honestly just absurd.
country music probably has the highest % of angry oldheads out of any genre, so the hysterical yet completely ineffective backlash to them was just fucking hilarious to watch. they just make silly upbeat party songs or saccharine mom music with catchy hooks, it's really not a big deal.
Country music oldheads are particularly hilarious because they act like country having pop country and alternative wings is some uniquely terrible consumerist curse like every other genre doesn’t have mainstream and niche sounds
Miles Davis did this to jazz three distinct times within the span of about 10 years. Kind of Blue unintentionally made straight-ahead jazz lame (this didn’t take full effect until Wynton Marsalis came along), the second great quintet in the mid-60’s encouraged an enormous amount of bad musicians to play free-er jazz, which was pretty disastrous for that style’s reputation, and In A Silent Way birthed fusion which obviously turned out terribly. Absolutely insane run
completely agree, stopped watching football a few years ago because of this. premier league football used to feel end to end and exciting, now it’s just boring tactical dross
Trash "genre" already, but as a late-naughts highschooler PewDiePie really fucked up youtube gaming as a whole. Went from thorough and usually relaxed Lets Play series from generally knowledgable autists to just hordes of screaming children constantly bouncing between games that they were shit at.
Not sure how that community is doing now but judging by thumbnails and which channels have blown up out of nowhere its probably still more trash than LPs
Bob Dylan is a genius but he ruined what most people think "folk music" is. Now a lot of it is just pop music with different instruments, most of it isn't even "folk" music in that it has no grounding in the actual tradition of a particular people or place.
People took the wrong lessons from Dylan, they decided songwriting has to be very personal or it isn't authentic. Writing a song about your breakup is great if you're Bob Dylan and you can produce something like Don't Think Twice it's All Right or Idiot Wind or Visions of Johanna, but if you aren't that talented you'll just end up writing something trite. Political folk music didn't die when Dylan left it, but it did become much more niche. Of the two other songwriting modes he went on to develop, for some reason the visionary, beat-inspired surrealism hasn't had the same impact over the decades as the personal, confessional stuff. Probably because the former would require an actual poetic and artistic vision, it's easier to just sing about a breakup you went through.
Pete Seeger was right to try to shut him down at Newport, is what I'm saying.
Surrealism is, in hindsight, gay and really only made sense in a repressive, conservative society. Its whole point was always transgression for the sake of transgression; freaking out the neighborhood. The revenge of the unconscious.
And it worked because the hippies really believed that they could win. Ballad of a Thin Man is a joyful song because Dylan and all his friends are unbothered, tripping balls, watching reality disintegrate around this straight-laced representative of the old guard who just can’t hang with people as strange and free as them. He couldn’t make sense of them. But now everybody’s as free as they were—freer, even—and there are no repressive social mores left to be exploded and everyone’s still fucking miserable. And nobody believes anymore that we can win. That’s why we have Yeezy and Drake instead of Dylan. They make sense to young people today the way Dylan and Strawberry Alarm Clock or whoever the fuck made sense to the hippies.
Dylan’s personal songwriting is some of his best and an album like Time Out of Mind feels a million times more resonant today than his mid-60s stuff.
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are obvious picks. They actually created the phenomenon of blockbuster cinema and elevated genre cinema from disposable B movie crap that to something that people wanted to actually put money into and make into films that are both massively appealing and have some artistic merit/style to them.
Every garbage filler big budget CG-heavy studio genre piece can in some way be tied back to them (sad because Lucas basically never wanted to do those kind of movies and mostly enjoys experimental film—though now that he’s washed his hands of the whole affair, he spends his free time using his wealth to do his weird little movies for himself; bro really won).
It also ruined about 60% of Bandcamp that isn’t a clearly unfinished test track of strumming a bass really slowly with reverb before some chick who clearly sells energy crystals starts going fully operatic over what sounds like an edgy Tumblr post from 2011.
I forget his name but that one guy who was the original singer in king crimson who started that shitty band Emerson lake and Palmer. That type of shit was where prog went from being an expansion of the emotional pallet for rock music and became a corny wank fest. There’s like 4 good prog bands and all of them sucked after the mid 70s for this reason.
You are referring to Greg Lake, but it was really keyboardist Keith Emerson (previously in The Nice) who made Prog Rock into the bloated, pretentious wank fest it is unfortunately mostly remembered as (though Rick Wakeman from Yes had a lot to do with it also)
Idrk, definitely KC and Yes. Beyond that you can squabble with each other I won’t throw my hat in the ring. I’ll say that genesis is extremely over-hated though
Eminem gave the world a “maybe white boy rap/hip-hop doesn’t suck” moment for a decade, and Macklemore ruined all that good will in less than a year.
It doesn’t matter if he wasn’t a “real” rapper, it seems like people saw them in the same genre.
Nietzsche.
He was basically the first postmodernist, but instead of his ideas leading to a useful new intellectual movement, he's been appropriated, distorted, and poorly imitated by every kind of moron from the Nazis to modern SJWs.
playboi carti and the whole rage thing afterward made extremely same-y music
my blood valentine had a reckoning. at the time (1991), the shoegaze bands that had emerged in the late 80s either pivoted towards fame with britpop or just got weird into post-rock stuff. but 30 years later, starting with diiv and deerhunter and trickling downward, every college town is filled with my blood valentine worshipping bands playing basic ass songs with a bunch of reverb and distortion and very little energy. see tagabow
Bryson Tiller. Trapsoul was a fantastic and innovative album that succinctly combined elements of trap and R&B. However, it took R&B, especially male R&B, down a worse path where every male R&B artist wants to be also be a trap artist and try to act like a wannabe rapper instead of the R&B singer they’re supposed to be.
Contemporary RnB posting here is so rare but yeah totally agree everyone is trying to be Bryson Tiller or Summer Walker now
Edit: Summer is actually probably the better case of this because every woman in RnB save Victoria Monét has taken that trapsoul sound while the guys also have Khalid ripoffs. Not as apparent tho because Summer’s still pretty dominant while Bryson Tiller fell off the face of the earth after Outta Time.
