Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. I don't want to say it but every cell in my grease soaked body begs me to chant it from the middle of main street. Music fucking sucks. Okay. When I say "music" I really mean independent music. I know, that cuts out a lot of dumb bullshit we all may like, but it also removes a big portion of, well...dumb bullshit.
The bad thing is that you already know music sucks. You just don't know why. Thats because, like a many-tentacled sea demon, the suck hits us from many angles at once and begins to pull us deeper an deeper into the darkness of shitty. It's hard to really think about how sucky something is when all you want to do is run away. So, bravely, I will endure the sucktitude and hopefully live to tell you about it.
First of all there is the 95 percent rule. I didn't invent it, I just discovered it. You should really pay attention because whether you know it or not, this rule pretty much applies to everything and everyone. Here is the rule: 95% of everything sucks. That's right, 95%. This applies to paintings, clothes, cars, teachers, burritos, shoe horns and trees. 95% of your whole world sucks. So given that, right off the bat only 5 percent of music even has the chance to be not sucky. Not good odds, and there are many more obstacles in the way before you get to the Awesome line. Fact.
As a rule, there are no longer any cohesive scenes. And if there are scenes, they are so isolated and closed minded musically that anything at all outside of the preferred musical formula, known as a genre, is ignored. This naturally excludes most of the 5% of music that's actually any good. Fact.
In the western music scale there are only 12 notes and only four or five of them sound good together. Fact.
Another theory held by many musical elitists is much more simple and elegant: music sucks because people are stupid, and people are the ones who make music. Except random music and that sucks 100%. Fact.
Something more obviously to blame for music sucking is shitty songwriting. Just because you've got a mac and pro tools and a nice microphone an the ability to layer an infinite number of tracks with any instrument, it doesn't mean that anything you record will be good. Most likely it will be a cacophonous mess because, let's face it, you suck at songwriting. Technology should help support the song, not hide the fact that there is no song. Fact.
I also blame Revisionism for some of this suck. Let me explain revisionism. See, sometimes music genres get so boring and stale that they fragment and explode, like a supernova. Later a band or act will do something new and split from established genre rules (for lack of a better term). Sometimes what they do is good; this is the first stage in the cycle and it is known as Innovation. Sometimes many acts make similar musical decisions around the same time and this is the second stage in the cycle called Trending. Many times Trending takes place with no interaction of any of the acts involved, other times many of the acts will be from a similar geographical region, especially historically. Once Trending occurs, usually some chodes decide that they would do well to play this new innovative kind of music as well. At this point we are well into the Imitation stage. Whether the acts intend to or not, Imitation naturally reduces the potency and originality of the Innovators by reducing and reusing the original musical ideas to stock patterns and rule bound structure decisions. Usually at this point the musical movement dies out to be almost entirely forgotten, or it succeeds (as it were) to enter the fourth stage known as Acceptance. In this stage the genre has a concrete name and usually a particular fashion or style associated with it. This stage is notoriously short, with generally one or two waves of bands or acts before it moves into the dreaded fifth stage of the cycle known as Revisionism. This is the longest stage of the music cycle and is usually the one responsible for the whole supernova effect that starts the cycle over again. Unfortunately for every one band that decides to be in the Innovation stage, 100 more decide to just dwell in the doldrums of Revisionism. Can't really blame them, this is the music that they have been playing for years or at least is the music that inspired them to create. That's fine. But that's also why we still have tons of shitty blues acts, punk acts, ska acts, fucking bling bling hip hop, eighties style hair metal bands, nineties style Pantera wannabes, and just a shit ton of screamy emo bullshit.. That's Revisionism and probably a good part of the reason music sucks. Fact.
Thats why I like bands that aren't easily classified; that just can't seem to fit into a certain genre. My favorite music has found my ears because I asked what something sounded like and someone said, "I don't know man, they've got their own sound." Of course, even super shitty bands have their own sound. The 95 percent rule applies here as well.
The bad thing is that you already know music sucks. You just don't know why. Thats because, like a many-tentacled sea demon, the suck hits us from many angles at once and begins to pull us deeper an deeper into the darkness of shitty. It's hard to really think about how sucky something is when all you want to do is run away. So, bravely, I will endure the sucktitude and hopefully live to tell you about it.
First of all there is the 95 percent rule. I didn't invent it, I just discovered it. You should really pay attention because whether you know it or not, this rule pretty much applies to everything and everyone. Here is the rule: 95% of everything sucks. That's right, 95%. This applies to paintings, clothes, cars, teachers, burritos, shoe horns and trees. 95% of your whole world sucks. So given that, right off the bat only 5 percent of music even has the chance to be not sucky. Not good odds, and there are many more obstacles in the way before you get to the Awesome line. Fact.
As a rule, there are no longer any cohesive scenes. And if there are scenes, they are so isolated and closed minded musically that anything at all outside of the preferred musical formula, known as a genre, is ignored. This naturally excludes most of the 5% of music that's actually any good. Fact.
In the western music scale there are only 12 notes and only four or five of them sound good together. Fact.
Another theory held by many musical elitists is much more simple and elegant: music sucks because people are stupid, and people are the ones who make music. Except random music and that sucks 100%. Fact.
Something more obviously to blame for music sucking is shitty songwriting. Just because you've got a mac and pro tools and a nice microphone an the ability to layer an infinite number of tracks with any instrument, it doesn't mean that anything you record will be good. Most likely it will be a cacophonous mess because, let's face it, you suck at songwriting. Technology should help support the song, not hide the fact that there is no song. Fact.
I also blame Revisionism for some of this suck. Let me explain revisionism. See, sometimes music genres get so boring and stale that they fragment and explode, like a supernova. Later a band or act will do something new and split from established genre rules (for lack of a better term). Sometimes what they do is good; this is the first stage in the cycle and it is known as Innovation. Sometimes many acts make similar musical decisions around the same time and this is the second stage in the cycle called Trending. Many times Trending takes place with no interaction of any of the acts involved, other times many of the acts will be from a similar geographical region, especially historically. Once Trending occurs, usually some chodes decide that they would do well to play this new innovative kind of music as well. At this point we are well into the Imitation stage. Whether the acts intend to or not, Imitation naturally reduces the potency and originality of the Innovators by reducing and reusing the original musical ideas to stock patterns and rule bound structure decisions. Usually at this point the musical movement dies out to be almost entirely forgotten, or it succeeds (as it were) to enter the fourth stage known as Acceptance. In this stage the genre has a concrete name and usually a particular fashion or style associated with it. This stage is notoriously short, with generally one or two waves of bands or acts before it moves into the dreaded fifth stage of the cycle known as Revisionism. This is the longest stage of the music cycle and is usually the one responsible for the whole supernova effect that starts the cycle over again. Unfortunately for every one band that decides to be in the Innovation stage, 100 more decide to just dwell in the doldrums of Revisionism. Can't really blame them, this is the music that they have been playing for years or at least is the music that inspired them to create. That's fine. But that's also why we still have tons of shitty blues acts, punk acts, ska acts, fucking bling bling hip hop, eighties style hair metal bands, nineties style Pantera wannabes, and just a shit ton of screamy emo bullshit.. That's Revisionism and probably a good part of the reason music sucks. Fact.
Thats why I like bands that aren't easily classified; that just can't seem to fit into a certain genre. My favorite music has found my ears because I asked what something sounded like and someone said, "I don't know man, they've got their own sound." Of course, even super shitty bands have their own sound. The 95 percent rule applies here as well.
Timm Tayshun thinks at least 95% of this article sucks.
