What is this generations Nirvana, Limp Bizkit, Tupac, or Rage against the machine?
-
They're not so prolific or relevant now but I feel Rise Against deserves a mention. I did my senior essay on their work in high school and honestly it changed a lot of my political opinions doing research/listening for that.
I almost forgot, rise against and Tom Morello did this song live together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5hLetyUToI
Ha, cool! I need to give them a more thorough listen.
I wonder who else's first exposure to them was that incredible "Urban Ninja" video that was really popular when YouTube was cool...20 years ago
-
So you're saying that no one listens to music that isn't spoon-fed to them?
My friend, algos won't show me Swedish power metal, I gotta go find it. No one waited for Rage to come on the radio, you sought it out at the record store or from friends that had copied demo tapes and mix tapes.
algos won't show me Swedish power metal
Any algorithm that won't let someone discover Sabaton, is a defective algorithm.
No idea about today, but Pandora used to be cool for this in the "Music Genome Project" days.
-
I feel global political oppression or global wars usually produce great music but Macklemore might be the peak.
Nothing against him, some of his songs are good, but I expected real rage inducing stuff with everything going on. Or is this just the state of music as a whole?
wrote last edited by [email protected]What are you calling "this generation"? Mellenials are the largest generation and span from like late 20's to 40ish. Zoomers are graduating and entering the workforce. The generation younger than gen z (idk what their name is) are school aged and often the driving force behind what is and ist popular.
As a mellenial who considers RATM, Nirvana and 2pac as more gen x derived, id say the whole underground skateboard/snowboarding rap scene was the closest to those 3 bands when it comes to originality and music with a message. Off the top of my head I can think of Brother Ali, Atmosphere, Immortal Technique, Coremega, Jedi Mind Tricks
Less underground but still goats would be Nas, J.Cole, Eminem, Mac Miller, Jay Z. You cant name an artist more original than Lil Wayne with his whole never writing a single song down and saying whatever comes out of his mouth in the booth gets recorded.
As for bands, id go with, System of a Down, Jack White/White Stripes/Raconteurs/whatever other side projects Jack White has in the works, Green Day, American Idiot was pure blooded mellenial rebellion eventhough I would put them half in gen X (Dookie) and half in mellenial bucket (American Idiot). I was never an emo fan but My Chemical Romance's Black Parade album is one of the best rock opera albums ever released.
If you are using Limp Biscuit as an example of taking over the radio kind of popularity then id have to go towards country artists like Swift, Toby Kieth, Eric Church etc. Country went from being the red headed bastard of all music genres to becoming the most widely listened to genre accross all demographics in less than a decade.
Notable mentions that didnt make the list for near misses or for being too generationally ambiguous:
- Beyonce
- Foo Fighters
- No Doubt
- Sublime (even tho chronologically 100% gen x but I dont know a single peer in the mellenial gen that didnt have ever sublime album on hand with one cd always playing round the clock)
- ska bands like Pepper, Butthole Surfers, O.A.R., Badfish
- Red Hot Chilli Peppers
- Johnny Cash (his late in life album that he remade Hurt by NIN is arguably some of his best work)
- Blink 182
- the whole catalog from all the Dipset artists
- Outkast
- DMX
- Lupe Fiasco
- Common
- Mos Def
- hate him or love him you cant deny his influence on the entire music scene... Kanye "Benjamin Franklin didnt win 21 Grammys" West
I feel like this is a question entire music history courses are built off of. Especially being a mellenial, myself. All the generations before us could count music genres on one hand with subgenres not even a thing yet. And maybe im just old but I feel like the generation that has followed so far has completely checked out on making new music. I 100% admit I dont count EDM as meeting any definable characteristic of musical art. I mean I guess gen Z can have credit for the mellenial's left over hip hop evolution with Kendrick, Chance, and .... idk i guess mumble rap. I even looked up genZ musical artists and didnt find much else. Which isnt to say its bad but I certainly wouldn't include it with the names being tossed around in my main comment to the question cuz they could all battle for a spot on music's mount Rushmore of music lol.
