The 80s were a very strange time...

The 80s were a great time for music. Probably my favorite era.

I lived it, the 80s were my teenage years. It was a strange time but also hopeful. There was just more heart in everything it felt like. They were some of the best years of my life.

Exactly.  Listen to bands from the 70's and 80's, and you can hear how much talent was required to do what they did.  Nowadays all it takes is ProTools, a mumbling drug-dealer, an auto-tuned attractive female, and a drum machine and you've got another Top 40 hit.

DUDE, the 80s had so much damn variety in terms of "top hits" and stuff that achieved radio play.

Listen to this modern music, this is total ear rape to me: BORING, repetitive, no humor, no message, no passion bleeding through the speakers/screen, nothing interesting at all.. It's just boring dreck, I mean, what is there to enjoy in these other than "hey look there's a chick on the screen"?




SO BORING AND REPETITIVE. The beat isn't even that good to be worth repeating 7 million times.




This just seems like a bad attempt to be "ethnic sounding", nothing about it catches my ear, it's just spazzy noise, seemingly scattered notes sung in such a bizarre way.. The sad thing is, the two songs above, 90% of modern radio hits sound exactly like them. But then you have ones like this:




See, this has lyrics that at least aren't totally boring crap, it seems to be aware of how most modern songs have garbage lyrics. It also sounds OK to my ears, but even so, the video and song are just.. Too damn boring for me over all. Every damn song is written in a "minimalist" way these days, relying more on big whooping, bassy sounds and less on interesting melodies with variety. It just gets old to my ears so fast. I feel like the hits of the next 10 years will maybe have 3 different notes hit per song, maybe, but you bet your ass those 3 notes will be played through some weird synth that sounds like it's filling a giant hallway with bassy, glittery noise! Oh, and the music video will be an attractive woman doing <insert activity here> in stunning 4K HD!


Now compare that to some hits from the 80s, so many different sounds to enjoy:




So many different instruments that I can distinguish - a great bassline, great synth effects (but they don't make up the whole song!), clean guitar, xylophone/vibes, great female backup singers, and so much passion in his voice.. You can feel emotion bleeding through in the sound alone! Never get that amount of soul from current radio hits and the funny thing is, there are older songs out there with far more soul than this one. Emotions beyond "sex appeal" just seem missing from modern radio music.


Here's another type of 80s hit:




Much more energy, a classic rock vibe almost, but every single part of this song was actually performed by real musicians, not simply entered into a computer. Both of these charted extremely well in their heyday, but you'll notice they don't even sound like the same genre at all. This is the aspect of modern radio music that bothers me most, it's so insanely homogenized. Every big record label wants to play it safe and simply copy whatever the "popular sound" is with only minor variation. In the older days of radio, there was much more of a "who knows if this will sell, play it on the radio for a while and see how it does!" attitude that is simply GONE.


Yet another totally different 80's hit:




Wow, a song with a real message? It's not just about sex and titillation? Who would have thought! See, so far each song has had a pretty distinct sound, lyrics with some actual depth and a variety of topics, plus you know what else I'm noticing? How much less the videos rely on sex appeal. It's usually interesting shots of the band, interesting set designs, just generally interesting or weird stuff that keeps your eyes entertained, and not just because there's women on the screen. Just another example of taking a business risk, trying something a bit out there and different rather than staying in the "musical safe zone that's guaranteed to make money".


How did things get this way? Why, simply ask Frank! (the first half of the video is the relevant bit, but the whole thing is great)



This clip is from the 80's. Here he's talking about how 80's radio music seems so homogenized compared to 60's radio music, and indeed I would have to agree - Variety on the radio hit an astonishing high in the 60's. We've only doubled-down since then, and that's the problem: the 80's music that Frank saw as "all sounding too similar" now seems to have tons of variety compared to what's on the radio now. How much further will radio music dip into this trend of hitting as few notes as possible in each song?

Now, am I romanticizing things here, and was Frank in that clip? Probably to some degree, but as a musician, looking at the technical side of things is very telling. I like interesting and dynamic melodies, harmonies and rhythms that aren't just "a few seconds of music repeated over and over for 3 minutes", and that's just the sound itself - don't even get me started on how damn boring lyrics are these days.. they're guaranteed to NOT result in any brain activity. My ears are simply bored by the seemingly lazy nature of modern radio.

Now just to clarify, this whole damn post was about radio music, just the famous stuff that makes money and gets lots of publicity. In every decade, there have always been those bands and musicians doing excellent, innovative, interesting things, as well as the bands playing boring music and trying to ride the coattails of what's currently big, but the problem is that, as far as radio is concerned, the bar is dropping at freefall speeds.

The thought of some big producer slapping the keyboard a few times in FL studio making millions of dollars while small, unknown bands who play their hearts out and try new things are underappreciated and ignored just disgusts me on some core level. It feels like in the last 50 years, the radio has done a complete 180 - it went from being a smorgasbord of different sounds to being a pit of homogenized dreck. There are peaks and valleys, but the overall trend has clearly been towards musical simplification (or as I think of it, musical retardation). The worst thing in all of this is that, inadvertently, it trains the ears of the impressionable youth to love simple noises and be confused or repelled in some way by melodies and sounds with lots of variety.

Sorry for the huge ramble. A bunch of this is anecdotal, subjective, personal crap. Maybe the radio is more interesting and diverse than ever before and I just perceive everything backwards. I wouldn't rule it out..

That's a good point, but it makes up for it's simplicity with so much passion, angst and emotion - None of that stuff seems to bleed through in the sound of modern radio music.