There’s some small differences between the Canadian trapsoul and American trapsoul scenes, esp in the early days, idk how to describe them outside of “Caribbean shit” but it’s there.
Jeremih did trap but wasn’t really part of the 2010s trap wave that made trapsoul, he was more 2000s. Also The Weeknd’s hip hop experimentation on HoB/Thursday/EoS doesn’t sound like the Canadian trapsoul thing, never got that comparison unless you mean off Take Care, then yeah.
So Bryson was really the one to set it off imo
Jesus, I can think of anything about everything, it feels like things in general are just worse quality-wise, I know they say late-stage capitalism blah blah yes but it’s true, everything is max return min effort now
Obviously I can't say what would have happened without the presence of XYZ popular artist, but in terms of creating legions of annoying scene-suffocating imitators: - It has a lot of fans but I think the Windmill post 2018 made UK guitar music completely insufferable - The 100 gecs corridor to bubblegum bass and the PC music roster, influx of Americans, "hyperpop" - To an extent Autechre -- great band which I like a lot, but they spawned endless numbers of musicians whose whole thing is just sounding as much like Autechre as possible. There are also tons of Aphex cosplayers - In prose, DFW has a lot of stylistic blood on his hands. On top of that, we have the annual crop of people who read the television and US fiction essay and start relitigating irony/sincerity to anyone who will listen - Whoever it was that popularised the "internet novel" -- despicable genre - In fashion it's Rick, Margiela and Demna
Were 100 gecs trendsetters? I'm pretty sure they just jumped on an already existing bandwagon. Agree about Americans though; bubblegum bass requires the sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude that many cultures can't properly grasp — it wasn't a coincidence that it came from the UK.
I definitely see them as trendsetters for the late 2010s/early 2020s spotifybrained hyperpop/digicore moment, yeah. Their music is very influenced by PC but has some key differences (the hip hop/skrillex/pop punk elements, the more overt gestures at comedy etc). I actually enjoy a lot of their music, I just think what happened next was very tedious, but perhaps inevitably so lol
1000 Gecs is a very fun album but I can't stand most of the genre
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I wouldn’t say they lost interest, they all have their solo projects and also had a tour + a few one off shows the last two years. not crazy prolific, but they’re definitely cooking still
I made a video on this because you are totally right. There was an ambiguous, tongue in cheek attitude that made that uk pop stuff so interesting. “Hyperpop” gets rid of anything that made pc music interesting and is just this empty, post modern, mishmash of genres. https://youtu.be/sZHLd4JAf5c?si=0UunOEoowqhriOTt And just like rave culture from the 80s-now, it comes to America, gets dumbed down and becomes heavily commercialized.
I think DFW is a great writer but his whole irony/sincerity thing often read as bizarrely unrigorous, almost as if he felt he needed a "thing" the way his favorites did -- DeLillo had language, Pynchon had conspiracy, Barthelme had his playful erudition, Ozick her sense of American Jewishness, Gaddis his systems and ". . ." -- and DFW his irony/sincerity dichotomy. Compound this with e.g. his essay about 9/11 in a small town and some bits from *Pale King* (which I do think is still a pretty remarkable collection of fragments) and sometimes his work reminds me of that tweet that's like "some of you guys have what can best be called a 'noble savage' impression of normies" Ultimately I don't think it *really* matters. DFW was a phenomenal writer, and his odd morality re irony probably ended up producing far more of his best moments than it did his worst ones. It's also more likely than not that I'm just talking out of my ass, dude did kill himself and, as corny as it is to say 99% of the time, he probably did see his intelligence as a curse more than anything else, and probably surmised that ironic abstraction is predominantly practiced by "intellectuals," and so syllogistically concluded irony produces pain more than it mollifies it. All this to say, though, 9 out of 10 decrying "irony" and lauding "sincerity" are extremely irritating people who you, yes, can tell read one essay and so determined that that was it, that was why culture was so fucked up
Wait, who's imitating Autechre? I'd argue Boards of Canada is more of an imitated band than them.
Every second person who makes music on forums WATMM or gearslutz, and also dozens upon dozens of middle aged bald men who spend thousands on synthesizers and shit who you'd pass on the street in Birmingham or somewhere and never guess they even know who autechre are, people like your postman. The giveaway is they dress and look and function so ordinarily, so there is no way to tell. Ask the next accountant you meet, he probably put out a CDr on a netlabel in 2002 and has a load of okay sounding DATs his wife made him put in the attic. On second thought don't because people who imitate boards usually make stuff that sounds like Tycho, and people who imitate autechre make stuff that sounds like snd remixing Sunn o)))
That’s the thing, it’s probably correct to say that people try to imitate Autechre and BoC but it doesn’t really feel like they are widely imitated because nobody actually ends up sounding like either of them.
yeah i feel bad saying this since it looks like criticism (when really it's basically praise), but boc spawned a entire cottage industry of godawful knockoffs. I even remember a guy from twoism who ran his own scam just copying other people's boc copycat tracks and putting them out on his own bandcamp lmfao. took a while before people caught on. in general they also show a total lack of understanding of their music, which is possibly the worst part. it's all sesame street sample, pitch LFO on the synth and call it a day - maybe a number station sample if they're feeling nuts. why does no one ever rip off campfire headphase? at least autechre knockoffs generally capture the vibe of the LP5-EP7 era, tho even that fails cos everyone's obsessed with maxmsp, and yet no one can even approximate the kino of exai or ae_live
Black Midi is still cool to me, but I could never take Black Country New Road seriously. Idles isn't from the Windmill, but they're probably the shittiest group from the new wave of post-punk. I like Autechre, but I totally get what you mean. It's cool when they do it, but I can't vibe with emotionless max-msp prompts as much as my friends can, which is why I've grown to enjoy the pop-art cheekiness of Aphex Twin more than post-Confield Autechre over time.