Edit: I know im missing some big names but im not guna edit my list everytime kne pops in my head lol
-
Check out Jesse Welles for more folky protest music.
He also has non-protest music too, but some good recent protest and political songs include:
Love this!
-
It doesn't if you don't use services and algorithyms.. But damn crap like Spotify is popular. I would never, but it's like they hand it out when you turn 5 and say this is the default!
wrote last edited by [email protected]I haven't used it for a while, but I remember Spotify recommending some pretty neat and niche stuff. It just really depends what you feed it to begin with.
If you start with "Popular top 40 corporate-bred pop artist of the month", it will swiftly taylor the algorithm to more of the same, and once it's got an idea it mostly goes one direction and it's really difficult to get it to recommend other styles that aren't Harry.
Fun puns and anecdotal evidence aside: Spotify sucks especially because of how it pays artists next to nothing.
I personally skim Freegal from my local library, Bandcamp on Fridays, and buy MP3s from 7 Digital if I want to support the artist. (I don't know 7 Digital's revenue take, but I at least get to own the music forever, and in FLAC if I want!)
-
Kneecap
Bob Vylan
Both got in trouble for speaking out about the Palestinian genocide.
I AIN'T JUST A VILLIAN I'M THE MOTHERFUCKEN MAN
-
We had local record stores
Keyword being "local". We had no record stores. Which ones were there stocked mostly overpriced Beatles represses. They still do to this day.
We had university radio which would play whatever the DJ was into, because it wasn't programmed.
We too, and the DJ had dogshit taste and played random generic autotune rap.
would also bring in albums from small and indie bands
Ah yes, the small and indie bands that could afford to checks notes - press on actual honest to god vinyl.
We had clubs that would book bands from everywhere. The club I hung out at had a band every night of the week, and no matter when you went, you would hear someone new.
No, you had clubs. We had fuckall and a half and what was there was for the bourgeoisie cisheteronormative folks to listen to bland dance music in and fry out their brains on molly that was 90% caffeine and 10% undiscovered synthetic that will kill you.
None of it was about the music, and of course it wasn't - it was a place for cliques to flex fashion.
If you lived in some kind of fantastical Life Is Strange-esque world - I'm happy for you, really, truly, and I'd like to hear more stories, but most of us didn't, at least not those of us born after '97.
Nowadays discovering music is really quite a lot simpler, there's no one you gotta know, there's no place you have to know to go to, there's no subcultures you gotta be part of, there's nowhere you have to be to know specific artists.
You're completely unbound by your immediate geography, whether you're in Pakistan or one of those places 'Jesus of Suburbia' was about or a dense European city, all you need is an internet connection, which even in extreme poverty is much more affordable than going much of anywhere IRL.
Even if I lived in ye olden times, there's no way in hell I would've known about even bands from the time like Cleaners from Venus or like 13th Floor Elevators, and in my own time I wouldn't have known about Sweet Trip or Cats Millionaire, and I love how much there is and how much more is left to discover, all without needing to be part of something or being somewhere, it's more democratic, and more fitting for a global world.
wrote last edited by [email protected]You're making a lot of bold assumptions, none of which are true.
Keyword being ālocalā. We had no record stores. Which ones were there stocked mostly overpriced Beatles represses. They still do to this day.
So you had them, and they were shitty. Not quite the same thing as not having them. Did you ever ask if they could special order? The store I used to go to carried music zines that catered to a variety of tastes, and they would talk about any number of new albums and bands that were doing the rounds. If a band we saw live had a new release listed in one of them, we would go to the store and order it.
We too, and the DJ had dogshit taste and played random generic autotune rap.
So they had a single DJ that worked 24/7? And since you mention autotune, which doesn't become prominent until the 2000s, you clearly have no clue, because it was already possible to discover new music then without having to hunt it down.
Ah yes, the small and indie bands that could afford to checks notes - press on actual honest to god vinyl.
There was, let me check notes.... cassettes. Bands used to record music in their living room with a cheap 4 track, and put them on cassette.
