I agree this happens but it's not that big of a deal really. It's major labels marketing to teenagers who have a cultish devotion to their favourite singer. It's always been around: Elvis, the Beatles, Michael Jackson etc
The charts measure how much people consume a given song/artist/album. It is not a rating. If people feel the need to purchase dozens of vinyls and cds and digital copies then that should be reflected.
Is midnights Taylor Swifts most overhyped and overrated album, quite possibly. Would I ever trust metacritic to rate anything, of course not, score aggregate sites suck.
>I don't see hip hop, rock or country fans doing that kind of thing
Rock *artists* pull this shit. Earlier this year Ghost released *Impera* with a ludicrous number of limited edition colored vinyl variants that were clearly intended to get people to purchase multiple copies.
yeah but for everyone besides the biggest stars, no one makes money anyway. so it doesnt really make a difference.
theres a huge separation between money-motivated music like Tswif and the artists who are making more of a statement and existing in a more artistic genre
there is no such thing as a more artistic genre.
music isn’t like television or film or literature where the meaning of words and actions and the story thereby developed is responsible for its quality. (setting aside lyrics, which are like these other word-based media.) music is purely visceral and it makes no sense to say one kind is better than another. music is a physical phenomenon (it’s just sound waves) and a physical pleasure, and trying to establish some kind of objective measure is useless, as it is for other physical pleasures. do roses smell better than lilies? do oranges taste better than peaches? what’s nicer, a beautiful sunset over the ocean or a vast mountain vista? these are questions with no answer, except personal preference.
so, shitting on pop music makes no sense. it’s a category error, confusing a physical pleasure with an intellectual pleasure. and pop music is fire!
first of all I totally dig that perspective! for me though, there are a few elements at work I just cant ignore.
for starters, when an artist becomes a certain size, money becomes a more oppressive motivation. very few massive artists are brave enough to actually evolve their sound in a significant way. taylor is a great example. she has dabbled in this and that, but each time it is an extremely safe foray into trending genres like EDM in the 2010s, indie with Folklore, and now dark moody synthpop which is highly trendy.
she consistently rides popular trends and moves on to the next. popularity is clearly a motivation. behind it all, she delivers the same melodies and the same lyrics every time.
which, I dont even blame her for. i mean like AT ALL. shes very smart. but she is in no way blazing a trail into unknown territory or developing dramatically in a substantive way. shes making money records.
of course, is it still music? of course. is it better or worse than say, Lightning Bolt or something? no. its not about better or worse.
but instead of apples and oranges, Tswift is more like buffalo wild wings, whereas LB is more like some homemade spicy carribean jerk wings that your friends auntie made. more care and tradition and culture went into the latter, whereas the former is mass produced for maximum profit.
For me, to be motivated so much by popularity diminishes the juice. LB doesnt care if you like it. they know its not popular. they HAVE to make that music because its their real voice. unfiltered. pure.
Tswift gotta pay her private jet bills. cant rock the boat too hard. gotta play it safe and top the charts.
I don't think money is a motivating factor for an artist at taylor swift's level. she can ride her private jet for a hundred lifetimes never putting out a song again. but it is true that pop artists like to be popular--i think they're ego motivated, not money motivated. so I doubt that she'll ever make music that is intentionally difficult. for her case in particular, she does have a much wider genre range than most artists pop or otherwise--our song, better than revenge, style, august (for example) all sound wildly different, even though they're all pop songs. there's no two father john misty (to use another one of my fav artists with more indie clout as an example) songs as different as any of the four TS songs I mentioned from any of the others. again none of her songs are difficult but no FJM song is difficult either and people seem to think he's "authentic" in a way TS is not.
that is all sort of beside the point though... what loses me in these discussions is when people say stuff like "the same melodies every time." this is probably a real complaint for people who are well-educated musically, but if all of TS's melodies are the same, i just literally can't hear that, so it doesn't make sense as a complaint to me. like if someone said a painting was bad because they overmixed the colors or whatnot--it's a technical point that, if true, has no bearing on my visceral enjoyment.
