This man is making the top charts in Japan:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhOVibLEDhAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlUb2F-zLxwThis lady is making the top charts in the US:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyDfgMOUjCIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PZsSWwc9xAWhere did Americans go wrong, culturally?
Nowhere. Music is subjective, and seeing as you're here your tastes are way more inline with what's popular in Japan.
I wondered how long it would take for the third worlder invented made up conflict between America and Japan to reach here.
This isn't about a "made-up conflict" or anything, its just observation i made. I'm an American and I was simply surprised at how good (though possibly generic) the Japanese chart-topper was.
>>2>Music is subjectiveThe moment music started to be subjective is the moment it started going to shit. By having no standards for beauty, companies and corporations can get away with releasing the most debauched art and get away with it.
>>4>The moment music started to be subjective is the moment....This statement fragment in itself is excruciatingly subjectivist.You cant escape it. Your position boils down to proposing that even though art is objectively subjective, we should pretend that it is actually objective, fuck reality, nothing is real, its whatever we act like it is.I listened to the billie eilish songs and they're honestly some of the least awful american pop ive heard in a while. I cant escape the thought that this is some faux-edgy rich girl from cali, but at least they're kinda quiet, not so fucking obnoxious as the shit I was subjected to on the schoolbus as a kid.
>>4You're acting like I'm saying all art is subjective, which I never said. A piece of visual art is representative and thus audience understanding is important to it being art, and there are various things every human responds to in largely the same way. This makes it partly, but not entirely, objectiveMusic on the other hand is completely abstract. The only thing necessary for music to be music is to have some sort of pattern, and which patterns of sound are appealing to the ear vary wildly from person to person. It is categorically subjective
Westerners don't like melody anymore. It's noticeable not only in popular music, but in film and video game soundtracks. Japan still embraces it, hence the difference.
>>7That statement makes no sense unless you're talking about rap, which isn't really music
>>8I don't see how it doesn't. Popular music doesn't embrace strong melodies, listen to those examples above.
>>9That doesn't mean westerners dislike melody. Deemphasis =/= rejection. You're confusing impressionism with abstract.
Why do girls get a pass to be "edgy". Every xanax addicted teenage white girl is into this self-harm/webcore/scene shit
>>11They don't? At least not any more than men. They just tend towards it more because of how much women change during puberty.As for why it's a thing in music and the like, American guys find it hot
>>12>They don't?discarded
>>10By "don't like", I don't mean hate, but disinterest.
>>7I totally agree with this.When I was young I always thought I had "weird" musical taste because to me most normal (western) music sounded "dry".Like people want to listen to parts of songs that don't sound like anything to me, and then when a part comes on that suddenly gets me excited is when they want to change the station or skip to the next song (and those parts are few and far between anyway).It was always like my brain was just on some totally different musical wavelength from everyone else. And these days almost all of the music I listen to is Japanese, so I don't doubt that it's a "western" thing.Sometimes I wonder if people actually even know what they like at all, or if they're just responding to clever lyrics or to something that sounds familiar.I'm not sure if you could say the difference is only melody or not, but I do notice more melody in the jap music I listen to.
Can we take a moment to acknowledge that pop music, especially stuff that makes it to charts, is usually not that great and you should find a genre you like and dive into that?
This is pretty nice, I like it OP.
>>16Preach. This applies to other mediums too. There's tons of great shit made in the west, but if you look to mainstream venues like television or radio you're not gonna find it
>>18Likewise, chart topping J-pop aint the real shit either.
>>19It applies a lot more to American media, where indie auteur media and big budget corporate media are way more stratified than they are in Japan.The best example I can think of is comics. Dojin and professional manga are basically the same thing. But western alternative comics are so radically different from mainstream comics that if you weren't told they were American you'd probably assume they were from Europe.
Looks suspect and cherrypicked. Pretty sure you can find degenerate stuff in japanese charts too.
>>21If you use the word "degenerate" to refer to any form of art you're a retard. Art has not been a linear progression since at least the late 1700s. We know all the principals, and unless some cataclysmic event happens we're not going to forget them because we wrote them all down.Bad art is not "degenerate". It's just bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG9NqEEWE00This is a really good MV.
>>16>>18>>19>>20Two counter-arguments:1. Many works and artists didn't start out as popular. Does their popularity suddenly make them bad?2. In cinema, for example, the vast majority of films considered masterpieces were popular at the time they were released. Jaws (which is, by the way, also the first summer blockbuster)? The Godfather 1 and 2? Alien? So on and on. Knowing this, how can you in good faith dismiss a work released today for simply being popular?
>>24Cinema is a bit of a different animal, but a lot of works are ignored because they weren’t popular, hence cult cinema. If you want to see why people dismiss popular music, just listen to top 40. You’ll feel like a normalfag zombie.
>>24Pop music isn't popular music, it's music deliberately designed to be popular.
According to the Oricon charts ( https://www.oricon.co.jp/rank/js/d/2019-10-05/ ) these are the top singles as of the day i post this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZBeo_k1k-Ahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yCEYQeMqJchttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptnYBctoexkI must admit, they do sound pretty samey. I'm sure I would be tired of this music as well if I needed to hear it all day on the radio.
https://pratanallis.bandcamp.com/track/rainy-sunday
Just listen to shit before the '90s and '00s. Popular music really was better back then. What happened? Personally, I think niggers. Fucking RnB and rap bullshit.
>you moranIt is very unlikely that >>30 is Irish, let alone one from the respectable Moran dynasty.
i'm not a fan of rap myself but what is your opinion on motown?
They say that every decade. Ask someone in the 2000s what they think about modern music and they'd probably respond with a joke about autotune.Also, both genres were at their height in the 90s and 2000s, and American music has had a very heavy black influence since the late 1800s you moran