And we had these really cool dual cassette radios, which you could one button copy to a blank cassette. So many of my music collection that I bought from bands I saw came from the band using one of these to copy their tapes.
https://u-mercari-images.mercdn.net/photos/m83247247555_1.jpg
I had probably a half dozen carrying cases full of albums of various music.
No, you had clubs. We had fuckall and a half and what was there was for the bourgeoisie cisheteronormative folks to listen to bland dance music in and fry out their brains on molly that was 90% caffeine and 10% undiscovered synthetic that will kill you.
Just because you lived in a shitty place, doesn't mean your experience was universal. The city I lived in was so small, we had a single bar that catered to everything outside of mainstream. Gay, goth, punk and metalheads... all in the same place. It was not uncommon to hear a Sepultra song, followed by Bauhaus or the Pet Shop Boys or Skinny Puppy.
If you lived in some kind of fantastical Life Is Strange-esque world - Iām happy for you, really, truly, and Iād like to hear more stories, but most of us didnāt, at least not those of us born after '97.
In 1997, I was downloading music from the Internet from IRC. From album releases to bootlegs some guy at a show made holding up a tape recorder. You could also take CDs out from libraries and rip them to mp3 for long term storage. I would keep CDs full of mps, that I would then burn to CDs (because MP3 players didn't exist yet) so we could listen to them. If you were lucky, you would get 128kbit, 44khz, but we would settle for 64kbit or 96 if it was what we could get.
If you were born after 1997 and you couldn't find music you liked, that was a you problem. It was out there if you went looking for it.
Nowadays discovering music is really quite a lot simpler, thereās no one you gotta know, thereās no place you have to know to go to, thereās no subcultures you gotta be part of, thereās nowhere you have to be to know specific artists.
And if you were born after 1997, that's been true your entire life. As long as the Internet has existed, there have been people putting music outside of the mainstream online. I used to DJ for an Internet radio station. We started in 2001 (and is still going), and went out of our way to discover new music. The founder was a musician himself, and wanted to spotlight lesser known music. We played anything from any drama, and had a robust request engine that people used to request music. We pre-recorded podcasts for play so long ago, it pre-dated the term podcast.
Youāre completely unbound by your immediate geography, whether youāre in Pakistan or one of those places āJesus of Suburbiaā was about or a dense European city, all you need is an internet connection, which even in extreme poverty is much more affordable than going much of anywhere IRL.
Even if I lived in ye olden times, thereās no way in hell I wouldāve known about even bands from the time like Cleaners from Venus or like 13th Floor Elevators, and in my own time I wouldnāt have known about Sweet Trip or Cats Millionaire, and I love how much there is and how much more is left to discover, all without needing to be part of something or being somewhere, itās more democratic, and more fitting for a global world.
It's awesome you mention Cleaners from Venus, because they distributed their music on cassettes by mail order from listings in zines and word of mouth.
-
I feel global political oppression or global wars usually produce great music but Macklemore might be the peak.
Nothing against him, some of his songs are good, but I expected real rage inducing stuff with everything going on. Or is this just the state of music as a whole?
Dead Pioneers
-
algos won't show me Swedish power metal
Any algorithm that won't let someone discover Sabaton, is a defective algorithm.
No idea about today, but Pandora used to be cool for this in the "Music Genome Project" days.
Ahhh, yes Pandora. The Good Ol' Days.
And I'm the only algorithm I need for finding Swedish power metal, because I put in the hours to find what I like. But, admittedly, my taste in music is generously called "eclectic" by some, and "trash" by my loved ones, so there's no algorithm that's ever even believed I was a real person and not just 3 raccoons in a trench coat.
-
Making them! https://jimmyhalliday.bandcamp.com/
wrote last edited by [email protected]Holy shit, your band is fucking fire!
Edit: I listened to your whole album and it's great. Reminds me of the early 2000s Fat Wreck Chords era when punk was honest and real, but also fun. Like some NoFX/MXPX stuff plus shades of this band named King Kong but louder. Thanks for linking to it!
-
Holy shit, your band is fucking fire!
