What's with the idea that contemporary hip hop and pop lack melody?

Yes...it is what it is...we all had our music to love and cherish. They will have theirs. : )

 

This is a hip hop artist and IMO this outrocks that recycled GVF garbage that 60 year olds are besides themselves over how amazeballs they are because "they can rescue us from the national hip hop nightmare and steer our kids into the right direction"

 

On the whole, i find that contemporary music is more about singles than it is about albums. It’s also created with the knowledge it is likely to have a very short shelf-life tied to popular trends. Moreover, I truly believe this is a phenomenon that has only arisen in the past 15 years... when digital and streaming services truly overtook physical media.

This has had (at least) two effects. First, when songs are not created to be part of a larger cohesive work, it’s less important for one song to be readily distinguishable from another. Moreover, when the driving medium is digital as opposed to a ‘fixed’ play format, songs are not created with the thought that they will be heard — repeatedly — in a particular order. Streaming services have only exacerbated this consequence. The end result, I truly believe, is that there is less concern with sustainable and distinguishable melody. Who cares if everything is going to exist in one giant musical ‘shuffle’?

Second, modern music is created with the knowledge that it is likely to be ‘out of fashion’ before it may even be officially released (i.e., because of early leaks etc.). For modern pop artists, this raises the question of what the point is in truly investing time in creating lasting works of art. Survival hinges on immediate gratification, not long-term appreciation. This is also in part a product of how much music is currently available — and available for approximately nothing. The current generation is always looking for something new/fresh/exciting. And who can blame them... more is available at the touch of a button than ever before. But with that availability, patience and listening skills are diminishing. Just as twitter/social media has slowly eroded patience with the written word, streaming/digital services have further eroded the value of the album as a coherent work of art worthy of invested listening time.

End result: mainstream popular music ain’t what it used to be. And I believe things like melody have been sacrificed. Of course there will always be exceptions (K Lamar I’m looking at you).

 

There's nothing more exciting to me- STILL!- than discovering new music I can really connect with.
I actively seek new music, and I find much to get excited about.
But most current popular genres do NOT excite me.
That's just me. I have my reasons for why I don't enjoy most popular music.
It's when someone pigeonholes me as someone who refuses to listen to anything new is where I just shut them off.

 

I disagree with this, in fact I think the opposite may be true.

I agree with your points about the loss of the album as a “slow” “deliberate” format, and definitely think its demise is linked to that of the physical media that forced that form of listening. There’s surely something lost with the state of “infinite content” that we’re experiencing, as it’s easier to ignore the longform pieces. To me this is just a loss of form, not innovation or quality. If anything the over-saturation of songs has accelerated the cycle of innovation. Obviously there’s derivative crap out there, but a majority of the new songs that become major viral hits are completely unique sonically.

To me this doesn’t really feel as disposable as some might think. I don’t really care that Young Thug never made a great album in the middle of this decade because “Stoner” was a totally unique song that shook up a lot of the genre’s sound, and it stands in its own. The beauty of this fast cycle is that it’s hard to become jaded with a genre that’s constantly in flux.

I would also point out that artists are already finding a way to express themselves creatively outside of the conventional structures of the LP. Look at Tierra Whack, her Whack World project was comprised of 15 1-minute tracks, distributed as a steaming EP, a longform YouTube video and 15 individual Instagram posts. This year she released one single a week in February. For a while I was wishing she would sequence these and put them on an album but I’m slowly embracing that the album isn’t always the best canvas for the work, nor is it the most financially viable.

 

are we talking about the album being lost as an artform in a thread about hip hop? It's arguable that hip hop is perhaps the most album-focused genre out there right now

 

From the biggest artists that is often true, but there are a lot of rappers are more singles and mix tape driven. Like the late Nipsey Hussle, who didn't release his first LP until last year.

 

I get it...ignore them...I enjoy discovering new music in odd places...far away from the current chart action...

 

So I just listened to “Lemonade” straight through. I don’t need to hear any of those songs again. Now I am playing “The Birth of Soul” by Ray Charles. Yes, it is a compilation but it is awesome. Full of songs with melodies, rhythm, and harmonies. It’s musical and I Love it!!

