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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Hmmph. Maybe this explains why I keep going back to music from before 1990. Or maybe I'm just old :-)

I'm old. And I know what you're feeling, I have many friends who are stuck on 70's, 80's, 90's music (you can guess my age cuz I didn't mention 60's ;) ). But as an oldie, I can tell you that there is good music out there.

I don't know, I don't know you at all, but explore, get out of your comfort zone and give music a chance.

So a little about myself, maybe 20 years ago I couldn't imagine loving music that didn't have lyrics. At that time I thought that having words was important, sort of like poetry. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy lyrics, but lately I've discovered more experimental music, ambient music. Artists like Oneohtrix Point Never and Tim Hecker. Of course Boards of Canada which are probably better known than either Hecker or OPN (though OPN recently toured with NiN and Sound Garden, go figure!).

Point is, if you enjoy what you enjoyed in the past, go for it. If you're lamenting that music today "ain't what it used to be", you may need to expand your horizons a bit, there is good shit out there! Give it a try!

+1 for Tim Hecker and Boards of Canada, especially for music while programming. Goregous, heady sound art.

Yeah, tough choice between BoC, Hecker and OPN. If you haven't experienced OPN yet, try him out (Daniel Lopatin). I'd probably start with his older stuff and progress through it as his newer stuff is more avant garde, but familiar if you progress from earlier stuff to newest.

His latest record is due out in November and from what I've heard so far it's even crazier than anything past, but still has the OPN sound even though the medium appears to be completely different.

EDIT: I actually find it hard to program to Hecker. There are certain parts of Ravedeath, Virgins, and Radio Amor, (among others!) where I am completely distracted by soundscapes!

I love that y'all are talking about these artists on HN! If you're into these guys, I would recommend Fennesz' Endless Summer, or Gas for some great ambient techno. As people have said, there's way more where that came from...so much amazing, uncelebrated music out there from all eras.

I'm a big fan of Gas's mid-90s project Burger/Ink, a collaboration with the almost as prolific Jörg Burger, and their "Las Vegas" album. And if you like that, try Porter Ricks.

For something more recent, this week I have been mostly coding to The Cyclist and Legowelt.

But I've also been listening to a lot of 80s Italo-disco, including the more commercial hits which were also manufactured in some of the ways mentioned in this article, so I'm having trouble saying manufactured is necessarily bad; it's just the sound of modern pop music I find mostly horrible and brash.

I have Becz and Endless Summer, they find their way into the mix now and then as well :)

It is easy because only the good music from the era past survived. In 20 years we will know what the good music of today is.

20 years ago macarena and coco jambo were bigger than "smells like teen spirit" or "rape me"/"self esteem"/"come out and play"

> But as an oldie, I can tell you that there is good music out there.

I agree there is a ton of great music out there (I too am an "oldie", having reached 48 this year). You just need to know where to look.

I recommend listening to Stuart Maconie's Freak zone programmes on BBC Radio 6. He does a two hour "Freak Zone" [0] on a Sunday evening and an extra one hour "Freakier Zone" early Monday mornings [1], they're packed with all sorts of goodies.

Thanks for the tipoff about OPN (been on my list for a while) and Hecker (brand new to me).

If you prefer the more melodic sounds of BoC then you should check out the Ghostbox label [2]. Lots of good stuff there and with a nod towards hauntology [3] from a British perspective (see also works by Robin The Fog and Howlround [4] if that's an aural itch you need to scratch). I also particularly recommend King of Woolworths[5], an incarnation of Jon Brooks who also records as The Advisory Circle [6]. Ming Star is very bloody good.

[0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06chqml

[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06chp7h

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Box_Music

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology

[4]: http://robinthefog.com/

[5]: http://www.discogs.com/artist/16510-King-Of-Woolworths

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Advisory_Circle

The refrain that music in its entirety has done the same cut and paste thing as pop music in the last 25 years is really frustrating to me. There's tons of absolutely brilliant, innovative musicians out there. Sure it's not on the radio, but that doesn't mean for a second that it doesn't exist. Off the top of my head there are artists like Flying Lotus, Beck, Autechre, hell even artists more in the realm of accessible pop like Jamie XX who are writing and producing all their own music and it's all relentlessly interesting and innovative

It also explains why David Cassidy never had another hit after leaving the Partridge Family, and the Monkees never had one after deciding that they were real musicians and could write their own music :-)

I have a soft spot for Michael Nesmith.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsOW_9KJSaw

He wrote Listen to the Band, the only Monkees song I ever listen to voluntarily.

Edit: Evidence the Monkees were a seminal garage punk band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3VQIHyq9lA

Yeah, the magic behind the Monkees were Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who wrote most of their hits and later toured with Dolenz and Jones.

That was my thought too, yeah. We all have a tendency to romanticize the stuff that came before us, but manufactured pop was a thing long before 1990.