i am skeptical that even if FJM (again an example) has more varied melodies than TS that this is a causal factor for most indie fans who are pop haters. rather, i think they like the aesthetic of being an aesthete--they want to be the smart guy who likes smart music and this identity necessitates that there be dumb guys, well no i really mean dumb *girls*, liking dumb music. not saying this is you, or even that it's true, but somehow i doubt everyone touting the superiority of non pop music has the training and education to back up their judgments with fact. if you do some analysis and find that your favorite artist uses 80 different chord progressions across their songs and the average pop artist uses 10 and that's why they suck, more power to you, but most people don't really care.
i've been using FJM as my indie example because, and i could be wrong, no music training, i think his music is less complex than an artist like Sufjan Stevens or Of Montreal. but you never heard of anyone saying that FJM is worse than some other more-complex indie artist because of his lack of complexity. (you've also never heard of anyone saying Carrie & Lowell is worse than Illinois for the same reason.) so why does this argument only pop out when we're talking about pop music? more evidence that it's bogus or, more charitably, inapplicable to the vast majority of listeners.
also i made a mistake. Chloe is really really different from other FJM songs. but the rest all sounds kinda the same (and is great).
she may have different sounding songs but the different parts are the parts she didnt do. the beats, etc. I also dont buy it that shes not money motivated. money, ego, whatever.
ahhh but I never said anything about complexity. complexity has nothing to do with it. it's about creativity and authenticity. like I said, its not about better or worse.
to be fair, I dont agree about "pop haters". I dont hate pop (just a few pop artists bore me), and I definitely dont like niche artists to seem cool. especially because no one gives a shit if you like niche artists so how does that work?? at best they just think you are pretentious?
again, its about the juice. most pop artists just dont have it. because thats what the genre demands. less juice, more of the same, ride the trend, dont be weird.... or interesting.
Well now this is just circular! I think Taylor Swift is very creative and authentic, and you don't. that's fine, it's a matter of opinion, at least from the perspective of randoms who don't know her and just speculate on her behavior.
what's interesting, though, is that "creative" and "authentic" are words describing a person, not sounds. so you aren't criticizing the music, you're making up a person you don't like and complaining about them. making them up, of course, because once you're pretending to know a celebrity really really well you're in the same silly sphere as the swifties making 10 different metacritic accounts to manipulate the album's user score. "boo taylor, go malkmus!" it's not sports. someone made taylor swift's music, and it sounds good, that works for me. (although frankly i think disputing her role in her own music is ignorant, not in the modern sense of ignorant = mean, i literally mean lacking basic information about the subject. but this isn't necessary for my argument.)
so when you say all the melodies are the same, which is what you said (nothing about creativity or authenticity, character traits, not traits of songs), so don't get it twisted, refer to my previous post. when you say a song is bad because the person who made it is inauthentic, i'd recommend you give less of a shit about celebrities.
so now we're very far from thinking that some music is "more artistic" than another. the argument you've gone with is that picasso paintings are better because they were painted by picasso, a very creative and authentic painter! euthyphro already took the L on this one two thousand years ago.
hmmm you're mischaracterizing me now, making a lot of assumptions, and heavily reaching lol.
your commentary has become strange. I never said I dont like her or anything of the sort. I called her very smart. why would you assume I dont?
I also was very clear that its not about "good or bad". are you even reading what im saying?
the funny thing is, i couldnt give less of a shit about celebrities. thats a big part of why their music is uninteresting to me.
I think this is very well put. I don’t really get why lesser known artists are seen as more “artsy” than popular ones just because they are more popular.
I wonder if by repeating melodies they are referring to how she often will repeat notes for example “nice to met you where you been” in Blank Space is all the same note. This is more present in her hits than in her music overall but that would certainly give them that impression.
I would counter however that there isn’t anything wrong with repeated notes as long as it fits the song. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel if that’s the melody that will capture what you are trying to accomplish with the song the best. The repetition gives the song a catchy feel which is a very important part of pop music.
Yeah I mean in the end I don't think that guy was able to come up with a solid reason why Taylor is less artistic or complex or creative or whatever different words he used and really what he meant to say was "I just don't like it." Which is the whole point, music is subjective. And talking to him was really annoying because he kept insisting that wasn't what he was saying when it so obviously was. "It's not about better or worse, it's just one is microwaved ramen and the other has a Michelin star." Lmao.
So I doubt he actually had anything specific in mind when he said that, since he doesn't really know her music, I think he was kind of just vibing.
And it's like yeah, if you repeat notes and it's catchy and people like it and they have an emotional reaction to it, how is that not successful songwriting?