All the songs were written and recorded before I was born. I did not listen to Soul until I was an adult so why do I love it when I dislike Hip Hop? I am not connected to either genre culturally. I grew up in SoCal in what could be called a “surfer” culture. I am not “educated” in Soul. I’ve never studied it. My ear likes it. That’s what I know.

 

DAMN! That would make a great rap song!

 

There is hiphop with melody, but that is not an improvement

 

It died in 1994 with Kurt Cobain

 

Have to say that Childish Gambino piece really illustrates hip hop's inventiveness in creating bass timbre and textures rarely heard in ANY genre of music. That song is why I just love my Sony headphones due to its uncanny ability to reproduce those low end boxy, punchy bass frequencies without inducing sea sickness and sinus drainage. The mix & mastering is just amazing.

 

That's not always true. And, there have been many contemporary pop albums made in the last decade or so that are solid pieces of work, or where every track is a winner. There have been huge hit albums by Rihanna, Calvin Harris, Nicki Minaj, Flo Rida, Bruno Mars, and Katy Perry's albums has gotten a lot of praise on this very forum. If you didn't pay attention, you don't know. Hell, even Ke$ha and Britney Spears turned in solid albums a few years ago. Bruno Mars is consistent with the quality of his albums.

I would not call Kendrick Lamar pop, though.

 

I enjoyed popular music up until a couple of years ago. Starting in about 2010, we had a magnificent run of albums until about 2017. Now they are just sporadic.

 

Not if you go below surface level diving into modern day music

I'd hardly call the genre that contains To Pimp A Butterfly a "stab to the art" when it is all the great things about the wonderful art of music and more

 

This post is so outrageous. It ignores the one hit wonder decades of the 70s and 90s while it implies that you’ve never even listened to a contemporary album or even know anyone in the younger generations.

I’m a modern pop fan. There are as as much in depth sounds, looped around melody, in modern pop as there is in Pink Floyd. Rock turned into rehash and hip-hop, dance pop, and country replaced it. Nobody has to like it, but it is a fact.

 

I tend to agree with you here about mainstream music created for singles, but I want to put forth that many artists today are putting out quality albums, but as I said in another post, you have to look below the surface. (Before someone jumps on me about my previous posts, I’m not that big a Hip Hop/Rap fan either, although I do like some of the artists, but I don’t bash it endlessly and think it’s the end of music like SOME people here. I’m more concerned about this notion that nothing worthwhile is being released today.)

 

I don't understand people who don't get the emotional power of Lemonade -- other than kids. It's a very adult about marriage and learning to live in a life long relationship with scars and betrayal and coming out stronger. I would expect that kids and teenagers might not really get the album. But adults who don't get it, I think I probably don't have a lot in common with. It's like when I was last in a rock band a few years ago with couple of guys who didn't like Bob Dylan, I realized, I should never again be in a band with rock musicians like that, our aesthetic preferences were just too fundamentally different.

When I hear that line right at the start of the Lemonade -- "Pray I catch you whispering/pray you catch me listening," it slays me. It's transfixing. It's this incredible image of a couple caught in this passive aggressive stasis of cheating, where she knows he's cheating and she's desperately wants the secrets to come out but she can't confront him so there's in this moment she just hopes for some kind of accidental or not so accidental moment which will be a dam breaker and let all the secrets spill out. It's amazing. What a stage setter "Pray You Catch Me" is. And what a powerful piece of music.

Then the album proceeds through these emotional moments to this incredible release in "All Night" where our hero finds a new peace in love not by kicking him out but by the couple finding a way past the cheating to a new relationship (Found the truth beneath your lies/And true love never has to hide,...Trade your broken wings for mine/I've seen your scars and kissed your crime)...its unique, its adult, it's emotionally as potent as anything I've ever heard in pop music.

The real emotional high point of the album, and I think the album's best song, and one that is continually in my head is "Freedom" which is an amazing song of personal empowerment. But also, "Sorry" is a total earworm. There's not quantitatively any lack of melody, rhythm or harmony in the album. There are no shortage of hooks and sing-along song and rhythms that make people want to move. In fact, if you watch Homecoming, the new great documentary about Beyonce's Coachella show from a couple of years go, you'll see thousands of people. You may not like the music. But there's no deficiencies in it in terms of some kind of lack of harmony or melody or rhythm.