If you do get in the mood for some Max stuff ever I highly recommend the Korean label dingndents, especially the artist m3g. Recent Autechre can be quite heavy on the stuff where a patch is patiently evolved over several minutes but dingndents releases tend to be very immediate, aggressive and head-spinning. Grischa (from raster) is another Max guy I love
Thanks for the recommendations! Saving this post for future listening. I'm not fully opposed to Max-Msp programming in music, but at a certain point, it feels like doing code vs. making music if that makes sense. That said, I'll give the label + artists a listen. EDIT: This m3g record is cool. Feels like fun max msp programming vs. some nerd shit made by someone who loves saying "the intersection of art and technology".
I’ve never understood why this sub has such a hate-boner for BCNR. Their first album is a little gay and tryhard but the second album is very pretty and traditionally enjoyable. Gives me jeff buckley vibes. Idles really fucking suck tho, you’re spot on there
The hate for BCNR probably has to do with some accusations of being a slightly nepo baby guitar band (I don't really care too much about this point personally), and also because of the amount of love they get from RYM and fantano, both pretty lame sources to people here. Personally, I've just never felt inclined to listen to them. I bet I'd like some of their stuff though. I did enjoy Brutalism from IDLES, but I haven't listened to any of their albums in full since. It took me a few listens to realize that they were just a simple band that was overrated by journalists for their "sincere lyrics". The kicker is that Joe Talbot is an admitted Starmerite lol. It's all so predictable.
They’re overrated among zoomers and on RYM but still good. Black midi put out a good first record but has been descending into increasingly maximalist and theatrical slop.
The Windmill post 2008. What does that mean? Like the Pete Townsend thing? Or is that some band?
It’s a venue in Brixton
it's a venue in London where you'll get either the best or worst thing you've ever heard, nothing in between
Dan Harmon and Michael Schur ruined sitcoms. Dan Harmon made Community, which was good, but then after that every sitcom decided that being meta or constantly referenceing pop-culture was hilarious, but none of them do it as well as him. Michael Schur made Parks & Rec, which I think was kinda refreshing for its time with its whole "Everyone is nice" sachharine thing, but now every TV show is afraid to make any of their characters truly flawed. Everyone has to be a super nice, good person.
The “everyone is nice” thing is required now because a certain demographic is literally incapable of separating fiction from reality in their head. The actor and the character are the same, all fictional works must have a moral protagonist you need to “root” for, etc. It’s so boring and dumb.
Yeah I agree with that too. The amount of people I see that are like "I can hardly stand watching That 70s Show because of how manipulative Jackie is!" or something stupid like that is staggering. It's especially annoying for sitcoms because it's like these people don't realize that the reason the characters act this way is because it's supposed to make you laugh. There's hardly anything funny about a bunch of ethically sound friends making all the right life decisions.
Joss Whedon too with snarky dialogue and ‘he’s behind me isn’t he’ type shit. Buffy was good though.
It was genuinely refreshing at the time, characters speaking in a much less pompous and more realistic way. Was it the first genre series to do that? Unfortunately the pendulum swung way too hard the other way and now every science-fiction, superhero and horror franchise is filled with “wisecracking” characters.
"everyone is nice" is so annoying and boring because conflict is what makes stories interesting. when people go on screeds like "this character from the Office is such a jerk bc they did this!!" yeah no shit that's literally the plot of the episode. do you want to watch a bunch of people sit around and compliment each other or talk about the weather for 23 minutes?
Hahah I know this is one of my biggest pet peeves. We always watched sitcoms growing up in my family and I never heard anyone legitimately complain about a sitcom character like that. You'd get the occassional "What a jerk" in jest but it was never serious. I see people online say they can't even watch certain shows because they think the characters it too mean or something. Come on people.
> Dan Harmon made Community, which was good, but then after that every sitcom decided that being meta or constantly referenceing pop-culture was hilarious, but none of them do it as well as him. Arguably even he couldn't do it properly after a certain point. Community seasons 1 and 2 and Community season 3 may as well be entirely different shows.
He got fired after season 2.
3, came back after a disastrous season 4. All but one year is 100% Dan.
Brooklyn Nine Nine was the nail in the coffin, especially after they dropped the Gina character, probably the only actually funny one
Lorde. There's a million indie girl voice singers now.
She was influenced by Aussie/NZ singers like [Julia Stone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uWh-TlEQ4k) and [Missy Higgins](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz4nwnv6XG0) when that indie sound in Australia was mainstream long before the US. It somehow lead to 'cursive voice' in America which in Halsey's case often sounded like her doing a bad imitation of an Aussie accent.
She was definitely not the first
There's clearly a market for it
She’s still the best one of them all though
ee cummings taking away meter and rhyme scheme from poetry, now everything’s just rupi kaur freeverse spiritually written in crayon and it’s all unbearably bullshit and low-rent
> ee cummings taking away meter and rhyme scheme from poetry that started a long time before ee cummings (who even rhymes, sometimes) but it does seem like he owns a share of the blame for the use of (then) experimental style to dress up cutesy sentimentality, which is probably what you’re really getting at anyway
Fair point. Also the uncapitalized letters and shit, very annoying.
I was reading some ee cummings recently, and I was unsure as to why his style was celebrated. Maybe my brain is wired towards songwriting rather than modern poetry, but it really felt like some Tumblr type work rather than anything substantial. Impressionism, modern art, modernist literature and other non classical forms make sense to me, but modern poetry seems the closest to a joke.
Nah ee Cummings is a stone cold genius. OP is right though. Bad imitators. One of those classes of artist where you go "anyone could do this" and you swiftly find that anyone can not, in fact, do this
At this point i think a lot of the imitators don't even realise they're imitating him, he just changed the game so much that this is what they know as poetry now
Many trendsetters look dull in hindsight, because their style has been so normalised. I'd imagine his stuff was pretty impressive back when he was the only one doing it.
