For me : Trippie Redd’s “!” Is actually a great album
Lyrics don’t add value to 99.99% of music and any notes from them should be from an actual instrument.
This is a fantastic unpopular opinion.
I definitely consider this for some genres, but for others it ruins the music for me.
I tend to hear the vocals as an instrument and often have no idea what the words are. It’s happened before where once I learn the words I don’t like the song as much anymore either because the meaning of the words is distracting or the meaning is way different than the meaning I’d put on the song.
90% of all radio songs lately have been horrendous covers of old songs, with some of them literally being just that old song, but with a cookie cutter beat under them. The other 10% are just said cookie cutter beats with some generic singer doing an annoying voice over them.
Popular music is becoming more creatively bankrupt than it ever has been.
I think they asked for unpopular opinions
Oh right. Weezer sucks.
Rap and Hiphop are just shit music.
I have a pretty broad music taste, I have rock, classical, pop, eurodance, opera, bitpop, industrial, metal, ballads and more on my phone, except rap or hiphop.
There is just something in me that as soon as I hear either it just sounds like shit.
You shouldn’t generalize, a lot of the stuff that gets played a lot is not indicative of the whole genre. There is some rap that makes me cover my ears, and there is some rap that makes me feel enlightened. Hip hop it just depends on the song, since there is so much variety.
I mean, OP litterarly asked us about what our most unpopular opinion about music is, this is mine.
I would never impose this view on others, they are free to like what they like.
That’s true, I was just hoping to maybe convince you to try out something that maybe you don’t know is wonderful yet. I’ve had that experience with music before, and I think it helped me to understand why people like things
I have had it happen several times with music, lastly with Opera and Classical music.
On the rare occasions I’m scanning through FM radio stations, the reason I hit the Next button the fastest when I find myself “listening” to a hip-hop station? The hi hat. tss ts ts ts ts ts tss ts tssssss. It’s most of what you hear, everything else is mixed down in the mud beneath it. I’m informed this is an…artistic choice?
I like it because I can equate it to poetry. You have to be one talented motherfucker to come up with some of those rhymes, and to be still able to put it along to a rhythm and beat, sometimes incredibly fast (Busta Rhymes, George Watsky).
ETA: I also have a soft spot for three particular white Jewish boys from NYC
I’ve been thinking about something similar (as someone who isn’t a fan of rap/hip-hop). No matter how much I don’t like it (the actual music behind it is too bland for me), it has the greatest potential to deliver deep lyrics with puns and other wordplay.
But then it got me thinking: What the HELL is holding us back from improving the other genres’ lyrics, or actually slapping some decent music on top of rap/hip-hop music, and not just some bland base or short and repetitive catchy tune?
There’s a lot of rap and hip-hop that isn’t just running along to a bassy beat. Busta Rhymes doesn’t rap to a beat, and he comes up with some clever lines. I’ve heard that Childish Gambino is one of the most clever writers right now, with some lines in Bonfires and Sweatpants being pretty damn hard.
I really like A Tribe Called Quest as well, because they have a more jazzy sound than most. I REALLY like Digable Planets though because they’re like the ultimate fusion of funk, jazz, and hip-hop.
I may check some out, thanks for the examples!
For more unconventional hip-hop, try Flobots. Handlebars is the only song that got radio play and it’s alright, but most of the rest of that album is better. Mayday is my favourite song by them
Also, I implore you to listen to JU$T by Run The Jewels and really listen to the lyrics.
I tried to, but I just coulnd’t stand the rythm or the rapper’s voice.
Sorry but the genere just isn’t for me.
The one song that might classify as rap/hiphop that I do enjoy is https://youtu.be/KD59LJX2r38 though is has a lot of pop in it, the video is quite cool, and I would be lying if I said that I would not like to have a fur baseball cap.
It helps if there’s a transcript to read along with it. Zack De La Rocha from Rage Against The Machine has a verse at the end of that song that hits really hard, because he’s a great lyricist.
There’s a line in El-P’s verse where he says “hand on my heart and my mind on my drugs, got a Vonne-gut punch for your Atlas Shrugged,” and the whole song is about modern ultra capitalism and our state of society at large.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/KD59LJX2r38
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Beyoncé is not a very good singer.
She’s got talent, but if it weren’t for Jay-Z, she would have had a career similar to Kelly Rowland.
Kelly who?
She is, she just doesn’t use it to full effect. The vocal range she uses in her releases is such a small sliver of what her voice can do.
Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.
A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.
There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.
I think Johnny Cash’s cover of ‘Hurt’ is probably the gold standard of a cover exceeding the origional
I don’t mind a cover changing the meaning of a song, but stuff where the cover is just the song again is…lazy as fuck?