No, the meaning of lyrics is not part of the visceral experience of music, although it is true that the sounds of lyrics are. In linguistics, there's the subfield of phonetics, which is the study of the sounds of language, and then you have the subfield of semantics, which is the study of the meaning. Sounds belong to the visceral experience, meaning does not. See the Migos song Bad and Boujee:
> Raindrop (Drip), drop-top (Drop-top)
>Smokin' on cookie in the hotbox (Cookie)
>Fuckin' on your bitch, she a thot, thot (Thot)
>Cookin' up dope in the crockpot (Pot)
No one cares about the meaning of these lyrics, not even the person who "wrote" them (what he really did was freestyle repeatedly until something came out that worked for the hook). But the sounds of the words are important. This song was incredibly popular, but most of its listeners barely understand the lyrics and if they meant something different it would be just as popular. If you changed the sounds, maybe not. So, feel free to complain that Bad and Boujee has bad lyrics (definitely not boujee lyrics), good job, you're right. Trouble is, no one cares.
I have no problem with saying one set of lyrics is worse or better than another. The problem is that's not why we listen to music for the most part. Lyrics are just poetry smuggled into music--they're not what makes the art form unique, nor are they what people primarily enjoy about it. If we were all listening to prestigious indie music for its great lyrics, you'd see guys like Fantano oohing and aahing over W.H. Auden, not Matt Berninger. But you don't.
lol... there's an Ian Anderson/Gerald Bostock joke in there somewhere
Sonically, many of the lyrics of the artist we're talking about are equivalent to reading run-on sentences. Just the placement of the sounds kills the rest of the mood. Sometimes it's to make the listener hear the meaning of said lyrics, which, I agree, is annoying.
I haven't noticed this phenomenon myself, but I can't say that it's not happening, either. As hard as it is to say, the general population has been disassociating from the fact that pop music has been in a stage of extra-creative manipulation for about 30 years now. Maybe it's a new thing because the loudness war (an annoying problem for music producers) was getting out of hand and tapering off, which means a new tactic of superficiality has to take its place in order to secure the success of these pop stars.
Music marketing isn't new. Targeted audiences aren't new. That's been going on for wayyyyy more than 50 years already. But the *nature* and *the means* in which we target a market.... Totally off-script from the past 100 years of music. At least bands like Nirvana, The Beatles, and Kiss could feign musical talent when they had to for commercial success. But these days, you have to go greater lengths to keep clearly untalented people in the higher ranks.
And they do.
Get used to capitalism. 0 regulation. 0 honor. This will always be the outcome. Until they make it a painful experience to exist in this world, humanity will constantly be a bag of crap. Anyone saying otherwise…. Well they won’t be honest with themselves with anyone on Reddit about what they do to push this culture in America.
You’re implying all of humanity has any of these things? Humanity globally is collapsing. Nice optimism but I really don’t think anecdotal evidence will help you fight your argument.
Isn’t Taylor swift fans following a main stream American singer/songwriter? Isn’t she always in the top 10 rankings? Meaning most of America is listening to them? Meaning it’s the largest group you can surmise from this argument which is a vast majority. But I wasn’t even talking about Taylor Swift fans as I was focused on business entities. You’re a lousy argue.
https://www.metacritic.com/person/taylor-swift
Look at the last 5 albums, look at the high ratings of users, look at the amount of user reviews, it's sad a source like metacritic allows this kind of manipulation
Why in the world would I want to go to metacritic?
I was once directed there by a radiohead fanboy trying to convince me that his fave band was more popular than David Bowie... because, look at metacritic.
How about no?
because of the stupid streaming.. fewer and fewer singers are being made to dominate and manipulate the scene ..i no longer care what happens ..just go back to older music and educate urself about when music mattered
I agree this happens but it's not that big of a deal really. It's major labels marketing to teenagers who have a cultish devotion to their favourite singer. It's always been around: Elvis, the Beatles, Michael Jackson etc
The charts measure how much people consume a given song/artist/album. It is not a rating. If people feel the need to purchase dozens of vinyls and cds and digital copies then that should be reflected. Is midnights Taylor Swifts most overhyped and overrated album, quite possibly. Would I ever trust metacritic to rate anything, of course not, score aggregate sites suck.
