Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheGRS | Hacker News Reader

One of my coworkers stated this a few years ago: "i'm on an interesting musical journey right now: trying to identify musicians/groups/bands/artists, etc. that i've over looked because they were "mainstream" popular"

And I always thought that was kind of a hilarious thing to go through. Most people I know who are music snobs are generally anti-pop music and it seems like they miss out on the fun stuff that everyone gets into.

I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.

View on HN

> I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.

I feel like that's often part of it. Something that represents peak (whatever) in terms of a sound. The sort of highly-polished result that almost sounds like it was AI-generated by a model trained on exactly what was popular over the past few years.

Of course, you don't need AI to do it - just slightly more human and manual analysis of trends, sales, marketing, and production techniques.

I unironically love the band Winger. They’re probably most famous now for becoming instantly uncool once Mike Judge drew Stewart in a Winger tshirt on Beavis and Butthead in the 90s.

The thing is though, they’re amazing musicians. Kip Winger is premiering another one of his classical works with the Nashville Symphony in the next few weeks. Reb Beach is one of the most skilled and melodic guitar players to come out of the 80s. They wrote and continue to write some great songs too if you like that kind of music.

Music snobbery is just silly, and robs you of the joy of discovering some great new music while simultaneously robbing others of it too. Everybody loses.

On a parallel track, I've been continually amazed at how even as someone interested in broad musical categories, how many bands I've never heard of who were 'mainstream' popular in some way - maybe not top 40 radio but at least on some radio somewhere, or were #1 at some point in some not completely niche genre. there's just so much music out there, even so much good music.

That happens to me all the time. Like wow I've never heard this 30 year old song before, but it was a hit at the time it released.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com