#7

Focusing on what I dislike let’s me see if it’s only about hating mainstream or if mainstream really is extremely simplistic. :slight_smile:

#8

You’ve got a nerve to be asking a favour.

4 Likes
#9

You have got a lot of nerve to act the way that you do
+@

2 Likes
#10

Mainstream is not simplistic, look at ABBA.

#11

You answer your own question by referring to the predictability and monotony of the music you don’t like.

Just use it as a spur to go out and discover music you do like that is not predictable or monotonous. It’s so easy these days to explore and keep exploring until you find something that really excites and satisfies you.

Something like this takes some of the tropes you refer to but does something compelling and enormously moving with them

1 Like
#12

The black keys are shite

3 Likes
#13

The dumbest thing about EDM was the need to ever put that superfluous letter on the front of what has always just been “dance music”.

The only time an E was successfully added to dance music was the early 80s - now THAT worked.

3 Likes
#14

This is it. The answer is in the question really.

#15

EDM is a bit like McDonalds food, in the sense that it’s easy to hate from this sort of perspective, but is actually precision engineered to give you exactly what you want. Just think how many people are trying to make this ‘simplistic’ music and not connecting with anyone, and then think about how much refinement and effort must actually go into making something that can inspire mass euphoria in rooms full of people.

Obviously you don’t have to like it, but learning music theory should, ideally, broaden your horizons - think about the textures, the tension and release, the use of dynamics. I’d rather listen to I’m So Into You on repeat than A Moon Shaped Pool, and I’ve always been a Radiohead obsessive, for example.

2 Likes
#16

The whole purpose of this thread is to elaborate on the reasons for you to hate a particular group/genre.

Elaborate? :slight_smile:

#17

Yet I will still appreciate extremely monotonous and repetitive electronic music! I don’t know why it bothers me so much when it comes to mainstream EDM :smile:

#18

I think it’s just the predictablity and lack of subtlety. I really don’t mind listening to EDM at a club or something if I’m pilled up. It’s not ideal but it works. But I could never imagine going out of the way to listen to it. It’s just really over the top and every track is just a slight variation of a single formula

Anyway always found this video interesting: https://youtu.be/71HQt7KZEtY

1 Like
#19

I love repetition if it is done right. This, for instance,mis brilliant

1 Like
#20

Same here! But why do we find it brilliant and why is it done right in this case is my real dilemma. I guess I’ll have to learn more about music theory to understand, one day ! :slight_smile:

#21

Remember the three Rs - repetition, repetition, repetition.

2 Likes
#22

I’m delighted that this post received likes

#23

Moderat

#24

The thing is this. I love dance music. And spent a large part of my 20s (late 90s, early 2000s) getting messy in clubs in Brixton and Vauxhall. The music I loved was trance, hard trance, acid trance and most of this was from Europe. Germany Holland etc. Labels like Noom, Tinrub etc. were amazing.

To many that music just sounds simple and repetitive. But from my point of view most of it was really quite good, there was some terrible stuff for sure.

This is alongside my love of electronic acts like Aphex Twin and Purity Ring.

However, since the mainstream discovered trance a number of years ago and it’s become chart fodder there is just a strict adherence to cliched sounds, synth parts and the structure of a song. Honestly I saw American Idol one day and some pop star was just singing over something that could have been a B-side from 1994 on a trance label. It was very strange.

It’s like the modern pop scene has taken a certain strain of dance/EDM of how it used to be and are just sticking to that. It has very little in common with what I would call dance music…or would have called dance music.

I am not actually sure what my point is. :confused:

#25

The mainstream has a knack of taking something that is wonderful and somehow stripping it of whatever it is that makes it that. It creates a soulless copy which is not only horrible in itself but also mars your enjoyment of the original because you know you hate it but you can’t quite put your finger on how it is different from the original you used to love.

It’s similar to how it became difficult to listen to indie guitar music once the major labels got hold of the sound post-Britpop and dumped lorry loads of ‘landfill indie’ on us.

You just have to hold your nerve and trust your instincts as to what is good and what is bad.

1 Like
#26

Yes. That’s a pretty apt comparison. And I haven’t heard the term landfill indie for a long time. Funnily enough, I liked dance music in bits and pieces (KLF, Orb, Orbital, Leftfield, AFX) whilst I was an ‘indie kid’. But it’s only when I got fed up with Indie, and it became this horrible mainstream thing that you talk about that I really got much more into dance.