Edit: I listened to your whole album and it's great. Reminds me of the early 2000s Fat Wreck Chords era when punk was honest and real, but also fun. Like some NoFX/MXPX stuff plus shades of this band named King Kong but louder. Thanks for linking to it!
Then you might be surprised to learn that there is no band, just me! I played and sang all the parts except for drums, those I made with Hydrogen. I did all of that using mostly open-source tools, all in my living room!
-
I feel global political oppression or global wars usually produce great music but Macklemore might be the peak.
Nothing against him, some of his songs are good, but I expected real rage inducing stuff with everything going on. Or is this just the state of music as a whole?
Zeal and Ardor.
An absolute top tier band that stand for human rights and who's lyrics reflect their beliefs.
Created by a black metal artist from Sweden who made one of the best black metal albums of the past 5 years, who have since released banger after banger.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/racist-4chan-comment-album/
Also seconded/thirded on Run the Jewels. "Close your eyes and count to fuck" is on the forever playlist.
-
You're making a lot of bold assumptions, none of which are true.
Keyword being ālocalā. We had no record stores. Which ones were there stocked mostly overpriced Beatles represses. They still do to this day.
So you had them, and they were shitty. Not quite the same thing as not having them. Did you ever ask if they could special order? The store I used to go to carried music zines that catered to a variety of tastes, and they would talk about any number of new albums and bands that were doing the rounds. If a band we saw live had a new release listed in one of them, we would go to the store and order it.
We too, and the DJ had dogshit taste and played random generic autotune rap.
So they had a single DJ that worked 24/7? And since you mention autotune, which doesn't become prominent until the 2000s, you clearly have no clue, because it was already possible to discover new music then without having to hunt it down.
Ah yes, the small and indie bands that could afford to checks notes - press on actual honest to god vinyl.
There was, let me check notes.... cassettes. Bands used to record music in their living room with a cheap 4 track, and put them on cassette.
And we had these really cool dual cassette radios, which you could one button copy to a blank cassette. So many of my music collection that I bought from bands I saw came from the band using one of these to copy their tapes.
https://u-mercari-images.mercdn.net/photos/m83247247555_1.jpg
I had probably a half dozen carrying cases full of albums of various music.
No, you had clubs. We had fuckall and a half and what was there was for the bourgeoisie cisheteronormative folks to listen to bland dance music in and fry out their brains on molly that was 90% caffeine and 10% undiscovered synthetic that will kill you.
Just because you lived in a shitty place, doesn't mean your experience was universal. The city I lived in was so small, we had a single bar that catered to everything outside of mainstream. Gay, goth, punk and metalheads... all in the same place. It was not uncommon to hear a Sepultra song, followed by Bauhaus or the Pet Shop Boys or Skinny Puppy.
If you lived in some kind of fantastical Life Is Strange-esque world - Iām happy for you, really, truly, and Iād like to hear more stories, but most of us didnāt, at least not those of us born after '97.
In 1997, I was downloading music from the Internet from IRC. From album releases to bootlegs some guy at a show made holding up a tape recorder. You could also take CDs out from libraries and rip them to mp3 for long term storage. I would keep CDs full of mps, that I would then burn to CDs (because MP3 players didn't exist yet) so we could listen to them. If you were lucky, you would get 128kbit, 44khz, but we would settle for 64kbit or 96 if it was what we could get.
If you were born after 1997 and you couldn't find music you liked, that was a you problem. It was out there if you went looking for it.
Nowadays discovering music is really quite a lot simpler, thereās no one you gotta know, thereās no place you have to know to go to, thereās no subcultures you gotta be part of, thereās nowhere you have to be to know specific artists.
And if you were born after 1997, that's been true your entire life. As long as the Internet has existed, there have been people putting music outside of the mainstream online. I used to DJ for an Internet radio station. We started in 2001 (and is still going), and went out of our way to discover new music. The founder was a musician himself, and wanted to spotlight lesser known music. We played anything from any drama, and had a robust request engine that people used to request music. We pre-recorded podcasts for play so long ago, it pre-dated the term podcast.
