by Josephine Lisa Buckley

Modern music. The Baby Boomers’ most favourite punching bag. “All music today sounds the same!” they cry, not realising that the Greatest Generation were saying the exact same thing about their favourite artists. In fact, it’s pretty much customary for the elderly generation to complain about the quality of modern music. People born in the 1890s were likely complaining about Glenn Miller, people born in the 1910s were likely complaining about The Beatles, people born in the 20s were likely complaining about punk rock and new wave, and people born in the 30s, surprise surprise, were likely saying the exact same thing about grunge music. It’s a pattern that’s gone on and on.

And now, to the surprise of absolutely no one, most of the Baby Boomers and upper end Silent Generation have moved on to punching down upon Gen Z’s music. But are they actually right this time? Is modern music really, objectively getting worse? One person who seems to believe this is a YouTube user by the name of Thoughty2. I don’t want to rag on him too much or have this seem like a personal attack on him, I’ve watched about two dozen of his other videos and he’s clearly well read and knows his history. Unfortunately, a lot of his actual opinions seem to be nothing more than him pick-meing to the older generations as a younger Millennial.

I’m not going to lie and say that I think modern music is all great. There’s a lot on the radio today that I think is, to be blunt, pretty shit. But the same could be said for pretty much any decade. I’d be perfectly fine if I never heard “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond ever again, and I refuse to listen to Barbra Streisand. Anyway, Thoughty2 seems to have some “evidence” as to why modern music is objectively getting worse, and in this article I’m going to be analysing each of his points and seeing if his “evidence” holds any merit.

Before I get into my analysis, I just want to make something clear: I will never shame anybody for their music taste. If you like modern music and hate the classics, that’s perfectly fine. You can’t help which music you like and don’t like. You might be somebody who thinks all music released after December 31st, 1999 at 11:59pm completely sucks, and again, that’s fine. No one can force you to like what’s current. But all of this goes both ways. You shouldn’t shame someone for what they like or what they don’t like. Music is subjective, and if we all had the exact same opinion on everything then there wouldn’t be much discussion to have. I do not hate Thoughty2, I simply disagree with him.

Anyway, without further ado, let’s begin!

“Older music is more relevant”

I’m paraphrasing, but this is generally what he’s trying to say with his first point. A lot of his opinions here are generally correct. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles is, in fact, likely the most influential album ever recorded. I’m not disputing that. Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin… those guys are all great. Thoughty2 then compares and contrasts Sgt Pepper to Justin Bieber’s Baby, and completely drags the song.

You know what the problem with this analogy is? While Sgt Pepper’s was considered a hit at the time and is still iconic today, Baby has always widely been considered to be a pretty bad song. It’s one of the most disliked videos on YouTube and most of the comments on its video are discussing how terrible it is. Given this information, is it not a wise conclusion that maybe, this song’s views are mostly coming from people who simply want to mock it in its comment section and leave dislikes? This song was a hit for about a week before people realised how much it sucks.

Compare that to Britney Spears, another artist Thoughty2 uses as a negative contrast to “classic” music. The issue with this is that Spears’s debut album, Baby One More Time, was a massive hit and is still considered to be one of the best albums of the 1990s even today. Just last week, I heard You Drive Me Crazy on a major pop radio station. Her autobiography, released this year, is one of 2023’s best selling books and won the award for best autobiography of the year by Goodreads Choice Awards. I’m not even that big of a Britney Spears fan, and even I bought and read the book simply because so many people were talking about it. It’s clear that the public is still interested in Spears even 24 years after the release of her debut album. Again, if you don’t like her music, I’m not gonna judge you, but to claim that she’s not culturally relevant is ludicrous. If this wasn’t even the point he was trying to make, and he was just waffling on in the opening with his Sgt Pepper’s point, and he really is just saying “Bob Dylan good, Britney Spears bad”, then this argument is entirely subjective and not really proof of anything.

“When your parents keep telling you that the music died long ago, they may actually have a point, because it turns out that science agrees with them”

My parents actually don’t tell me this. Even my surviving grandparents don’t. My paternal grandmother, born in 1941, is a self-confessed One Direction fan. But eh, I’m just being fallacious. Let’s hear all about this “science”!