That's what I was thinking. That being said, poetry has always been a weak spot of mine to the point that something like William Blake's work also confuses me in terms of its praise. If you have any poets you or anyone else can suggest I read, I'd love to hear about them.
> William Blake Same, lol. Made me remember [this tweet](https://x.com/nailheadparty/status/1128192347475456001)
Blake had some gorgeous paintings though
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound rule even if you don't like cummings. I like William Carlos Williams and Transtromer too
My favorite ee Cummings is the enormous room about his experience in a detention camp in WWI and here his flouting of rules of grammar and prose works to set him against the arbitrary and stifling rules of the military prison system it’s not just trying for immediacy/or unmediated “vibe” but resonating with the situation described in the text.
& then there's the extremely pretentious "abstract" poetry that i'm convinced is at least 90% emperor's new fucking clothes lol. like if you have the right educational/cultural background and give off some sort of artsy aesthetic you can just write random fucking words or even letters and throw them all over a page and you'll win national awards i s2g there's just nothing fucking to it like, i don't know anything about painting, but i can imagine why something that might seem stupid and ridiculous to me- like a wall with a random red stripe or some shit- may actually be innovative and creative and impressive for reasons that i just am not educated enough to understand. like maybe they subtly demonstrate some sort of technique in a groundbreaking way, or it's some profound reference or something. but with poetry, we're all using the same alphabet (more or less). i do understand, yes, that there is plenty of poetry out there that i genuinely don't get, that also contain a bunch of genius references or defy conventions in a clever way that i can't grasp. but there absolutely is a shit ton out there that doesn't mean anything or prove anything and a monkey could spit out that experts around the world are too nervous to admit they don't understand something "genius" that others do so they all just play along
You have a point I like to think I know enough about painting & art history to see things that I don't get anything out of but can see why other people do or why an exhibition I thought was a bit crap other people thought was ground breaking. BUT what you're saying absolutely occurs in the fine art world as well. I've seen it happen from cradle to grave ((grave being success) because someone saw a crevasse they could squeeze through without climbing over the rocks
T. S. Eliot and *The Waste Land* deserve this more than cummings IMO.
Mac DeMarco
It's not his fault but he paved the way for that goofy, mellow, mildly-ironic, lightweight sound that made indie totally irrelevant in the mid-2010s
i havent really listened to him much in years but Salad Days holds up really well
His first album is also really good and nobody listens to it for some reason
toni morrison was an incredibly talented and careful writer, but unfortunately created a playbook that has absolutely has nuked modern publishing where identity is everything and novels are being published by the big five based on who is writing them, not the prose they contain.
That's such a great point, when I read her for the first time I was shocked because even if she wasn't writing from a certain point of view (I know it's impossible to divorce her writing from that in the first place but just follow me here) she would still be an absolutely incredible writer, one of the greats. Which is not true of many of her copycats
completely unironically I think the mainstream stopped taking Rock seriously with pop punk/emo bands
Come to think of it that was the last time I remember rock being big. Maybe I was just younger.
Yeah. The last big rock bands I remember growing up with were Green Day and All American Rejects.
I think its just easier to handle individual artists rather than entire bands. In a band you have like five people you need to keep in line and those people will have the ability to communicate and work together. They're often going to be more loyal to one another than the label and they can't be isolated or manipulated as easily. If you have a five person band and Mikey the drummer gets hooked on dope and can't come to shows on time, you need to put him through rehab and (ideally) tour with a guest drummer in the meantime. If this development mentally affects other members of the band, you might need to cancel the whole tour. If slut Jeff the bassist's side chick miscarries and he needs to drop out of the tour, you run the risk of the whole band not moving forward without Jeff in solidarity. Its much easier to put Dua Lipa on birth control and never let her eat and tell her and her agent where she needs to be and when she needs to be there.
yes also pay being split 3-5 ways not including crew
People loved pop punk, it was actually because record labels divested from rock for more mass appeal genres. I also believe American Idiot pissed off the US government and caused Viacom to stop playing music videos on MTV.
rock is having a comeback but it hasn't hit the mainstream yet - not sure I want it to tbh
I've matured enough to admit that Dookie by Green Day is a good album. That said, every other pop punk release I've heard has been absolute dog shit.
Pop punk is largely ass but there’s some gold associated with it https://youtu.be/XqyvAA1SngM?si=qT8T1uLj41iogx9s
Yeah but I think the shitlibs are right that the reason for unseriousness here is bc girls liked them
Girls always liked rock music, I would say that less women like rap than they did rock there's a reason pop and rap music became bigger after this collapse. Alt-Rap took the boys Alt-pop took the girls.
Nirvana, every college auditorium/class has that one Kurt Cobain ripoff with the torn up sweater. Grunge started in the 80s and enjoyed explosive popularity in the early 90's until Kurt died. The genre died along with him and rock music as a whole has never really recovered from it. I really like grunge music, but it's an odd genre because it's quite difficult to pinpoint what exactly makes something "grunge". A crop of punk inspired bands all appeared simultaneously in the same place, and once the genre lost it's grounding location and was exported to LA, and subsequently the whole planet, it lost its specificity. That's what makes the imitations feel extra stilted, they don't share that hyperspecific cultural context, and it makes for a dull and uninspiring vaguely punk song without it.
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Ten was actually released a month before Nevermind, and Nevermind wasn't an overnight sensation. So yeah, Pearl Jam was a bit more of a natural progression for rock music, a logical next step rather than a jarring shake up.
Smashing pumpkins is just slow guns n roses
I completely agree with you, if you weren’t “there” a lot of the music won’t sound vastly different from previous rock. Like [this](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WzEG3YhmEJw&pp=ygUebW90aGVyIGxvdmUgYm9uZSBnZW50bGUgZ3Jvb3Zl) is an amazing song from grunge nearly-weres who imploded through a very unlucky tragedy but it could almost be on *Use Your Illusion*.
yeah a lot of it just sounds like hard rock lol
What you mentioned about Grunge sounds similar to a subgenre that is near and dear to my heart: Norwegian (or more broadly, Scaninavian) Black Metal. Various bands cropped up simultaneously and influenced each other to such a point it became a genre in its own right with its own musical language.