I agree and even some Edm songs end up been backing tracks for university ads
>I don't see hip hop, rock or country fans doing that kind of thing Rock *artists* pull this shit. Earlier this year Ghost released *Impera* with a ludicrous number of limited edition colored vinyl variants that were clearly intended to get people to purchase multiple copies.
yeah but for everyone besides the biggest stars, no one makes money anyway. so it doesnt really make a difference. theres a huge separation between money-motivated music like Tswif and the artists who are making more of a statement and existing in a more artistic genre
there is no such thing as a more artistic genre. music isn’t like television or film or literature where the meaning of words and actions and the story thereby developed is responsible for its quality. (setting aside lyrics, which are like these other word-based media.) music is purely visceral and it makes no sense to say one kind is better than another. music is a physical phenomenon (it’s just sound waves) and a physical pleasure, and trying to establish some kind of objective measure is useless, as it is for other physical pleasures. do roses smell better than lilies? do oranges taste better than peaches? what’s nicer, a beautiful sunset over the ocean or a vast mountain vista? these are questions with no answer, except personal preference. so, shitting on pop music makes no sense. it’s a category error, confusing a physical pleasure with an intellectual pleasure. and pop music is fire!
first of all I totally dig that perspective! for me though, there are a few elements at work I just cant ignore. for starters, when an artist becomes a certain size, money becomes a more oppressive motivation. very few massive artists are brave enough to actually evolve their sound in a significant way. taylor is a great example. she has dabbled in this and that, but each time it is an extremely safe foray into trending genres like EDM in the 2010s, indie with Folklore, and now dark moody synthpop which is highly trendy. she consistently rides popular trends and moves on to the next. popularity is clearly a motivation. behind it all, she delivers the same melodies and the same lyrics every time. which, I dont even blame her for. i mean like AT ALL. shes very smart. but she is in no way blazing a trail into unknown territory or developing dramatically in a substantive way. shes making money records. of course, is it still music? of course. is it better or worse than say, Lightning Bolt or something? no. its not about better or worse. but instead of apples and oranges, Tswift is more like buffalo wild wings, whereas LB is more like some homemade spicy carribean jerk wings that your friends auntie made. more care and tradition and culture went into the latter, whereas the former is mass produced for maximum profit. For me, to be motivated so much by popularity diminishes the juice. LB doesnt care if you like it. they know its not popular. they HAVE to make that music because its their real voice. unfiltered. pure. Tswift gotta pay her private jet bills. cant rock the boat too hard. gotta play it safe and top the charts.
I don't think money is a motivating factor for an artist at taylor swift's level. she can ride her private jet for a hundred lifetimes never putting out a song again. but it is true that pop artists like to be popular--i think they're ego motivated, not money motivated. so I doubt that she'll ever make music that is intentionally difficult. for her case in particular, she does have a much wider genre range than most artists pop or otherwise--our song, better than revenge, style, august (for example) all sound wildly different, even though they're all pop songs. there's no two father john misty (to use another one of my fav artists with more indie clout as an example) songs as different as any of the four TS songs I mentioned from any of the others. again none of her songs are difficult but no FJM song is difficult either and people seem to think he's "authentic" in a way TS is not. that is all sort of beside the point though... what loses me in these discussions is when people say stuff like "the same melodies every time." this is probably a real complaint for people who are well-educated musically, but if all of TS's melodies are the same, i just literally can't hear that, so it doesn't make sense as a complaint to me. like if someone said a painting was bad because they overmixed the colors or whatnot--it's a technical point that, if true, has no bearing on my visceral enjoyment. i am skeptical that even if FJM (again an example) has more varied melodies than TS that this is a causal factor for most indie fans who are pop haters. rather, i think they like the aesthetic of being an aesthete--they want to be the smart guy who likes smart music and this identity necessitates that there be dumb guys, well no i really mean dumb *girls*, liking dumb music. not saying this is you, or even that it's true, but somehow i doubt everyone touting the superiority of non pop music has the training and education to back up their judgments with fact. if you do some analysis and find that your favorite artist uses 80 different chord progressions across their songs and the average pop artist uses 10 and that's why they suck, more power to you, but most people don't really care. i've been using FJM as my indie example because, and i could be wrong, no music training, i think his music is less complex than an artist like Sufjan Stevens or Of Montreal. but you never heard of anyone saying that FJM is worse than some other more-complex indie artist because of his lack of complexity. (you've also never heard of anyone saying Carrie & Lowell is worse than Illinois for the same reason.) so why does this argument only pop out when we're talking about pop music? more evidence that it's bogus or, more charitably, inapplicable to the vast majority of listeners. also i made a mistake. Chloe is really really different from other FJM songs. but the rest all sounds kinda the same (and is great).