Like Fast Car by (country music guy) is fantastic, but it’s the same as the original, which is also fantastic. Feels cheap or something, I don’t know. Like the whole Weezer cover album was boring as fuck. The songs are technically great, but why listen to that over the originals? Rivers said his goal was to try and reproduce the original sound, which seems like an interesting exercise for the band, but not for the listener. So that wraps back around to respecting the band.
Anyways, I have a lot of strong feelings about covers. Make it your own, even if you don’t change it that much.
IDK if it’s unpopular, but I’m worried that TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube Shorts have completely screwed with what kind of music gets popular nowadays. It seems like every popular song has some kind of intense drop because content creators love the “quick build up to some kind of visual punchline” video format and it has ruined what I think could otherwise influence and encourage originality
Historically, music changes to fit the medium that’s used to deliver it to the listener. Short form video is no different. I just have to trust that artists will always find ways to say what they need to say. After all, “the enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
I have never heard that quote. From what context does it come? It sounds somewhat ridiculous to me
It’s often attributed to Orson Welles, but I don’t know if that’s accurate. It is paradoxical, yes, but I find it to be a commonly relatable sentiment though across many art forms. It almost seems like the art world’s version of “necessity is the mother of invention”.
Without limitations, there’s little opportunity for art; or to frame it another way, if everything is expected, nothing can be surprising. It’s when an artist’s work “jumps off the page” that people are in awe, so it’s important there’s a “page” to “jump off of” as it were.
The same thing happened in the mid 2000’s with ringtone rap. This phenomenon is older than people think.
Also record labels probably can pay to have tiktok promote their music and that makes people like it artificially.
There is, in fact, good country music that isn’t just about trucks, beer, flags, and right-wing U.S. propaganda.
People have a lot of hate for the genre due to the mass appeal, common denominator examples. But like with all music, dig a little deeper beyond what gets radio play and you can find some good shit.
I have a real love hate relationship with country music, I love almost everything except it feels very low energy most of the time and like you said the classic truck songs
I’ve found bands like poor man’s poison and the dead South, hurry up and wait by ben miller band is a great example of something decent
dig a little deeper beyond what gets radio play and you can find some good shit.
Don’t leave us hanging! What are your suggestions?
Not them, but Red Headed Stranger is probably one of my favourite concept albums ever.
Here is a random list of songs I like, in my opinion under the umbrella of country in one way or another (though some stretch that a little. Or a lot. Don’t @ me, die-hard country fans).
Some may, indeed, involve beer, trucks, and American Christian propaganda - but pleasant sounding at least. I’m also confirmed to be pretty lame, and that may be reflected in my choices here.
I also never said you needed to dig deep - some/most of this is like, a fingernail scratch. But if you find something here you dig, strongly recommend diving deeper into the artist.
Merle Haggard - Mama Tried
George Jones - White Lightning
The Highwaymen - Highwayman
Dick Curless - The Heartline Special
Eddy Arnold - Cowpoke
Conway Twitty - Hello Darlin’
Townes Van Zandt - Waiting Around to Die
Sons of the Pioneers - Empty Saddles
Marty Robbins - Running Gun
Willie Nelson - Bubbles in my Beer
Hank Thompson - A Six Pack to Go
Johnny Cash - Sunday Morning Coming Down
Sonny James - Baltimore
Del Reeves - A Dime at A Time
Dale Hawkins - Everglades
Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West - Blue Bonnet Rag
Tim Carroll - I Think Hank Woulda Done It This Way
Buddy Emmons - Orange Blossom Special
Tommy Collins - You Better Not Do That
The Louvin Brothers - Satan is Real [here’s that propaganda I told you about - still love this song]
Eddie Noack - Psycho
Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed - Jerry’s Breakdown
Tom T. Hall - That’s How I Got to Memphis
Roger Miller - Dang MeI like the list, but there’s a disturbing lack of Steve Earle.
Go listen to Ray Charles’s album covers of country songs, “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.”
And then go listen to Sturgil Simpsons “Meta Modern Sounds in Country Music”, both incredible albums
Had a chat with a coworker about this. I’m not a big fan of the genre as a whole, but something happened to the genre around 20ish years ago. The country twang went from being a natural signature sound of some artists to being something everyone emulated while singing their bird cage bottom piece of shit piece about their truck.
My grandparents used to watch this show on TV called Club Dance. Imagine Soul Train for old white people; it was shot in a fictional “saloon” and they’d have both professional country dancers and amateurs who wanted to be on the show. Most of the music I remember hearing about the show was basically about dancing. The whole “truck jeans beer girl creek boots truck” phenomenon hadn’t been invented yet.