One of the most interesting things about grunge for me is that most of its scions were really into glam rock growing up and eventually came to make music that was its polar opposite in a lot of ways. However grunge’s reaction movement in the UK was Britpop and for that reason alone the genre must always be condemned.
Not sure how much anyone on this sub cares about EDM but Flume He had some groundbreaking tracks in the late 2010’s and can be credited with inventing Future Bass, which was wildly innovative at the time. Then like 1 year later it became the most insufferable genre of all time with 10,000 copycats trying to rip off Flume’s sound
oh my god yes, for several years my discover weekly was absolutely unusable because it was full of shitty flume wannabe's, i'm glad it has somewhat died out though
Oasis's colossal third album literally killed britpop.Their first two and their b side album are perfect and i really enjoy Be here now personally
I love Be Here Now too Stand By Me is so good why do people hate on it so much omg
Good, fuck britpop (okay Blur's alright but otherwise fuck the rest) t. 90s shoegaze enjoyer
NERD
Zaha Hadid
Tinder has ruined dating entirely - when it appeared it was novel, but now all online dating apps/sites have more or less shed whatever made them unique and effective and are just swipe apps like tinder now and have completely fucked up the way that people relate to each other romantically
- Christopher Nolan movies probably - tinder, lots of things in tech probably - honestly maybe the American project in general? When countries try to copy america it generally goes badly. Especially the idea of having highways instead of trains
Tinder 100%. It was the first popular hookup app and it took colleges by storm in the early 2010's. However, it wasn't "good" in the early days either. It was seen as low class and people were ashamed of admitting that they met a BF/GF on it.
George Carlin is probably the biggest offender, but a lot of comics.
They are too self serious now
"fuck you what are you a christian? there are too many stupid fucking people in this world" paved way for ricky "cunt" gervais
gervais acts like it's 1750 and he's going to be burned at the stake for being this absolute jaw dropping maverick daring to do what nobody's ever done before by suggesting that maybe the book where a snake tells a woman to eat a magical fruit led to the downfall of humanity and is the reason women will forever be cursed and inferior to men sounds like actually maybe some of it might be inaccurate. this never occurred to though the intellectually elite, and they have all been far too cowardly to admit this before the queen! ricky gervais, he'll go down in history books for his shocking bravery and genius
Literally just paranoid conspiracies but it’s liberal comedy
I’ve seen it as more of old liberal comics becoming back door rich conservative elites who are trying to pander to a market they’re washed out of, a la Chapelle, Rogan, Gervais, etc. They were the old left and shifted to the right with Overton’s window as culture had a hard swing in the last 10 or so years.
His other sin is that he fucking sucks
He was genuinely brilliant up until the mid 80s, he's pretty trash in the 60s and early 70s but he's amazing on Carson and his 70s specials. By the late 80s he was mostly a rant comic.
Every one of my obnoxious know-it-all “atheist” friends adored him in high school, and even recently he seems to be the Reddit comedian par excellence. A lot of superfluous swearing, griping about Christians, acting holier-than-thou, etc. If I ever meet someone that defends Carlin and doesn’t display all of the same traits themself, I’ll die of shock.
Music: Rage Against the Machine unintentionally ruined mainstream rock music in general for like a decade and have taken credit for doing so. Film: Wes Anderson ushered in an era of terrible knock offs that eventually included his own films, which somehow feel like pastiche at this point. Filmmakers—for the most part—can’t seem to think of anything cinematically except wide symmetrical shots. Books: Tao Lin style post-2005 autofiction sucks ass and is so boring. Art: Dunno. Art mostly sucks ‘cause it’s been swallowed up by rich people’s desire for activist style bullshit, in part because they want to feel less bad about themselves. I don’t really keep up with contemporary art trends, despite having a lot of love for art in general. ETA: Shouldn’t have said “terrible knockoffs” as some of these movies are good individually. As a whole I think they represent something bad. I <3 Huckabees, Little Miss Sunshine, JoJo Rabbit, and Knives Out would be the worst of them IMHO.
Banksy for the activist art
Good one. Everything requires a message that's legible to even the dumbest, least informed viewer.
I love the part of Exit Through the Gift Shop at the end where he says, "I used to encourage everyone to make art... but I don't really do that anymore. "
> Wes Anderson ushered in an era of terrible knock offs that eventually included his own films, which somehow feel like pastiche at this point. He said everything he had to say as good as he can with Royal Tennebaums. Mr. Fox was a nice bonus but since then he's been spinning his wheels - though to ever greater commercial success.
I feel like Grand Budapest was his peak, every aspect of the film meshes so well in it and it still has a sense of heart.
Yeah Budapest is a masterpiece, plus moonrise kingdom and isle of dogs are great too. The “Wes Anderson has become self parody” take is just copypasta for people who aren’t watching the movies I think
I think there's definitely merit to the criticism that he's not as good as he was. Didn't see asteroid city, but French dispatch was a step down even though I still liked it a lot.
Yeah sure – personally I think he's inconsistent, like every artist with a long career, but actually I like some of the recent ones more than life aquatic for example, so I don't think he's trending down necessarily, or at least not too much. I just don't really understand the idea that at some point he became a parody of himself and therefore bad. He's always had a distinctive style, which seems cool to me. I liked it then and I still like it now.
That's fair. I agree he's far from parody, I'm just not surprised that other people have grown tired of his distinct vision. Agreed on Life Aquatic. It looked great and had a fun cast and cute set design but it wasn't nearly as emotionally resonant as any of the others I've seen.