“Research reveals that every year, music is getting worse”

Wow! I didn’t know that somebody asked every single person alive what they thought about the current state of music, and that everyone in the world collectively agreed that music is getting worse every single year.

They didn’t? Then this point is stupid. A “study” cannot determine that music is getting worse. As I’ve stated, over and over again, music is entirely subjective. A lot of people probably do feel that music is getting worse every year, but then a lot of people might think the opposite.

“They analysed 500,000 songs released between 1955 and 2010, analysed the harmonic complexity, timbral diversity, and loudness”

First of all… what? Fucking loudness? Is this a joke? Maybe the first two components have some validity, but loudness? Am I misinterpreting something? Let’s keep watching and find out.

“Over the past few decades, timbre in songs has dropped drastically”

In case you aren’t familiar with what timbre is, then no need to panic. Thoughty2 gives one in this video.

“Timbre is the texture, colour, and quality of the sounds within music”

Unfortunately for Thoughty2’s argument, this definition is not entirely accurate. Timbre relates to the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound, or tone.

Here’s a definition of the word “perceived”:

1. become aware or conscious of (something); come to realize or understand.

or:

2. interpret or regard (someone or something) in a particular way.

In other words, this entire argument is completely subjective. Timbre is an entirely subjective component and this point is, once again, meaningless and unscientific.

The rest of his timbral argument is simply him throwing together a bunch of musical words to make it sound like he has an objective point, but then we get to an example. For this example, Thoughty2 compares and contrasts The Beatles’ A Day in the Life to Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines.

That’s right, my dear readers! Thoughty2 just compared one of the most positively reviewed songs in history… to one of the most negatively reviewed songs in history, simply because one was released in the 1960s and one was released in the 2010s. To put this into perspective… imagine I compared Pink Floyd’s Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict to Counting Stars by OneRepublic. Therefore, the 2010s win! Rock music sucks! Hooray!

Sarcasm aside, this just isn’t really a fair comparison. A Day in the Life is widely regarded as The Beatles’ magnum opus. It’s often considered one of the greatest songs of all time, so obviously a random, heavily panned song from 40 years later isn’t going to compare in the slightest. Thoughty2 cites A Day in the Life‘s wide use of classical instruments, such as violin, viola, double bass, oboe, etc. The main problem is that this is an outlier even for The Beatles. The vast majority of their songs use simple instrumentation: Two guitars, a bass, drums, and maybe some piano and harmonica. This is true for most 60s rock music. The only ones who were really going against this grain were latter-day The Beatles and Brian Jones era The Rolling Stones. Hell, most songs of this era generally use the same, basic chord progression: I-IV-I-V. Some of the most famous 50s and 60s songs used this chord progression, such as Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry, Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan, Pinball Wizard by The Who…

Cut to the 2020s and nothing’s changed much. The most common instruments in pop music today are guitar, piano, drum, bass, and synthesisers. Listen to what’s currently on the radio today, such as Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift and you’ll notice that their music generally contains these instruments. Despite what Thoughty 2 claims, Blurred Lines only using a drum machine is not at all representative of a trend in modern pop. How many songs can you name that only use a drum machine? In addition, Thoughty2 names Bob Dylan as one of his favourite artists in this video. Dylan’s music, earlier on and even later into his career at several stages, features just Dylan singing with his guitar and harmonica. Using the logic that Thoughty2 establishes, wouldn’t this make Taylor Swift “objectively better” than Dylan’s early music?

Oh, and by the way, the study that Thoughty2 cites can be found here, where the point of the study was, in fact, not to determine if popular music is “getting worse”, but how people see change in popular music over time. The study does not, and was not meant to, determine if music is “getting worse” with time.

