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Music

Shitty Music Clichés, Trends, and Opinions That Need to Die in 2015

Kill these moronic instances of depravity so culture can move forward.
Ryan Bassil
London, GB

As the French poet Gerard de Nerval once said “The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet, the second, an imbecile”. Now I’m sure you’ve all spent enough time browsing for valentines day cards in Clintons to understand Nerval was suggesting clichés are the language of the banal. The more they’re used, the more nauseating and ineffective they become.
 
Clichés kind of work in music – good artists use them to subvert and meet expectation. The problem though is that the shit artists far outweigh the great, and each musical cycle brings new trends that, twelve months later, need to be destroyed.
 
We wrote a piece last year attempting to destroy some of the more popular clichés and lots of the trends we talked about – ineffectual lyric videos, the proliferation of hashtags in music videos, Miley Cyrus simultaneously destroying and saving feminism – were killed off in 2014. But that’s not good enough. Last year brought new trends, more dumbass opinions, and in our never-ending mission to rid the planet’s dernier cri-cum-scourges from existence, here’s every moronic instance of depravity that needs destroyed in 2015 so culture can move forward.

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The Saxophone needs to fuck off!

 
Despite sounding like the syncopated flatulence of a jazz-handed teen who’s chosen to battle gastrointestinal disease by sticking a piece of brass up their butt, saxophones were everywhere in 2014. Ariana Grande and Iggy Azalea’s “Problem” came first, followed by Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” and concluded with some heinous sleaze-gaze of a track by a 39 year-old man called Redfoo who wears lensless glasses, which led Buzzfeed to declare that “Saxobeat” was back. Just like farting though, the saxophone is vulgar and offensive in that every agitation of the instrument’s reed antagonises everyone who accidently trespasses upon its sound. Unless you’re like, Louis Armstrong or one of those dudes with a voice that sounds like the waste of the Marlboro factory burning down, saxophones suck ass. Fuck saxophones!

Bucket hats

The bucket hat was conceived out of practicality; it was worn by infants to protect them from radiation burn and adorned by adult men as a way of letting the world know they’ve consciously uncoupled with sex. Somewhere along the way though, the upper echelon of the fashion industry picked the hat up, and it saw a revival on the catwalk and subsequently the streets. Kurtis Blow and Reni from the Stone Roses popularised the hat in the 80s and a decade later, a fair amount of Dads and one-hit wonders were pictured with heavy-duty canvas on their heads. Then it disappeared. Last year though, Yung Lean, ScHoolboy Q, and Instagram brought the bucket back and everyone from Bieber to Ri-Ri flaunted around like confused ichtyhophiles. Has anyone ever looked good in a bucket hat? Unless you’re Cam’Ron – who is a god blessed with sartorial capabilities that equate to looking good in anything, even a pink fur coat – the answer is no. Throw that bucket hat in the trash where it belongs.

Trendcasting

Look, we may be blessed with the sort of intelligence that has led to the creation of a machine which some use to combat tracheobronchomalacia, and others use to print replicas of their penises, but if there’s one thing humans are terrible at it’s predicting the future. Just look at some of the trend predictions posted by various websites in January, 2014:
 
“Lady Gaga will have one of her best years yet” – Forbes
 
“Nation's sweetheart Adele releases her third album '26' in April. Unfortunately it's still a few weeks before her birthday and she's only 25. Twitter goes nuts” - NME
 
“The arrival of #GOATSEA + #DUSTPUNK” – THUMP
 
Looking through various “ones to watch” pieces from January 2014, there’s also a glut of names that continue to be unrecognisable a year later – Powell, Lo-Fang, Holychild, HAERTS, Hot Since 82, La La Brooks, No No No. Granted, that’s because their names are less appealing than listening to an audiobook of someone reading the instructions to a dehumidifier, but that’s not the point. We’ve covered this before but Ones to Watch Lists never correlate with success, and predicting the future – as anyone who has planned for a successful date will know – is dumb. In fact, the only person who got it right was Fat White Family’s Lias Saudi who stated 2014 would be “a continued steady decline into total drudgery, followed by some sadistically boring, inept songwriting. Trumpets being blown, the usual array of crap”.

Cultural appropriation

Autotune exists; stop complaining about it

Cher’s “Believe” is widely accepted as the song that popularised auto-tune and let me tell you, if you don’t agree that’s one of the best pieces of pop music ever recorded then feel free to say nothing. That all happened back in 1998, and since then auto-tune has levied criticism from musicians and fans of Real Music. In what has to be one of the most LOL moments of all time, Death Cab for Cutie wore blue ribbons to the 2009 Grammy Awards protesting the industry’s favouring of auto-tune and JAY Z once (stupidly, shout out Drake) rallied for the “Death of Autotune”. Despite Real Music’s best attempts though, auto-tune never went away. Sure – it sucks when used like photoshop for the voice, but that’s a fact of the music business and everyone from Snoop Dogg to Britney Spears to Michael Buble is guilty of pitch shifting the shit out of their vocals. When used for artistic purposes though, that’s a completely different story.

Kanye West and Paul McCartney released the Song of 2015 on the first day of 2015 and it featured hella-auto-tune. This made lots of people angry and these people need to learn to accept or ignore art, or know that, at the least, auto-tune will not diminish their unborn grandchildren’s chances of survival or contribute to them being hit by a car on the way to work tomorrow.

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Only Listening to "Real" Hip-Hop Music

We did the below three categories last year but lots of people are still stuck up their own ass so…

A certain breed of hip hop fan believes that they’re better than everyone else because they’ve etched the lyrics of Illmatic, Low End Theory, and “The Message” into their brain. They refuse to like anything new, would probably dome on MF Doom if he asked, and are ignorant enough not to realise that they’re as bad as the detractors that first hated on every record released during the Golden Age. What’s real hip-hop? I don’t know, but a thousand internet commentators will inform you.

Only Listening to "Real" Rock Music

Yeah, and I bet you still don’t talk to strangers because that’s what your Mother told you when you were five, right?

Only liking “Real” Dance Music

Tell me again how you spent every weekend in a blissed out euphoric state listening to Larry Levan at Paradise Garage. Oh, wait, you work in accounts? STFU then.

The Lack of a Male Popstar

I get that Sam Smith, Ed Sheeran, John Newman et al were all popular last year but they all have the charisma of a damp rag that’s been left in the washing up bowl looking sorry for the past week, not the magnetism of a popstar. Plenty of female popstars are rightfully killing it – Twigs, Nicki, Ariana, Taylor – and I’m certainly not supporting the patriarchy and suggesting a foolproof plan to knock them from their well-earned thrones. Merely, please 2015, give us the equivalent of a Timberlake, a Bieber, or a Jackson. Fuck it, even a George Michael will do.

The sort of articles written by adult humans that shame teens / directioners / beliebers for being young and free on the internet

Sure - this is me being a lazy content creator but here is Luke O’Neil of Noisey being spot on about this very topic in a piece titled “The Media Got Trolled Into Thinking Kanye West Fans Don't Know Who Paul McCartney Is” and why mess with perfection?

“One of the laziest forms of contemporary content creation, which I'm sure by now you're familiar with, is the blog post round up of a series of embedded tweets. It can come in a few different forms: ‘Look at how outraged people are about XYZ’ is the most common variety, but only slightly less so is ‘Get a load of these dumbass, know-nothing teens.’ The purpose is obvious: to leverage our inherent disdain for the ignorance of youth in order to score on a cheap cycle of traffic. And the best part for the dickhead behind it is that it requires almost no effort besides using the search field on Twitter.”
 
Follow Ryan on Twitter: @RyanBassil