Youāre completely unbound by your immediate geography, whether youāre in Pakistan or one of those places āJesus of Suburbiaā was about or a dense European city, all you need is an internet connection, which even in extreme poverty is much more affordable than going much of anywhere IRL.
Even if I lived in ye olden times, thereās no way in hell I wouldāve known about even bands from the time like Cleaners from Venus or like 13th Floor Elevators, and in my own time I wouldnāt have known about Sweet Trip or Cats Millionaire, and I love how much there is and how much more is left to discover, all without needing to be part of something or being somewhere, itās more democratic, and more fitting for a global world.
It's awesome you mention Cleaners from Venus, because they distributed their music on cassettes by mail order from listings in zines and word of mouth.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I'm not really going to respond to all that because I'd just be restating the same thing over and over. I'll focus on one point:
Yes I'm more than aware of how Cleaners of Venus distributed their music.
That's my entire point - they're a very much niche band essentially unknown in their time - and I would have never, in a million years - known about their distribution method, or known of them at all, if it wasn't on Wikipedia and on the internet and their music wasn't easily torrented or streamed.
Even if they were less niche, and sold their records in stores: stores are very very expensive, anything meatspace is very very expensive due to rent costs of the actual precious physical space, they have to make their stock count, and that means catering to the mass market.
If such stores even exist - which they essentially don't and when they did they were few and far between and not exactly record stores - more something like HMV, they catered to the mass market first because they are giant mega corps and dgaf about anything but the bottom line.
The internet - anyone could post anything there. Any music, any news about any new music, and anyone could access it from anywhere.
So If you literally believe that finding music is easier via counting on random zines and special orders in magical vinyl record stores that exist as far as I'm concerned - in fiction only, and when most countries in the world didn't even have such a concept, than via the internet which is available everywhere at all times to everyone globally, you're insane and I can't help you.
That is an insane, obviously incorrect position to hold and if you can't see that, you can't be made to see it with any arguments anyone could present.
I think that must be it because you made another truly psychotic claim here:
There was, let me check notes.... cassettes. Bands used to record music in their living room with a cheap 4 track, and put them on cassette.
Cleaners from Venus have 261k monthly listeners on Spotify. That means they'd need 216,000 cassettes. They'd also need the logistics and distribution to ship them all over the world to simply even come close to the reach they have now, to even be hypothetically obtainable.
Just because you lived in a shitty place, doesn't mean your experience was universal. The city I lived in was so small, we had a single bar that catered to everything outside of mainstream. Gay, goth, punk and metalheads... all in the same place. It was not uncommon to hear a Sepultra song, followed by Bauhaus or the Pet Shop Boys or Skinny Puppy.
Of course it's not universal. But it is more universal, because most of the world are not in one of like, three-ish Western European countries and the 10 or so sane cities in the United States. I'm sorry that causes your narrative of the world and how things used to be and/or are to be incorrect, but it's the simple truth.
What was universal? Top 40 hits played on TV and Radio. That was pretty much everywhere. That is - until the internet and now you could be a Wavves fan in Russia, and I'm sorry the thought is so offensive to you.
-
Kneecap
Bob Vylan
Both got in trouble for speaking out about the Palestinian genocide.
100% agree with you.
-
Rage against the Machine are very explicitly leftist. Like pretty much every song.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Rage Against The Machine is ok, but they are to me utterly eclipsed by the thousands of leftist artists before and after them that make far more poignant and interesting music both lyrically and musically.
Maybe I just haven't tried the right material or listened to them enough, I have nothing against them but they just don't grab me in the way every other leftist music artist has grabbed me, the ending song from The Matrix for instance while a cool mic drop in the film, I find just not very interesting.
I've listed some in my original comment, but if you're curious I can list many many more.
I actually maintain a playlist here:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5rYZABdJf5H8XmliZ9ZTIW?pi=KIskSDh8T--mY
-
Most people don't pay attention to lyrics at all, and don't have the literacy skills to try to understand them.
That's true and quite unfortunate, but to be fair Anti-Flag was still fairly popular from what I understand, and their lyrics are much more politically charged.