“Instead of experimenting with different musical techniques and instruments, the vast majority of pop today is built using the exact same combination of a keyboard, drum machine, sampler, and computer software”

I know right? It’s absolutely crazy that genres have their own musical structures. What’s next? Classical music sucks because there’s no guitar shredding? Also, no, most pop music does not use samplers. That’s much more of a rap thing, and even then it’s not all that common. As we’ve just discussed, what Thoughty2 is describing can be said of pretty much any period. I’ve just given the 60s as an example of this. The problem I’m having with Thoughty2’s examples is that he’s, so far, comparing album cuts to hit singles. Singles are, and always have been, specifically designed to be hits. Whether it’s because they’re catchy or follow a formula, the label knows ahead of time what they want to see in a hit single. This is why so many people complain that radio “all sounds the same”, because those songs follow a formula. A Day in the Life never had a single release because it wasn’t radio friendly. If you look back at classic rock, so many people complain that a band’s singles are never their best songs or even that those singles are some of their worst songs. I don’t know any Taylor Swift fan that thinks Shake It Off comes close to being her best song.

“It sucks the creativity and originality out of music, making everything sound somewhat similar”

Yeah, and people were saying this about synths back in the 70s as well.

“The Millennial Whoop”

In case you aren’t aware of what the Millennial Whoop is, it’s a type of vocal melody pattern that alternates between the use of the fifth and third notes in a major scale. And Thoughty2 is correct, this pattern has been used relatively frequently in pop music. Songs that have used this pattern include Kings of Leon’s Use Somebody, Ke$ha’s Tik Tok, Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, and Katy Perry’s California Girls.

Despite being technically correct with the Millennial whoop, there are still problems with this claim. The most notable one being… why does it even matter?

The Millennial Whoop is not the only “musical formula” that has been established in music. Earlier examples were invented by the Mannheim school, and include the Mannheim Crescendo (entire orchestra shifting from pianissimo to fortissimo [quiet to loud] in a short period of time), the Mannheim Rocket (an ascending passage having a rising arpeggiated melodic line, coupled with a crescendo), and the Mannheim Roller (a crescendo passage having a rising melodic line over an ostinato bass line). Notable users of these techniques include… Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven.

Another example is this little riff here:

If you have a guitar, try playing this riff. Can you guess what song it is? This isn’t a trick question. Just try and guess what artist used this riff.

If you said Chuck Berry, you’d be correct. If you said The Rolling Stones, you’d also be correct. If you said The Beatles? Also correct. Bob Dylan? Led Zeppelin? Elvis Presley? Correct, correct, correct. This riff, or a slight variant of it, has been used in literally hundreds of popular songs from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

By Thoughty2’s logic here: Beethoven, Mozart, The Beatles, and Elvis Presley weren’t creative musical artists.

“Lyrics are getting worse”

And to demonstrate this, Thoughty2 first compares Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone to Duck Sauce’s Barbra Streisand. He compares Bob Dylan, an artist who is all about lyrics, to a dance song, where nobody cares about lyrics and the music is the only thing that actually matters.

In addition, popular music is meant to appeal to a wide audience. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be called popular music. Let’s take a look at two of the Beatles’ most famous singles, Love Me Do and Yellow Submarine:

Let’s be honest: Yellow Submarine is not The Beatles’ best work, and a five year old could have written Love Me Do. But that’s literally the point: Popular music is supposed to appeal to a wider audience. Most pop music lyrics are terrible, but there have always been exceptions. An artist like Bob Dylan was an outlier even for the time period he was from, and as we’ve just demonstrated, The Beatles’ most lyrically complex songs were never necessarily their most famous or their biggest hits. Even big fans of today’s popular artists generally agree. I’ve yet to meet a Swifty who actually thinks Shake It Off is one of her better songs, for example, and I won’t lie, I think Shake It Off is pretty bad for Taylor Swift standards.

To offer up a modern song with great lyrics, I’d like to nominate Kyoto by Phoebe Bridgers.

Kyoto has some brilliant and powerful lyrics that use a “show, don’t tell” approach. It’s not explicitly stated, but we can infer from the lyrics that the song is about a relative who is emotionally absent, possibly abusive. This is true, the song is about Bridgers’s troubled relationship with her father. Yet, at the same time, the lyrics are open to interpretation. They don’t necessarily have to be about a strained relationship with a parent. The song hit the Billboard Top 40 in the US and was nominated for Best Rock Song at the 2021 Grammy Awards. The album it features on, Punisher, reached Number 1 on the UK Indie Charts and peaked at Number 4 on the US Indie Charts.