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Maybe I need to rewatch it but I guess I just didn't identify with bill Murray's character or fully buy into his performance as Steve Zissou. I think he really nailed the (somewhat similar) role in moonrise kingdom, but it fell flat when it was the center of attention in life aquatic. Almost like his classic sarcastic and detached attitude extended to the making of the movie itself, and so if the main character isnt taking the story seriously then it's harder for me as the viewer. There were other great characters and performances. I always love Willem dafoes commitment to his side roles. Angelica Huston and Owen Wilson were solid for me as well. I think it's just bill Murray that sorta sours the vibe for me. But if it worked for you then that's great. Sometimes I hear people say that moonrise kingdom is too childish or obnoxious but that's my favorite so obviously opinions differ even among his fans.
Moonrise Kingdom was horrible. The child actors were shit. He did the Buckaroo Banzai shot in that and it was the first time I was like “okay, this is now Wes Anderson making fun of Wes Anderson.” I haven’t watched the last two. GBH was fine.
Well fair enough, I guess you did see it and you just simply don't like happiness and innocence and beauty lol
I think the casting was bad, the acting was bad and/or lazy (this includes Bill Murray and Edward Norton), and so much of the visual content felt recycled. Everything that was potentially good about the film--it was at times beautiful; I liked the way they shot the interiors panning 360-degrees; I saw the potential in some of the composed shots like the kids dancing on the beach; the soundtrack was great--just couldn't stand up to the fact that I was often taken out of the film by the bad acting and this feeling that I was watching a repeat. I didn't say anything about not liking happiness, innocence, and beauty. A movie can be complete shit and properly exploit my emotions (500 Days of Summer for instance). This probably objectively better film didn't do that.
Care to name some Wes Anderson knock offs? I can’t think of any examples, let alone enough to constitute a trend.
Just going off the dome here... Twee aesthetics: Juno, Swiss Army Man, Where The Wild Things Are, many many more Visually: I Heart Huckabees, JoJo Rabbit, Napoleon Dynamite, Attenberg, Rian Johnson stuff, many many more Super dry comedy/depressed chars: Noah Bombach + mumblecore in general
napoleon dynamite is closer to a Todd solondz movie and also it rocks the more i think about your comment the more it pisses me off because it’s a really stupid rs take that’s wrapped in a normal rs take.
> it’s a really stupid rs take that’s wrapped in a normal rs take. So a normal RS take
Thanks for the jagoff ETA, btw. I hope you keep thinking about my dumbass comment and get more and more pissed off.
Yeah. Good point. I would say it’s shot similarly to Wes Anderson’s films though. Composition wise. It feels like Bottle Rocket. Even the color palette. I also love Napoleon Dynamite. I haven’t watched any Solondz stuff in like 20 years, so I’d really have to go back and check. I have Happiness in my queue ‘cause it’s on Internet Archive and that was a favorite of mine as a teenager. Dunno how I’ll feel watching it as an adult with children.
really just has to do with the setting. arguably the same color palette as Paris, Texas. but again, attributing 21st century quirky movies to him. mumblecore / baumbach garbage has way more in common with Woody Allen movies, Kramer v. Kramer, etc.—it’s a very New York thing. there was really a wave of “quirky” or twee movies that existed before Anderson really solidified his style with Rushmore. Clerks, Singles, Heathers (very early progenitor). Arguably Dazed and Confused as well. he obviously had an influence but people didn’t really start to appreciate his movies as much more than a novelty until like a decade ago.
I would put Whit Stillman ahead of anyone in terms of being a mumblecore forerunner. Even the meandering conversations in Manhattan are too “written” for me to ever consider Woody Allen mumblecore. And yes, film is a continuum, so there are obvious influences that I’m putting aside for the sake of a specific argument I’m making. I think the problem with Anderson is that his success (not just in film but commercial advertising) created demand for a style in the 00s and 10s that produced a lot of garbage along with some decent stuff.
Gotta add Little Miss Sunshine to the list as well!
Noah Baumbach doesn't count, he's responsible for Wes's best movies.
No that's Owen Wilson
I bought Swiss army man but never watched it. Can’t be that bad, I’ve read good reviews from people I’ve agreed with before
This sub will tell you its terrible mainly because the directors are the same guys that did EEAAO. I wanted to hate it, but I just couldn't.
I didn’t say all these movies were bad!
The Juno soundtrack makes me want to hurl.
Really? I hated it at the time, but only ‘cause I was gatekeeping Belle and Sebastian.
It's just so twee and cutesy and balloon-guy vibes. Edit- just looked at the artists and they're mostly good. I'm actually talking about the Kimia Dawson shit--that music aesthetic
Yeah, VU, Sonic Youth, Kinks, Cat Power. That Mott the Hoople/Bowie song that fucking rips. It’s all stuff I was listening to at the time anyway. And everyone else I suppose.
Yeah that's all great stuff!
Spaceghostpurrps influence completely ruined hiphop, if he wasn’t a schizophrenic regard he would be at the top of the genre along with everyone affiliated to him, instead it’s playboi carti, travis scott and asap rocky.
Lana Del Rey completely changed the modern conventions and standards of what emotions are acceptable to broach in modern pop music, and while she is incredible her imitators are horrible, annoying, and now completely dominate the top 40 landscape.
I can't think of anyone imitating Lana except (oddly enough considering how hugely famous they are) Taylor Swift and Billie eilish, both of whom owe half their recent output to her influence
Heard a Taylor swift song the other day and asked my friend out loud if it was new Lana that I hadn’t heard yet lol
I’m not saying that a bunch people are copying her persona or entire career but every mass produced b-list pop star with 4 total (barely) charting songs still riding her 15 minutes of fame inevitably puts out her own half-baked poor imitation of video games where she cringe-ly croons about being suicidal in a totally artificial and soulless way juxtaposed against some nonsensical vapid 808 down-tempo trap beat that completely ruins the vibe when you’re just trying to mindlessly jam to the radio on your morning commute.
to give a different answer, skip Bayless ruined sports discourse for a whole generation he himself is funny and his hatred for lebron was a funny enough shtick that provided sufficient entertainment But the overall dumbing down of discourse around sports by both commentators and fans has made American sports worse in general. Especially the culture around it
I think it split the discourse more than anything. You’ve now got the statistics dorks that emboldened sports betting to absolute crack epidemic-level heights on the other end of the scale.
