Is Music Getting “Dumber”?
The idea behind this article didn’t come to me in a dream, or as the result of brainstorming; it’s all thanks to a recent song by Ice Spice. Miss Spice’s most recent release, “Think U The Shit” (Fart), is an actual song. A brief visit to the music video will unearth an entirely disparaging comment section, full of haters and some people wondering, “Well- how did I get here.” (Letting the days go by…). I like Ice Spice! I think she’s a fun new face in rap and pop music, but across all of her music videos, the comment sections seem completely antithetical to the way she is being hailed as a favorite new artist and “people’s princess.” It’s almost all hate. Is it because she’s a black woman in a genre generally dominated by men? Like many female artists, people argue she uses a display of sexuality rather than artistry to gain popularity. But when men rely on sexual prowess for material, it’s all in good fun, and never “slutty” or looked down upon. While this may not be the case for Ice Spice, it is true that in the entertainment industry, sex sells. The industry machine requires the “marketability” of artists, so be it if they’re not the most talented; in a society that favors Instagram over Radio, optics are everything. So, as we favor songs that get shorter and shorter for diminishing attention spans in the TikTok age, as well as a greater expectation for stars to be present at least and sexy at most on social media, are we throwing away “quality” music in favor of exploitable crap? Is music getting “dumber?” And, if so, how did we get here?
This question is very complicated; it’s also age-old and contains multitudes. Let’s address it in three parts
Part One: Intergenerational Beef
Mike and the Mechanics put it beautifully in The Living Years, “Every generation Blames the one before, and all of their frustrations come beating on your door.” There is a long-standing tradition of blaming and finger-pointing the older generations by the youth. The hippies were sour about their square parents, only for their children to turn around and become Reagan voters, sticking their tongues out at Free Love and feeling groovy. This is a tale as old as time. So is the distaste that the old guard has for the youth. Parents in the 50s and 60s thought Rock was the devil’s music, only for their children, raised on rock and roll to look down on the music of their children for the same reason, And so it goes. However, in the internet age, it seems intergenerational beef has a razor-sharp edge. For example, the heavily covered phenomenon of the phrase“OK Boomer,” in addition to online skirmishes between Millennials and Gen Z for their respective qualms with one another. But perhaps most relevant to this conversation is the older generations mocking the youth of the Information Age for not having “real lives,” not “playing outside and skinning their knees,” or famously “choosing avocado toast over home-owning,” which we know to be the effect of the decline in the standard of living and buying power of common salaries rather than a genuine change in values by younger people. Living in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid 19 pandemic, Millennials and Gen Z don’t expect healthcare, homeowning, or financial comfort, so their value systems look different from their parents and grandparents. This change in value systems plays out in many fora, from taste in film and music to how money is spent and which artists resonate.
By birth year, Boomers lay possessive claim to the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix. Gen-Xers claim U2, Nirvana, REM, The Talking Heads, Tupac and Biggie, and Mariah Carey. Millennials witnessed the rise (and fall) of Kanye West, Drake, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé.
Gen Z started somewhere around 1997 and ends around 2010. Not enough time has passed to determine who will pull ahead as the monarchs of Gen Z Music, but a few early contenders include Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Lil Nas X, Chloe Bailey, and Tate McRae. These artists are going to be fundamentally different from the prior artists because if they were too similar to them, why would they ever rise to fame? We desire evolution in culture, not stifling and it makes sense that as younger musicians have more recorded, accessible music to look back at than ever before, we are going to see greater departures from the sounds that already exist.
Further, it’s only natural to have a favorable attitude to the cultural phenomenons you experienced as a young person in the summer of your life, when they were most relevant to you. Music can be like a time machine; it brings you back to different times and places in your life. An older person listening to the music of their youth is both a listening experience and a journey in time. Listening to contemporary music as an older person doesn’t provide the same dose of nostalgia; the resistance to enjoying it may be more of an effect of acknowledgment of aging than genuine distaste for the sonic experience.
Part Two: Whose Music Is Taken Seriously
Music is an art that takes many forms. It can be the machine bleeps and bloops of techno, the poetry of acoustic singer/songwriter ballads, the belting of gospel, the rasp of jazz, the twang of country, the spoken word of rap, or the auto-tune of pop. When and how music is “taken seriously” is a function of power, not truth. (Thank you, Nietzsche). Who gets called a poet and who gets called a thug goes far beyond who sings about murder, gambling, highway robbery, and drunken or drug-addled stoopers. In fact, you’ll find these topics explored in depth across the country: rock, rap, and even pop these days. I’m sure you know where I’m going with this… Many of the prejudices against groups of people can take on ugly, subversive forms such as seemingly “innocent” criticism of their cultural output.
Finding no value in country or rap/hip-hop music doesn’t make one an intellectual city slicker but rather demonstrates an inability to appreciate the rich diversity of cultural artistry and output. Trust me, there is country and rap/hip-hop for everyone and both of these genres have specific traditions they adhere to. If you think country music is dumb for singing about horses and tractors, I’ve got words for you. First, if you don’t like those themes, find other musicians. Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Tyler Childers, and Kris Kristofferson sing about the depths of the human experience far beyond country scenes-a-faire. Secondly, have you ever spent time with horses or driven a tractor? If it’s not your lived experience, how can you judge an aesthetic assessment or artistic ode to this lifestyle? Perhaps the music is not for you, but that doesn’t make it bad or stupid. The same goes for rap/hip-hop. Find the musicians that speak to you, or if you don’t think you can, remember that this is not because the genre should be written off and dismissed, but is because maybe the message just isn’t relatable to you and that’s okay.
