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Comment by PierceJoy | Hacker News Reader

I prefer good lyrics over mumble rap, but music is entirely subjective. You think it's a step backwards, but young people think it's a step forwards.

Mumble rap is essentially just natural selection. Some random rapper started doing it, people liked it, and so it propagated. If people didn't like it, it would have died out quickly. You just aren't one of those people.

> It's samey as hell and stagnant and lacks innovation.

I've said the same thing about metal since the first time I heard it. Metal fans disagree. Who's right? Does it even matter?

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I don’t know what mumble rap is, so I’m not commenting on that in particular.

But, something being selected for doesn’t imply that it isn’t a bad thing. Even if we assume that “how much the typical person likes it” or “how many people like to listen to it” or something along those lines is a good measure of goodness, those are not the only things involved in the selection pressure. Things like cost to produce, discoverability, etc. are all also things that influence the selection pressures. And if there are contributions to the pressures which aren’t entirely aligned with the direction of good, then it seems entirely possible that the selection could make something worse (as in, not as good, not as in, less successful)

re: mumble rap ~ have you heard trap?

I think once or twice, but I don’t remember what it is really.

Here is an accurate depiction of mumble rap by Snoop Dogg https://youtu.be/g0OdmRtuQew

Warning: lots of exercising 1st amendment in the above video.

The point of my comment wasn't that mumble rap is good, it's that music is subjective. There is no good or bad music. There is only music that is good to some, and bad to others. Mumble rap is good to enough people that it propagated.

Everything is natural selection, so that isn't necessarily very insightful.

An implicit premise here might be that music is good if people think it’s good.

If a genre is taken up through “natural selection,” that means a lot of people like it, and it is therefore good music to those people - regardless of what some critic might think.

A fairly significant amount of young people believe that modern American music is repetitive crap where most songs sound exactly like one another. (Because they are really are) Yet it is being pushed down their throats.

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