I don't know that Ray Charles' early '50s singles have to do with any of this. Yeah both those and Lemonade are part of the universe of R&B music, but they're examples of R&B music from more than half a century apart. Though, actually, now that I think about it, "Daddy Lessons" from Lemonade is a country style southern soul number that isn't really stylistically very far removed from the kind of music Ray Charles might have made at some point in his career.

FWIW, growing up with a particular kind of music and in particular subculture is one way to learn to appreciated and enjoy something, but it's hardly the only way.

It's fine if you don't like hip hop. I don't like Brazilian jazz and bossa nova. I've tried. Not my cup of tea. But that doesn't mean I run around saying, bossa nova isn't music, everyone who writes bossa nova music doesn't care about making great music, etc. It just means bossa nova music ain't my bag. FWIW, I grew up around NY in the early years of hip hop, I saw a lot of the early performers -- the Furious Five, Kurtis Blow, Treacherous Three, etc., and I don't really much care for a lot of contemporary hip hop. Take the song that touched this thread off, Drip Too Hard" -- it comes off too much to me as venal and avaricious concerned only with getting paid and Patek Philippe watches and private planes and partying. I'm totally over that in my life and songs about it bore to me. But I don't project out from my personal tastes to make pronouncements about the nature of whole styles of contemporary music I don't even keep up with.

 

That's actually one of the more annoying things to me about hip hop, the subject matter frequently revolves around that kind of thing. I would say contemporary hip hop, but this type of thing has been going on for a long time.

I don't like the lyrics of the song at all, BUT I still kind of like the song overall. Because it has a MELODY that I find catchy!

 

I'm someone who immensely dislikes hip-hop and rap, and it was that which drew me towards Gambino's Awaken, My Love!, in which he does a 180 and goes straight for rock, soul, funk, R&B, and psychedelia. Childish Gambino is a rapper, but Awaken, My Love! is not a rap album.

 

Pop music has ALWAYS been about the hit song -- that was true in the days when pop hits were measured in sheet music sales and onstage performances, say in the days of "Backside Albany" or in the days of "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" it was true in the days of "In the Mood" and "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got that Swing" it was true in the days of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Satisfaction" it was true in the day of "You Light Up My Life" and that was true in the days of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" that was true in the days of "You Light Up My Life" and "You're So Vain" and it's still true. And it's even been true when a song was written as part of a larger work, whether that was a breakout aria from an opera, like Un bel di vendremo, or a breakout song from a Broadway show, like "I Got Rhythm."

Second, these pop hits have enormously long lives. We still know "It Don't Mean a Thing..." and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "I Got Rhythm," 60, or 80 years later. We have entire radio formats devoted to playing the pop hits of the past. Some pop hits of the past disappear with their time -- even if we remember the phrase, I bet there aren't too many people who can sing "How You Gonna Keep Them Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?" but others just seem to live on and on, no matter how slight or seemingly locked into their own time they might have once appeared like "YMCA."

Popular music speaks to its time and its cultural moment with a kind of immediacy that is part of its appeal, and that's always been the case. But like other pop art -- like movies and comic books and TV shows -- is may also live on for a long, long time. These things might be made with a strong reliance on the conventions of their time, but they're also made by people who are trying to make the best work they could. I don't know if when Stephen Foster wrote "Oh Susannah" he expected anyone to be singing the song 150 years later. Yet here we are. You just try to write the best song you can. What happens to it decades later is completely unpredictable. You can't right for an audience you imagine might exist a century from now.

 

SZA - Love Galore (Official Music Video) ft. Travis Scott
N.E.R.D & Rihanna - Lemon (Official Music Video)


Some contemporary hip hop and R&B that I like

 

Points well taken. No doubt my comments were a bit categorical, absolute, and written at the end of a frustrating work day. You are absolutely right that what qualifies as ‘Pop’ and the search for a ‘hit’ have always gone hand in hand.