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

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 Valentine's 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 ruin 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 some more moronic instances of depravity that need to be shattered in 2015 so culture can move forward.

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 them some heinous sleazegaze of a track by a 39 year-old man called Redfoo who wears lensless glasses. It all led Buzzfeed to declare that “Saxobeat” was back. Just like farting though, the saxophone is vulgar and offensive. Unless you’re like, John Coltrane himself or playing in a band with one of those dudes with a voice that sounds like the waste of the Marlboro factory burning down, reed instruments suck ass.

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 had 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 allow him to look good in anything, even a pink fur coat – the answer is no.

Let's 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 "I wouldn’t mind betting on the arrival of a new wave of guitar bands, this time as a reaction to the paler end of EDM – and also prompted by the inevitable hoo-ha around the 20th anniversary of Britpop." - Steve Lamacq 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. We’ve covered this before but Ones to Watch Lists never correlate with success. Predicting the future, as anyone who has ever meticulously planned their date night conversation 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”.

Think of the thousands of people who made and approved these music videos and not one of them thought, "hang on a sec".

If you haven't read it yet, Annie Mac wrote for our sister site, THUMP, about why journalists need to stop asking women if it's possible to DJ in heels.

Cher’s “Believe” is widely accepted as the song that popularised auto-tune and if you don’t agree that it’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 progress. See also: people who think mp3s are runing the quality of music, people who think the internet is ruining the quality of music journalism, people who think all new music just copies old music as if old music was born out of some kind of immaculate conception.

I get that Sam Smith, Ed Sheeran, George Ezra 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. Just anyone with the faintest frisson of sexual appeal and some basic hip movement. We can't take another year of guys who look like they live in the bins round the back of a Ben Sherman ruling the charts.

Luke O’Neil got it spot on earlier this week in his “The Media Got Trolled Into Thinking Kanye West Fans Don't Know Who Paul McCartney Is” piece.

“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.”

Basically anyone who writes a piece about how stupid 14-year-olds are should also have to post unedited transcribes of their MSN Messenger chats from 2003 and then we'll see who's a fucking moron. Follow Ryan and Noisey on Twitter.