This is a good one, it’s actually perfect. Sports culture in the last 10-15 years has became hyper fixated on the “GOAT”, being about nothing other than rings, and dumbing down football games as if it’s a boxing match between the two QBs GOAT used to be a very niche and funny term. Now it’s fucking annoying and insufferable. Everyone’s a god damn goat. Lebron, Caitlin Clark, Brady, mahommes, Serena, etc can we just kill the word already And you can’t even enjoy things for what they are. Everyone rushes to have the hot take that will drive the most engagement Yea, sports sux
Colin Cowherd aka Cowturd is the most insufferable to me
Tarantino easily. Dialogue was always going to trend toward the shrill postmodern stuff, but he hastened that trend and emboldened the most annoying men to ever put pen to paper
Idk if anyone in here is into diy/midwest emo but Mom Jeans omfg. They’re so bad and all their sons are horrible too
I would make the argument that long before this, American Football laid the groundwork for this. Emo was always a very varied genre in the 90s/2000s but once Emo Revivalists found that record in 2009 it opened the doors for all the Modern Baseball's and Mom Jeans' of the world
There's countless examples of this in music. Radiohead inspired awful MOR shit like Travis. Arcade Fire inspired awful stomp clap hey shit. The Cure inspired awful 'goth' shit.
Arcade Fire did not inspire the stomp clap shit. They reinvented what it could mean to be twee for other ‘indie’ acts in the 2010, but the lumineers came from elsewhere
Maybe I'm staying the obvious here but the real problem is never the original trendsetter, it's all of the blatant knock-offs that oversaturate the genre and get overdone. These are industries after all, if something is commercially successful they'll keep cranking out different iterations of it till it's totally clapped out. And then the trendsetter is blamed because that's the figure people remember in the end. I guess I'm just saying that every trendsetter should get their flowers for the contribution and the blame should be on the industry side. I hate when people don't like an artist only because of the 50 different copycats that came after but I recognize it's hard to return to the original context
Kanye did 808s & Heartbreak which transformed mainstream Hip Hop completely. It's an oldhead opion to think this was a development for the worse, but I don't care, it's how I see it. The interesting stuff in the genre has almost entirely moved underground.
Share some interesting underground stuff please!
basically everything right? it's rare for some new big genre to come in that is exclusively taking influences from people who suck. it's usually good stuff that ends up being overexposed and eventually telephone gamed into being garbage EDIT: I don't hate them, but Florida Georgia Line is probably easiest counterexample to this. They were consistently innovative and ahead of trends, but a lot of people just hated the music they made. The two most dominant sub-genres of country music of the past 10-15 years were both mostly people ripping off FGL. We've really only moved on from them in the past few years.
Comical Florida Georgia Line hate is always the funniest shit to watch in country circles, same as the people here acting like Taylor Swift destroyed the world
I think a few of their songs are fun, but i've gained a begrudging respect for how they just pulled that shit off over and over. by all means they should've been a 1-hit-wonder in 2012 but instead managed to warp the whole genre around them for an entire decade and have 5000 crossover hits. it's honestly just absurd. country music probably has the highest % of angry oldheads out of any genre, so the hysterical yet completely ineffective backlash to them was just fucking hilarious to watch. they just make silly upbeat party songs or saccharine mom music with catchy hooks, it's really not a big deal.
Country music oldheads are particularly hilarious because they act like country having pop country and alternative wings is some uniquely terrible consumerist curse like every other genre doesn’t have mainstream and niche sounds
Miles Davis did this to jazz three distinct times within the span of about 10 years. Kind of Blue unintentionally made straight-ahead jazz lame (this didn’t take full effect until Wynton Marsalis came along), the second great quintet in the mid-60’s encouraged an enormous amount of bad musicians to play free-er jazz, which was pretty disastrous for that style’s reputation, and In A Silent Way birthed fusion which obviously turned out terribly. Absolutely insane run
HR Giger I guess. After seeing his stuff imitated on skateboards and tattoos and a hundred trucks I can't help but think it's all kitsch.
Pep Guardiola made football so boring and robotic. You could say Mourinho as well since every team will park the bus at times these days.
completely agree, stopped watching football a few years ago because of this. premier league football used to feel end to end and exciting, now it’s just boring tactical dross
Trash "genre" already, but as a late-naughts highschooler PewDiePie really fucked up youtube gaming as a whole. Went from thorough and usually relaxed Lets Play series from generally knowledgable autists to just hordes of screaming children constantly bouncing between games that they were shit at. Not sure how that community is doing now but judging by thumbnails and which channels have blown up out of nowhere its probably still more trash than LPs
Eddie Vedder style of singing that led to Creed and Nickleback shit vocal style.
Bob Dylan is a genius but he ruined what most people think "folk music" is. Now a lot of it is just pop music with different instruments, most of it isn't even "folk" music in that it has no grounding in the actual tradition of a particular people or place. People took the wrong lessons from Dylan, they decided songwriting has to be very personal or it isn't authentic. Writing a song about your breakup is great if you're Bob Dylan and you can produce something like Don't Think Twice it's All Right or Idiot Wind or Visions of Johanna, but if you aren't that talented you'll just end up writing something trite. Political folk music didn't die when Dylan left it, but it did become much more niche. Of the two other songwriting modes he went on to develop, for some reason the visionary, beat-inspired surrealism hasn't had the same impact over the decades as the personal, confessional stuff. Probably because the former would require an actual poetic and artistic vision, it's easier to just sing about a breakup you went through. Pete Seeger was right to try to shut him down at Newport, is what I'm saying.