Trent Reznor’s original version of Hurt is better than Johnny Cash’s version, which is terrible. I strongly dislike him bringing in the religious aspect by changing the lyrics and I just plain don’t like his voice.
Yeah, I said it.
Bands that title their album random symbols (or a series of them) are assholes.
I’m looking at KMFDM (can’t even encode “symbols” accurately) and Justice (their first album, often called latin cross). Both great albums that suffer from fucking horrible visibility because of their shit names.
What?? KMFDM back in the 90s were groundbreaking with their name and album art alone. Very stylized, nihilistic vibes aesthetically when I would see their albums in the record store - even before I ever listened to them. Hell, I even shoplifted a cassette tape from Camelot Records when I was a teenager just cuz I was so intrigued as to what this band was about.
You’ve awakened my “old man yells at cloud” vibes with this one.
Hey, both the bands I mentioned are awesome - I just object to the symbolic naming of albums. If you read “KMFDM’s Symbols album” and knew exactly what I’m talking about then you’re part of an in-group and everyone not in that in group standing with us in a record store in the 90s wouldn’t have a clue which album we were talking about… if we were talking about the album over lunch and they went to a record shop to pick up a copy they wouldn’t be able to find it without awkwardly asking a clerk.
Obscure symbol album names create elitism that we don’t need - you could easily find Nirvana’s Nevermind but by naming their album… that untranscribable string of symbols they made it less accessible to new listeners.
I don’t think I’d call them assholes… more just shortsighted about the realities of selling an album, specifically in how you refer to the album both in speech and in writing.
Everyone calls it “KMFDM - symbols” for a reason. I agree only in that it drives me insane when I would rip CDs and have to deal with trying to figure out what to name them. Also, fuck Leæther Strip for their stupid “æ” in the name.
This may not be an unpopular in the outside world but somehow I bet it will be here, the vast majority of metal is just straight noise and incomprehensible yelling to me. I do enjoy when metal songs are covered by bluegrass bands though
I don’t agree with “most” or you’re using a too narrow definition of Metal…
But I agree that the stuff you don’t like sounds like noise and incomprehensible yelling to me too, which is what I need to hear sometimes. Feels cathartic to have a wall of sound crash over you as you yell your guts out on the highway. Much better way to handle rage than taking it out on family members or service workers.
I debated adding subgenre to it but since it was an unpopular opinion I decided to go for broke. I know there’s a lot of variance, and don’t really hate on metal fans at all. Though I do stand by my point, at least for me
I prefer hip hop and country myself, and my experience tells me it’s not uncommon for metal heads and punk fans to say similar things about those genres even though the stylistic differences between say dirty southern rap and the west coast game are super obvious to me
It’s all just preference and personality
Edit: also I’m glad it gives you what you need from music! I don’t get it but I don’t need to
All music without lyrics/singing is background music.
Nickleback - Silver Side Up is a pretty decent album. Sure, that song is annoying and extremely overplayed, but I quite like the rest of the album.
I must admit that beyond that particular album I don’t know much about them, so if you claim that the rest of their discography is garbage, I’ll take your word for it.
I discovered them through “Savin’ Me” and I unironically love that song (and its music video) to bits. Even if some of the lyrics are a bit flimsy and dramatic, the song overall is so emotionally powerful. Same goes for “Hero” (packaged with the first Spidey movie). Strip away some of the ear candy in the Kroeger production and they both still hold up as beautiful songs.
IMO early Nickleback up to about the early/mid 2000s was awesome, I still listen to their older stuff once in a while. Someday is their best song IMO and its from the late 90s (I think?)
ABBA = shite.
IMO, obviously.
But the A*Teens ROCK!
The what now?
Got any more room on that hill?
Sure, grab a seat, friend!
Lyrics ruin most music. This is one is weird because I actually love the sound of the human voice, but it most music its just ugly. Also most of the lyrics themselves suck. Usually vague, meaningless, hoping you’ll interpret them as something deep. There’s just so many songs that most lyrics have to be bad.
Also drums ruin most music. They are harsh, dissonant, overly loud, overpower subtler instruments, and reduce complex, varying melodies to a simple beat. Even when I want simple heavy beats, I prefer electronic alternatives (no idea what they’re called) so it’s not so harsh
Not unpopular, just weird: the way to find your favorite song is keeping one as an alarm sound without starting to actively hate it.
Next level: set it as your boss’ phone ring tone.
Yup, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine theme song as my alarm, 5 years and counting
I feel like that’s impossible for me.
However, I set my ringtone forever ago and it never annoys me when it comes on. I like hearing it. It’s a chiptune from a keygen of soft software I pirated as a teen lmao.
