90% of everything is crap.
90% of pop music has always been not to your tastes; you just didn't listen to it then and commercial radio stopped being a functional curation mechanism soon after the Billboard chart mechanism changed in 1991. (Not that pop charts were always reliable; they kept giving airtime to Neil Diamond and his creeptastic songs about very young women...) Plus we always associate positively that which we hear when we feel good, and teenagers and young adults have a LOT more good days than adults. There's a reason it's called the golden age for marketing.
I stay away from pop radio, but there's a lot of talent in all genres. People seem to imprint on their first positive music experiences; for me, those were the 1812 Overture, and the Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams, when I was an infant and in 2nd grade, respectively. That influenced my musical tastes: heavy electronics with classical influence. (My parents are country fans, and country -- or specifically diminished minor 5th chords and especially pedal steel -- make my ears hurt like ten penny nails on chalkboard. I have a whole long story about being a baby in a bad way -- failure to thrive and failure to sleep -- until I was about 3 months old and a cousin made a mistake with my grandparents' stereo and blasted Tchaikovsky at me. At which point I stopped crying and fell asleep. Because my mother and grandmother kept the local country station playing 24/7. I survived my first two years thanks to the Reader's Digest Greatest Hits of Classical Music.)
Electronic instrumentation and fast data transfer means that three people on two continents and opposite coasts can collaborate to make an album that explores grief and parental loss, to benefit cancer research (Bruderschaft), or a young woman in the Toronto suburbs can make her mark in Europe (Ayria) without getting signed. An electronic duo can re-instrument their body of work for full orchestra and produce it themselves (VNV Nation, Resonance album -- see the YouTube links at the bottom).
There's Black Violin, who are combining classical strings training with hip-hop and R&B; Panic! at the Disco, Sinestar and Mesh are subverting 80s trends like synth pop, surf, and the early forms of post-punk (go *listen* to LA Devotee and tell me it wouldn't fit on a playlist with Duran Duran and Oingo Boingo); the whole Ambient genre flows from the spring that Laurie Anderson and Art of Noise and Deep Forest dowsed. Punk comes and goes, and is in the uptrend of paying more attention to actually knowing how their instruments work than to pissing off whoever wants to grumble. (Punk is at its worst when it is passive-aggressively oppositional-defiant; at its best when it's nonchalantly defiant.) No Light and Hocico, both out of Mexico City, have picked up where Enigma and KMFDM left off (not for beginners in electro-industrial, though). Iranian rave (no, this is not a contradiction, and they risk prison for it) is brilliant and utterly unlike anything coming out of Europe or North America (try Idlefon for an easy intro, but it's musician's music -- expect experimental).
Musicians have to work at least three times as hard for a tenth of the attention these days -- the labels *loved* the pirated music excuse so they could trash royalties and production contracts. Musicians always made their bank on the tours, not the album/single sales, but now tours are what keep them eating. They can't afford to be in the studio very long, so there's much more post- than there used to be. That means everything sounds far more produced (rather than the fuzz-grungy of old analog live mix) but that doesn't mean it's less creative. It's just different tools, and they're doing some seriously innovative multi-media stuff. (-- see Beyonce's Lemonade) And to be brutally honest -- places where an infected tooth or a case of bronchitis don't mean penury or death are producing better and more musicians. The social safety net matters to creativity.
Commercial pop radio is now almost a consolidated single entity, with standard playlists and sets designed for advertising revenue and inoffensiveness. There's no way that today some disc jockey in Phoenix can go into the back catalogue and dig up a 5 year old British cover of a rocksteady cover of a barely noticed bad drinking song and push it into the Billboard top 10 (seriously, look up the history of Red Red Wine. It is now an ear worm, but it's a fluke it hit). Commercial radio is just not worth the time, and that includes Sirius, thanks to heavy influence from Liberty Media (the jerks who ruined Discovery, own QVC and Expedia and fund way too many authoritarian/Randroid pols). Pandora is mostly country, Spotify is more rock pop and eclectic, including electronic. Train the app with your likes and dislikes and skips so it can learn your tastes, and Spotify will give you decent suggestions. For all that Apple Music has a shitty search interface, it's great for recommendations once you've got a library established. Far better than Amazon's. And there's YouTube curation -- it's hit or miss, but when someone hits, it's really good.
Links:
(Resonance, album preview)
(Perpetual, original)
(Perpetual, orchestrated)
//youtu.be/@@ r5dNcKTcnPA LA Devotee, Panic! @ the Disco -- warning: I broke this link on purpose, because video is either creepy as hell or making a pure satire out of the Satanic Panic, or both, but it features Noah Schnapp from Stranger Things, and the kid can act. Which is good, because the video has neither coherent internal visual narrative, nor any connection to the song. Remove @@ or just search for it.
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