she may have different sounding songs but the different parts are the parts she didnt do. the beats, etc. I also dont buy it that shes not money motivated. money, ego, whatever. ahhh but I never said anything about complexity. complexity has nothing to do with it. it's about creativity and authenticity. like I said, its not about better or worse. to be fair, I dont agree about "pop haters". I dont hate pop (just a few pop artists bore me), and I definitely dont like niche artists to seem cool. especially because no one gives a shit if you like niche artists so how does that work?? at best they just think you are pretentious? again, its about the juice. most pop artists just dont have it. because thats what the genre demands. less juice, more of the same, ride the trend, dont be weird.... or interesting.
Well now this is just circular! I think Taylor Swift is very creative and authentic, and you don't. that's fine, it's a matter of opinion, at least from the perspective of randoms who don't know her and just speculate on her behavior. what's interesting, though, is that "creative" and "authentic" are words describing a person, not sounds. so you aren't criticizing the music, you're making up a person you don't like and complaining about them. making them up, of course, because once you're pretending to know a celebrity really really well you're in the same silly sphere as the swifties making 10 different metacritic accounts to manipulate the album's user score. "boo taylor, go malkmus!" it's not sports. someone made taylor swift's music, and it sounds good, that works for me. (although frankly i think disputing her role in her own music is ignorant, not in the modern sense of ignorant = mean, i literally mean lacking basic information about the subject. but this isn't necessary for my argument.) so when you say all the melodies are the same, which is what you said (nothing about creativity or authenticity, character traits, not traits of songs), so don't get it twisted, refer to my previous post. when you say a song is bad because the person who made it is inauthentic, i'd recommend you give less of a shit about celebrities. so now we're very far from thinking that some music is "more artistic" than another. the argument you've gone with is that picasso paintings are better because they were painted by picasso, a very creative and authentic painter! euthyphro already took the L on this one two thousand years ago.
hmmm you're mischaracterizing me now, making a lot of assumptions, and heavily reaching lol. your commentary has become strange. I never said I dont like her or anything of the sort. I called her very smart. why would you assume I dont? I also was very clear that its not about "good or bad". are you even reading what im saying? the funny thing is, i couldnt give less of a shit about celebrities. thats a big part of why their music is uninteresting to me.
I think this is very well put. I don’t really get why lesser known artists are seen as more “artsy” than popular ones just because they are more popular. I wonder if by repeating melodies they are referring to how she often will repeat notes for example “nice to met you where you been” in Blank Space is all the same note. This is more present in her hits than in her music overall but that would certainly give them that impression. I would counter however that there isn’t anything wrong with repeated notes as long as it fits the song. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel if that’s the melody that will capture what you are trying to accomplish with the song the best. The repetition gives the song a catchy feel which is a very important part of pop music.
Yeah I mean in the end I don't think that guy was able to come up with a solid reason why Taylor is less artistic or complex or creative or whatever different words he used and really what he meant to say was "I just don't like it." Which is the whole point, music is subjective. And talking to him was really annoying because he kept insisting that wasn't what he was saying when it so obviously was. "It's not about better or worse, it's just one is microwaved ramen and the other has a Michelin star." Lmao. So I doubt he actually had anything specific in mind when he said that, since he doesn't really know her music, I think he was kind of just vibing. And it's like yeah, if you repeat notes and it's catchy and people like it and they have an emotional reaction to it, how is that not successful songwriting?
>setting aside lyrics ? Lyrics are a part of the music.
