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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

As a GenXer I've been through many phases of looking for new music punctuated by times I was indifferent.

Lately I've discovered Claude Debussy, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Isao Tomita, Wendy Carlos, Goldfripp, Enigma, Information Society (I think the 2008 album Synthesizer is the best electronic music album ever) not to mention Chinese instrumental music. If something has a 5.1 mix I will listen to it and usually like it; in fact I can't stand listening to 2 channel music on my home theater.

I am indifferent though to "new" music that is being promoted now, and can't stand to listen to the radio. I like old-school rap as much as Techmoan (my age) does, but think rap went through an event horizon with T-Pain. When I hear obvious autotune I change the channel right away and have no patience for sound engineers who tell me I'm wrong.

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I'm in my late 40s and try to do a lot of music exploration and discovery, and I've found a lot that I like, but I can't find anything new-ish that "sticks". Despite all the exploring and all the many one-off tracks I've found that I really, really like, it's painful to sort through all the chaff that Streaming sends you. When I go out to work in the garage or chill out for the day, I don't want to have my "discovery" filter on. I fall back to my comfort zone and put on a full album of something like Yes, King Crimson, ELP, Rush, Floyd, Zeppelin, maybe something more out there like Mike Oldfield, or even Tangerine Dream, Jarre, Vangelis, Klaus Schulze, and so on. The default is easy and I don't have to sit there listening closely and thinking "do I like this one enough to bookmark it?" I've never found streaming to deliver more more than 20% hit, 80% miss. And the hits don't hit hard enough to get into my default "safe" rotation.

I can say the same. I'm less interested in seeking out "new" music and more interested in music that seems to have stood the test of time.

The techniques of modern music production were developed for the movie industry and transfered to the music industry. Fantasia still has a pretty good soundtrack but music recordings before 1965 or (The Beatles) are unlistenable. The last year of music competes with 60 years of recorded music and that's a situation that just gets more extreme over time.

Obligatory mention of T-Pain's Tiny Desk Concert, in which he demonstrates, without autotune, that he's a talented musician and vocalist who's using it stylistically.

https://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/359661053/t-pain-tiny-desk-co...

I've got no problem w/ T-Pain himself, my problem is that every other rapper sounds like T-Pain today. The fact that he's had such an impact on the industry proves that he's a creative innovator. My problem is with everybody else.

Fair!

Retracted in light of BoorishBear's comment, which is definitely true. I'm not a big hip hop guy, but I think that the "everyone sounds like T-Pain" comment is something like 10-15 years out of date.

I have to say that I'm really not a fan of what seems to be "topping the charts" in hip-hop today, but even so, there's undeniably people doing new and interesting things in the genre.

A few releases since the heyday of T-Pain that I did enjoy:

* To Pimp a Butterfly

* DAMN

* Coloring Book

* Kids See Ghosts

* We Got It From Here ... Thank You For Your Service

I've also really enjoyed some of the hip-hop adjacent stuff that Thundercat has put out, especially Drunk. (Thundercat is amazingly talented, and was a big part of the production on TPAB).

A bit like how Blade Runner's rain-soaked neon cybernoir now feels derivative!

That and the mumblerap popularized by Drake means a lot of hip hop sounds the same.

> my problem is that every other rapper sounds like T-Pain today

They really don't, but you've made up your mind so you'll only ever really hear it when it sounds like T-Pain, then go "you see! all sounds like T-pain!"

Since the T-Pain era (known as the ringtone rap era) we've had everything from To Pimp a Butterfly to Flower Boy to Kids See Ghosts to LP!

It's been a decade+ of innovation on a level that makes the old days look mundane.

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