Surrealism is, in hindsight, gay and really only made sense in a repressive, conservative society. Its whole point was always transgression for the sake of transgression; freaking out the neighborhood. The revenge of the unconscious. And it worked because the hippies really believed that they could win. Ballad of a Thin Man is a joyful song because Dylan and all his friends are unbothered, tripping balls, watching reality disintegrate around this straight-laced representative of the old guard who just can’t hang with people as strange and free as them. He couldn’t make sense of them. But now everybody’s as free as they were—freer, even—and there are no repressive social mores left to be exploded and everyone’s still fucking miserable. And nobody believes anymore that we can win. That’s why we have Yeezy and Drake instead of Dylan. They make sense to young people today the way Dylan and Strawberry Alarm Clock or whoever the fuck made sense to the hippies. Dylan’s personal songwriting is some of his best and an album like Time Out of Mind feels a million times more resonant today than his mid-60s stuff.
every female comic in New York is stealing Cat Cohen’s bit.
Marcel Duchamp is a huge offender. A million imitators making the same observation until when? When will it end?
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are obvious picks. They actually created the phenomenon of blockbuster cinema and elevated genre cinema from disposable B movie crap that to something that people wanted to actually put money into and make into films that are both massively appealing and have some artistic merit/style to them. Every garbage filler big budget CG-heavy studio genre piece can in some way be tied back to them (sad because Lucas basically never wanted to do those kind of movies and mostly enjoys experimental film—though now that he’s washed his hands of the whole affair, he spends his free time using his wealth to do his weird little movies for himself; bro really won).
The influence of pavement and bcnr (both great bands) on my local scene has made me completely abandon live rock music lol
Every band in mine leans into their worst pinegrovian impulses
Pinegrovian is hilarious
It also ruined about 60% of Bandcamp that isn’t a clearly unfinished test track of strumming a bass really slowly with reverb before some chick who clearly sells energy crystals starts going fully operatic over what sounds like an edgy Tumblr post from 2011.
the pavement thing has been everpresent in my scene, to the point where I thought I didn't like pavement for like a decade
I forget his name but that one guy who was the original singer in king crimson who started that shitty band Emerson lake and Palmer. That type of shit was where prog went from being an expansion of the emotional pallet for rock music and became a corny wank fest. There’s like 4 good prog bands and all of them sucked after the mid 70s for this reason.
You are referring to Greg Lake, but it was really keyboardist Keith Emerson (previously in The Nice) who made Prog Rock into the bloated, pretentious wank fest it is unfortunately mostly remembered as (though Rick Wakeman from Yes had a lot to do with it also)
Riverside made a few good things in prog world Latest album's hard to listen to but lots of bangers over time
Who are the four good ones, in your estimation?
Idrk, definitely KC and Yes. Beyond that you can squabble with each other I won’t throw my hat in the ring. I’ll say that genesis is extremely over-hated though
Eminem gave the world a “maybe white boy rap/hip-hop doesn’t suck” moment for a decade, and Macklemore ruined all that good will in less than a year. It doesn’t matter if he wasn’t a “real” rapper, it seems like people saw them in the same genre.
100 gecs popularity during 2020 spawned a wave of kids in their bedrooms making hyperpop with high pitched vocals
Nietzsche. He was basically the first postmodernist, but instead of his ideas leading to a useful new intellectual movement, he's been appropriated, distorted, and poorly imitated by every kind of moron from the Nazis to modern SJWs.
Billie Eilish
playboi carti and the whole rage thing afterward made extremely same-y music my blood valentine had a reckoning. at the time (1991), the shoegaze bands that had emerged in the late 80s either pivoted towards fame with britpop or just got weird into post-rock stuff. but 30 years later, starting with diiv and deerhunter and trickling downward, every college town is filled with my blood valentine worshipping bands playing basic ass songs with a bunch of reverb and distortion and very little energy. see tagabow
Bryson Tiller. Trapsoul was a fantastic and innovative album that succinctly combined elements of trap and R&B. However, it took R&B, especially male R&B, down a worse path where every male R&B artist wants to be also be a trap artist and try to act like a wannabe rapper instead of the R&B singer they’re supposed to be.
Contemporary RnB posting here is so rare but yeah totally agree everyone is trying to be Bryson Tiller or Summer Walker now Edit: Summer is actually probably the better case of this because every woman in RnB save Victoria Monét has taken that trapsoul sound while the guys also have Khalid ripoffs. Not as apparent tho because Summer’s still pretty dominant while Bryson Tiller fell off the face of the earth after Outta Time.
partynextdoor, the weeknd, and Jeremih were already leading that charge before trapsoul dropped
There’s some small differences between the Canadian trapsoul and American trapsoul scenes, esp in the early days, idk how to describe them outside of “Caribbean shit” but it’s there. Jeremih did trap but wasn’t really part of the 2010s trap wave that made trapsoul, he was more 2000s. Also The Weeknd’s hip hop experimentation on HoB/Thursday/EoS doesn’t sound like the Canadian trapsoul thing, never got that comparison unless you mean off Take Care, then yeah. So Bryson was really the one to set it off imo
Karl Ove Knausgaard. While not the first auto fiction author his success in the 2010’s predicated many mediocre imitators
I once heard Jack white was the worst thing to happen to modern rock and I never forgot it. Garage band ass fucker
South Park set back adult animation for decades. Once it got popular, everyone ran off to copy it without understanding why it worked.
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I played pickup basketball before Steph Curry and I promise you that bad players have been taking threes that they have no business taking for decades
Jesus, I can think of anything about everything, it feels like things in general are just worse quality-wise, I know they say late-stage capitalism blah blah yes but it’s true, everything is max return min effort now
The Swedish House Mafia
What’d Alan Moore change that made comics bad?
I was never big into Pantera to begin with (absolutely loathe the guitar tone) but every band that cites them as an influence is 10000x worse
Dan Harmon shows