Calling a genre names reflects your attitude toward the culture that puts out that music, and many groups have had to fight hard just to get their music out there. Famously, forms of black music like jazz, the blues, rock, R&B, rap, and hip-hop were historically (and even contemporaneously) associated with poverty or criminality. But when the same forms were covered by white musicians, they became wildly popular, profitable, and acceptable. This is, of course, the effect of racism, hegemony, and appropriation. Chet Baker, Elvis, The Rolling Stones, Amy Winehouse, and Eminem would be nothing without the artistry of black people who created the genres these artists found success in. When there were racially segregated radio stations, music venues, and television channels, the effects of racism and hegemony on culture were crystal clear. Today, these themes are far more subversive but still extremely harmful. Who gets to be taken seriously as an artist is oftentimes far deeper than the actual output of that person, and more about their place in the world, as determined by the powers that be. There will always be outliers, but they’re the exception, not the rule.
That said, music is for everybody, and we don’t need to silo it into who it’s “for” and “not for.” You should try listening to everything, swim around, and see what you like! Even if the themes explored in particular music don’t resonate with your lived experiences, it doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate it, learn from it, be moved by it, or just like to dance to it! Don’t write off a genre based on your judgment of a few artists as an outsider, try and go inside that world and see it with new eyes.
Part Three: The Dicken’s Effect (Has Music Always Been Dumb?)
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . .” Everyone believes they live through a significant time period, but that’s just not true. Think about our less famous presidents, like Zachary Taylor or Franklin Pierce. Wars were fought, lives were lost, and yet almost nothing about these terms is part of our cultural memory as Americans. Time works in funny ways. The 20th and 21st centuries feel far more relevant to us because they are within cultural memory. People are still alive to talk about the electric music revolution of the 60s, or the birth of hip hop. So our belief that we were around for the most significant or best periods of music and that anything afterward will be “worse” or “dumb” is cognitive bias. This effect is exacerbated by the fact that sound recording is only around 167 years old, managing to be younger than photography and clearly eons later than novels, painting, or sculpture. So while we understand that in the long history of literature or painting, there has always been and will always be a variety of levels of artistry/acclaim, we measure music against an extremely concentrated pool of work. Further- there has always been dumb music!
The 1950s and 60s were FULL of teenybopper or dance craze songs like The Chicken Dance, Bunny Hop, Sock Hop, and Limbo. The lyrics to these songs might be simplistic or "dumb,” but there’s a good reason they’re all still around and so popular with kids- they’re just plain fun! And isn’t that what music should be? Disco produced all kinds of weird tracks from Ladybug to Discoduck; The 1970s were full of novelty songs like Chuck Berry’s “My Ding a Ling,” along with The Timewarp, the Y.M.C.A., and The Streak, a song with movie sound effects about a baseball game streaker, which made it to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in the US. In the 1980s people danced to the Cotton-Eyed Joe and Da Butt. If we had no time for absurdity, comedy, and downright nonsense in music, we would have no Weird Al Yankovic and possibly no Frank Zappa.
Nostalgia is also heavily weaponized in popular culture for a reason. Why is it that the 90s are always “back” in style? Almost as if they never went out of style. . . Follow the money. . . Picture this; you’re an older person living alone and far away from friends and family. Your bones hurt, your back aches, and you’re sitting in your recliner watching cable TV. A commercial for Cadillac comes on. As the shiny car drives across a beautiful, scenic, expansive road, Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” plays. The song transports you to the first time you ever heard it, in your buddy’s car, going to a party. God, you haven’t heard it in so long, and it sounds so good. Was his car a Cadillac? Maybe he borrowed it from his dad? Was there a pretty girl in the backseat with you? Your mind wonders. You’re pulled in by the song and the warm and fuzzy association you have with it. You’re taken out of your aches and your present condition; you can only think now of recreating that memory. Perhaps with a new Cadillac, it could all be possible. That’s how they getcha. The cognitive experience of listening to music from the days of our youth is extremely powerful. We love these songs for so much more than what they sound like; we love them because we long to be who we were when we first heard them again.
What Now?
After peeling back the layers of context (of all in which you live and what came before you), we can strip away explanations for feelings about the “decline” of music that may be based on cognitive bias, cultural insensitivity or incompetency, and nostalgia. But does that really answer the question of if music is getting dumber? Well, I don’t know. I don’t think we’re even asking the right question. This is because we’re focusing narrowly on pop music, a pseudo-genre defined not by thematic makeup but just by sheer numbers. There are formulaic approaches to writing pop music that might make something fit the bill for “sounding like a pop song” but not all pop songs need to sound alike. Pop music will always value quantity over quality, massive streaming/radio play/touring numbers over massive emotional impact. So if pop music now is focused on micro-length songs designed to be the fodder for TikToks, or stars who just look good on Instagram, and that just isn’t floating your boat, don’t listen to it. Pop always centers around popularity; that’s what its name means! It’s fallible to trends and marketability. Hence the pushing of certain artists who conform to trends. And this is also a tale as old as time. Fans of New Order or Joy Division probably wanted nothing to do with Tiffany or Debbie Gibson. Fans of Nirvana or Mudhoney weren’t gonna throw on the Spice Girls or NSYNC. Find the new music that speaks to you!
(I’ve also gone ahead and made a little playlist of my favorite new music, from the past five years for your listening pleasure. In the process, I learned that I myself don’t do a great job of listening to new music. The playlist goes from slow, somber, and sad to upbeat, poppy, and then into hip-hop.)
“To Gen Z and Beyond” on Apple Music
“To Gen Z and Beyond” on Spotify