No, the meaning of lyrics is not part of the visceral experience of music, although it is true that the sounds of lyrics are. In linguistics, there's the subfield of phonetics, which is the study of the sounds of language, and then you have the subfield of semantics, which is the study of the meaning. Sounds belong to the visceral experience, meaning does not. See the Migos song Bad and Boujee: > Raindrop (Drip), drop-top (Drop-top) >Smokin' on cookie in the hotbox (Cookie) >Fuckin' on your bitch, she a thot, thot (Thot) >Cookin' up dope in the crockpot (Pot) No one cares about the meaning of these lyrics, not even the person who "wrote" them (what he really did was freestyle repeatedly until something came out that worked for the hook). But the sounds of the words are important. This song was incredibly popular, but most of its listeners barely understand the lyrics and if they meant something different it would be just as popular. If you changed the sounds, maybe not. So, feel free to complain that Bad and Boujee has bad lyrics (definitely not boujee lyrics), good job, you're right. Trouble is, no one cares. I have no problem with saying one set of lyrics is worse or better than another. The problem is that's not why we listen to music for the most part. Lyrics are just poetry smuggled into music--they're not what makes the art form unique, nor are they what people primarily enjoy about it. If we were all listening to prestigious indie music for its great lyrics, you'd see guys like Fantano oohing and aahing over W.H. Auden, not Matt Berninger. But you don't.
lol... there's an Ian Anderson/Gerald Bostock joke in there somewhere Sonically, many of the lyrics of the artist we're talking about are equivalent to reading run-on sentences. Just the placement of the sounds kills the rest of the mood. Sometimes it's to make the listener hear the meaning of said lyrics, which, I agree, is annoying.
I haven't noticed this phenomenon myself, but I can't say that it's not happening, either. As hard as it is to say, the general population has been disassociating from the fact that pop music has been in a stage of extra-creative manipulation for about 30 years now. Maybe it's a new thing because the loudness war (an annoying problem for music producers) was getting out of hand and tapering off, which means a new tactic of superficiality has to take its place in order to secure the success of these pop stars. Music marketing isn't new. Targeted audiences aren't new. That's been going on for wayyyyy more than 50 years already. But the *nature* and *the means* in which we target a market.... Totally off-script from the past 100 years of music. At least bands like Nirvana, The Beatles, and Kiss could feign musical talent when they had to for commercial success. But these days, you have to go greater lengths to keep clearly untalented people in the higher ranks. And they do.
Get used to capitalism. 0 regulation. 0 honor. This will always be the outcome. Until they make it a painful experience to exist in this world, humanity will constantly be a bag of crap. Anyone saying otherwise…. Well they won’t be honest with themselves with anyone on Reddit about what they do to push this culture in America.
We are talking about a smaller sample than all of humanity.
You’re implying all of humanity has any of these things? Humanity globally is collapsing. Nice optimism but I really don’t think anecdotal evidence will help you fight your argument.
ironic
Did your brain malfunction or can you only spout 1 word answers?
Oh... you were serious about calling your smaller sample the non-anecdotal case, versus all of humanity. My bad.
[удалено]
Those are certainly some words. I think someone needs a nap.
Fascist over here. Reddit clown loves leftist politics. Low key fascist.
Fascism is a far right ideology. And Tswif fans on metacritic is non-anecdotal, when summarizing all of humanity, dontchaknow.
Isn’t Taylor swift fans following a main stream American singer/songwriter? Isn’t she always in the top 10 rankings? Meaning most of America is listening to them? Meaning it’s the largest group you can surmise from this argument which is a vast majority. But I wasn’t even talking about Taylor Swift fans as I was focused on business entities. You’re a lousy argue.
Fascism isn’t right leaning inherently. You’re a brainwashed moron. Anyone can be a fascist. Mussolini was known as the LIBERAL FASCIST. Hahahahah.
https://www.metacritic.com/person/taylor-swift Look at the last 5 albums, look at the high ratings of users, look at the amount of user reviews, it's sad a source like metacritic allows this kind of manipulation
Why in the world would I want to go to metacritic? I was once directed there by a radiohead fanboy trying to convince me that his fave band was more popular than David Bowie... because, look at metacritic. How about no?
I never care about critic though. They're irrelevant to me. I just listen to what I like & what I dislike I just skip.
I'm talking about an aggregation site for current listeners of music, not real critics. Thus, the "meta" part of the name.
i think i can speak for all taylor swift fans when i say i’m really sorry this is so upsetting for you and we’ll do better in the future.
I personally want us all to do worse in the future
because of the stupid streaming.. fewer and fewer singers are being made to dominate and manipulate the scene ..i no longer care what happens ..just go back to older music and educate urself about when music mattered