I think Rage Against The Machine just doesn't grab the same way, at least for me personally.
-
I'm not really going to respond to all that because I'd just be restating the same thing over and over. I'll focus on one point:
Yes I'm more than aware of how Cleaners of Venus distributed their music.
That's my entire point - they're a very much niche band essentially unknown in their time - and I would have never, in a million years - known about their distribution method, or known of them at all, if it wasn't on Wikipedia and on the internet and their music wasn't easily torrented or streamed.
Even if they were less niche, and sold their records in stores: stores are very very expensive, anything meatspace is very very expensive due to rent costs of the actual precious physical space, they have to make their stock count, and that means catering to the mass market.
If such stores even exist - which they essentially don't and when they did they were few and far between and not exactly record stores - more something like HMV, they catered to the mass market first because they are giant mega corps and dgaf about anything but the bottom line.
The internet - anyone could post anything there. Any music, any news about any new music, and anyone could access it from anywhere.
So If you literally believe that finding music is easier via counting on random zines and special orders in magical vinyl record stores that exist as far as I'm concerned - in fiction only, and when most countries in the world didn't even have such a concept, than via the internet which is available everywhere at all times to everyone globally, you're insane and I can't help you.
That is an insane, obviously incorrect position to hold and if you can't see that, you can't be made to see it with any arguments anyone could present.
I think that must be it because you made another truly psychotic claim here:
There was, let me check notes.... cassettes. Bands used to record music in their living room with a cheap 4 track, and put them on cassette.
Cleaners from Venus have 261k monthly listeners on Spotify. That means they'd need 216,000 cassettes. They'd also need the logistics and distribution to ship them all over the world to simply even come close to the reach they have now, to even be hypothetically obtainable.
Just because you lived in a shitty place, doesn't mean your experience was universal. The city I lived in was so small, we had a single bar that catered to everything outside of mainstream. Gay, goth, punk and metalheads... all in the same place. It was not uncommon to hear a Sepultra song, followed by Bauhaus or the Pet Shop Boys or Skinny Puppy.
Of course it's not universal. But it is more universal, because most of the world are not in one of like, three-ish Western European countries and the 10 or so sane cities in the United States. I'm sorry that causes your narrative of the world and how things used to be and/or are to be incorrect, but it's the simple truth.
What was universal? Top 40 hits played on TV and Radio. That was pretty much everywhere. That is - until the internet and now you could be a Wavves fan in Russia, and I'm sorry the thought is so offensive to you.
Did you completely miss the point that I was talking about pre-internet days? In my first response to you, I literally talked about an album release in the 90s.
Maybe your entire experience in life isn't as old as the pants I'm wearing right now, but the world existed before you did.
-
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when MP3s were new. If it wasn't for a HD crash in 2003, I would still have MP3s from the 90s.
Plus, I was agreeing with you. WTF?
I'm not talking about sharing in particular, I'm talking about friction involved in discovery. You have to know someone to share the link, even today. So someone is out there spending 10 hours a day listening to random stuff on YT just to get something to share, not waiting around for the algorithm to give them music.
If it wasn't for a HD crash in 2003, I would still have MP3s from the 90s.
You just made me sad thinking about the huge music library I used to have. I've recently started downloading again, but my tastes were so different back then I don't think I'll ever remember it all.
-
Absolutely fair point, and I agree with you to some degree. I imagine that it's somewhere in the middle, where bands have flooded the space so that if no technical means exists for discovery, we've traded off friction points. Instead of the 90's version where people would drive 40 minutes to the cool reord store in the next town over, now discerning listeners looking for gems have to wade through more and more bands they don't like. It's no one's fault, it's just how it is.
the ā90s* version
-
Did you completely miss the point that I was talking about pre-internet days? In my first response to you, I literally talked about an album release in the 90s.
Maybe your entire experience in life isn't as old as the pants I'm wearing right now, but the world existed before you did.
Yes you demented moron I think I am aware that the world existed before the internet and before I did, especially since I mention music that was made before I was born? Stop huffing the asbestos for a moment and read and re-read my post until you understand it, you absolute cretin.