“Thousands of Top 100 singles were written by one man, Max Martin. He is single-handedly responsible for thousands of the best performing songs”

First of all, claiming he is “single-handedly” responsible for those is a stretch. He wrote (or co-wrote) the lyrics, yes, but he did not produce (on his own) or perform the songs themselves. Claiming he’s single-handedly responsible for these songs is like claiming that Pete Townshend is single-handedly responsible for The Who.

Claiming he has written “thousands” of Top 100 singles is quite the exaggeration, as well. Since 1998, he has had a writing credit on 25 Number 1 singles, most of which were written with other people. He has written nowhere near “thousands” of songs. According to Spotify data, he has a writing credit on just over 400 songs.

Furthermore, a song not being written by the artist is not necessarily an indicator of quality. The following artists did not write their own songs: Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Diana Ross, Tony Bennett, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, as well as many others. Other artists worked with a lot of co-writers, including Roy Orbison and The Grateful Dead.

To use traditional, 50s pop as an example, the following songs were all written (or co-written) by one man named Jimmy Van Heusen: Polka Dots and Moonbeams, All the Way, September of My Years, Imagination, Here’s That Rainy Day, Somewhere Along the Way, But Beautiful, It Could Happen To You, I Could Have Told You, Come Dance With Me, Come Fly With Me, High Hopes. These songs were not performed by Van Heusen himself, but by other artists like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. These songs, even some 70-80 years later, are still considered standards and some of the best songs ever. If modern pop is bad because a lot of the songs are written by other artists, shouldn’t these artists be considered bad too?

The next section of Thoughty2’s video is mostly a complaint about streaming. I want to write an entry about this in the future, so I’ll be skipping this section for now. All I really have to say is that I don’t agree with this either.

“Back in the 50s and 60s, record labels would sign on the most talented artists. Many times record labels would sign on artists that weren’t meant to be. However, they’d balance the books by signing on the really big artists.”

I’m paraphrasing and summarising what his next point is, but this is essentially it. He’s quite wrong about how the music industry used to work. Labels did not sign on “the really big artists”, they signed on the artists that they believed would make them the most money. For example, in the early 60s, Decca Records quite famously refused to sign The Beatles. This point also severely underestimates just how many artists were around in the 1960s. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Hollies etc are the ones who have still retained popularity even sixty years later because they’re the ones who have stood the test of time. Many artists who were relatively popular for their time have faded into obscurity because they did not. I obviously can’t predict the future, but I’m sure the same will be true of our music in the 2080s. The ones who were actually good will be well remembered, the ones who weren’t will be forgotten. At best, the really bad ones will become something of a novelty like The Shaggs did (again, I want to do a whole article about this band at some point.)

Thoughty2 then goes on a tangent about how the music industry is “brainwashing” us. He basically claims that this is because the industry picks a song that they believe has potential and plants it everywhere. In stores, TV shows, advertisements, et cetra. The only problem is… this has basically always been the case. The industry is pumping tons of money into selling these acts, they want to make a profit. There is absolutely nothing wrong with advertising a product.

Conclusion

Thoughty2 is essentially claiming here that because he does not like modern music, clearly everybody else is just being brainwashed into liking it. His “evidence” and “sources” for modern music objectively being worse are shaky and just flat-out false.

So, despite everything he’s said in this video, my opinion is exactly the same – Music is subjective. You should not be forced to like or dislike something. If you like One Direction, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you like classical, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you like rap, there is nothing wrong with that. I don’t believe there is any way to determine a song’s “objective” quality or to determine which genre is “objectively” better. I can listen to just about anything because I love music and it’s an integral part of my life, and I’m sure a lot of people feel the same way.

I don’t really have much else to comment on, so it looks like this is the end of my article. I hope you enjoyed reading it and maybe even learned something new. Music theory and history is something I don’t get to talk about much so finally getting an opportunity to discuss it has been great. In addition, please do not send any harassment to Thoughty2 or his fans. Even if I fundamentally disagree with the points he makes in his video, his dislike of modern music is his opinion. As always, if you have any suggestions or criticisms, please feel free to contact me using the information on this page.