Sauzer Wrote:I can't be the only one who thinks a lot Japan's pop music jumped the shark sometime in the mid-80s, haha. I don't know - 500 girls all singing at the same time just isn't my scene I guess.
That's not a statement about the quality of the music. It's not even a statement about your personal, purely subjective evaluation of any music.
A dozen girls singing the same song could produce either crap or brilliant music just as easily as any other setup. Frankly, at this point they're more liable to come up with something good than a screaming frontman, two guys with plugged in, loud guitars and a (usually terrible) drummer in the back.
Realism Wrote:Well, most of the old Japanese music I can appreciate them so much more than a lot of modern J-Pop or J-Rock. It's way easier to find good music from back in the days than now it seems.
Music aimed mainly at kids is never going to be good (not by any standards that evaluate it in the full context of the history of music), because most of their audience lacks the ability to judge them. That was just as true during whatever magical time you guys think pop music was awesome as it is today.
Most people I know and respect, who have grown up during the 70s and 80s liking the music of the day, have since refined their tastes and now look back laughing at themselves for the silly stuff they used to think was good.
Realism Wrote:This kind of stuff was prevalent back in the 70s and 80s
Now you have to dig really deep to find anything like that
Even the girly J-Pop stuff sounds more creative than the stuff now.
I mean, even the soundtracks to old movies or TV shows are amazing. Can you find a modern Japanese film (or any film) with music like this in it?
For what it's worth, I don't agree that most of the stuff you posted is particularly creative or expressive music. A lot of it is very genre driven and constrained. You seem to have chosen these songs because they belong to particular genres, more than anything. The one exception is the "girly stuff" in the middle. That's a good song.
You're right, the only place you'll find that electro jazzy stuff in those last three songs is in something like a Tarantino throwback where he's paying homage to the specific brand of movies that dominated the 70s.
And, to be honest, that's a good thing. The last thing we need is for modern musicians and filmmakers to start reverting to the past instead of following (and, on rare occasion, when they're brilliant enough, furthering) modern trends. Good or bad, modern genres of music are at least moving towards something yet unexplored. There's at least the possibility of originality.