EDIT: To provide an example, here's a very good 2001 article by British journalist Jon Ronson about the culture of child sex abuse that surrounded the UK's hitmakers of the '70s: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/dec/01/weekend....

manufactured pop was a thing long before 1990

Here's a short snippet from Wikipedia that illustrates it[1]:

   Bubblegum pop is a genre of pop music with
   an upbeat sound contrived and marketed to
   appeal to pre-teens and teenagers, that may
   be produced in an assembly-line process,
   driven by producers and often using unknown
   singers. Bubblegum's classic period ran from
   1967 to 1972. A second wave of bubblegum
   started two years later and ran until 1977

Hmmm... Seem familiar?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegum_pop

The Monkees' music was recorded by "the wrecking crew", a gang of session musicians who were involved in most of the 60's hits. There is a very nice documentary about them on netflix named "The Wrecking Crew"

In the documentary they explain how these session musicians where so good, the Monkees' trained for a year before they could play the hits close enough for live concerts.

I look for music from the future like Purity Ring https://youtu.be/qHTeiYtlS8s

The manufactured pop has never been good, the difference is now I'm no longer a prisoner to MTV/Radio like I was in 1990, I can actually source and stream music worldwide and bypass major label pushed junk. A lot of music I used to mail order in the early 90s was all confiscated by border guards for either "obscene" album art or banned lyrics. Just happy the musical dark ages are over.

Nah, there's just as many good tunes coming out as there ever was. You just have to listen to Music Other Than Top 40 Pop. Fire up Pandora and seed it with some of your favorite pre-1990 songs, and I guarantee you'll find a boatload of great new music you never knew existed.

I sometimes wonder where is the 2015 equivalent of Led Zeppelin?

Maybe you only get a Zeppelin every couple of decades.

That's a tough one, even today I feel that Zep is as relevant as ever, so you can't really compare. But there is good modern music out there, but maybe it's apples and oranges comparing to Zep. Zep is still relevant!

I mentioned some of my current favorite artists in another post, but try Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) or Tim Hecker, these guys are doing crazy things today. Honestly, I was a Zep fan, still am a Zep fan and think that there is no comparison to Zep. But OPN and Hecker will blow you away much like Zep can blow you away, if you give them a chance. Just my opinion of course ;)

They're not raw enough, but I think about the closest you'll get right now to the concept of Zep might be the Foo Fighters. It's real rock & roll, the musicians are talented, their front man is ultra-charismatic, and they consistently put out hit after hit. If you want a slightly less rock-ish option (which isn't remotely like Led Zeppelin but meets all the criteria except for specific music genre), it's hard to go wrong with Pearl Jam ... or any of Eddie Vedder's side projects.

To co-opt what someone else said, in order to find what you're looking for from the 90s, you kinda have to go look at bands from the 90s and pray they're still together.

Maybe try Wolfmother?

Edit: Obviously nowhere near the stature and influence of Led Zeppelin, but the sound might satisfy you in some ways.

where is the 2015 equivalent of Led Zeppelin?

You could actually understand what Robert Plant was singing. The biggest problem with many of today's bands is that the words are usually unintelligible (often because music is being played loudly over them).

In contrast, I think part of the appeal of rap is that you can actually understand the words. You might not like them, but you can understand them. E.g. In Da Club by 50 Cent. Great beat, easily understood words.

Well, they're there but really hard to find unless you are lucky enough to live in a market with an independent, listener supported radio station such as KXT here in Dallas.

Indy recordings are not all good, sometimes they play some kinda crappy, pitchy local artists but at least it's not the record industry decreed crap everybody else plays. And there are some treasures out there.

Although they don't have the album release cadence of Led Zeppelin, perhaps Tool?

From what I understand, Led Zep were by no means the opposite end of the spectrum from manufactured pop. They were assembled by Jimmy Page from industry professionals, plagiarised a lot, and operated largely as a shameless cash generation machine. And the results were fantastic, of course.

If there was a formula for their success, nobody has been able to repeat it.

I know they plagiarized some old blues stuff, but all musicians do to some extent, and those old blues tunes were forgotten then and would still be forgotten if Zep hadn't brilliantly rearranged them.

I do too. I take the music of an entire decade, throw out 99.99% of all of it, make the rest into a big mix tape, and then call it a golden age.

Even when they're pumping out commercialized, mass-produced dreck, sometimes a little quality leaks in at random. Take a big enough sample, filter out the crap (and try to forget it existed), and you've got yourself the good ole days.

The phenomenon described is not new. In the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s -- probably back to the beginning of the genre -- most pop hits were written by a relatively small number of unknown-to-the-public songwriters.

Maybe it's even more common today -- but it's not anything new.

KBiRD 680 AM is streaming 24/7 out of Olympia. The story of the music selection is amusing.

Mediums mature. We can't expect mediums to exist in perpetual glory days, always building off of the past.

Pizza can only be invented once. The Beatles can only happen once.

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