Michael Abrahams | The changing face of popular music

I love music

Any kind of music

I love music

Just as long as it’s groovy

I Love Music – The O’Jays

I love music. A lot. Music has been an important part of my life for as far back as I can remember. Both of my parents and my brother were music lovers, and music was constantly playing in our home on the radio, phonograph, or cassette player. And the spectrum of music I was exposed to in my youth was vast: classical, jazz, calypso, soca, mento, ska, rocksteady, reggae, rhythm and blues, disco, pop, rock, and more. I do not just love music. Music, especially popular music, has contributed to my happiness and, in turn, bolstered my mental health.

Nowadays, however, I feel disconnected from popular music. I am aware that people usually feel their era’s music was the greatest, and I am no different: I believe popular music from the seventies and eighties was the best. But the pop music scene has changed significantly, and in many instances, not for the better, at least for me. I believe the quality of much of the music released today is not as good as it used to be.

One contributing factor is that music is way too easy to make nowadays. Back in the day, in order to be a successful artiste and produce hit songs, you had to be able to sing. You were also required to visit a studio and record songs with competent musicians. Nowadays, none of that is necessary. You do not have to be able to sing as well as artistes in the past. You can just record your voice and use autotune and other tools to fine-tune it. You do not even need musicians. You can just digitally create music. You can then upload it to a social media platform and, within seconds, have an audience. So, someone can literally stay in their bedroom, lie on their bed, and write, record and release a song that can become very popular.

Or you can just use artificial intelligence (AI) to create the whole thing. AI-generated songs are more common than many of us realise. The streaming platform Deezer recently reported that 39 per cent of music delivered there daily is fully AI-generated, amounting to 60,000 tracks. And as of late January, six of the top 50 trending songs on Spotify in the US were fully AI-generated. In a recent Deezer/Ipsos survey, 97 per cent of respondents were unable to distinguish AI-generated from human-made music. It is therefore not surprising that Sienna Rose, a completely AI-generated ‘artiste’, has over four million monthly Spotify listeners.

I recall, in my youth, that when a popular international artiste was going to release an album, fans would wait in anticipation for the lead single. If you liked it enough, you would buy it, and if you liked the album, you would buy that too. If you did not have the songs and wanted to hear them, you would sit by the radio, with your cassette, ready to record them if played. Similarly, when MTV arrived, if you wanted to see a video, you would either watch and wait for it to be played, or just leave a cassette taping for hours, hoping you would catch what you wanted to see.

Nowadays, it is also too easy to consume music. You can access any song you want within a few seconds on your cell phone or other devices and listen to it ad nauseam. On the one hand, as a music lover, I am grateful for being able to hear any song I want at any time. On the other hand, we tend to appreciate things more when they do not come so easily to us, and I feel that younger generations, who were raised with this ease of accessibility, may not appreciate the music they hear as much as older generations did.

And much of the popular music nowadays sounds generic and unoriginal. The Grammy for Record of the Year this year went to Kendrick Lamar and SZA for luther, which samples If This World Were Mine by Luther Vandross and Cheryl Lyn, a remake of the original version by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell from 1967. The song was also nominated for Song of the Year. Anxiety by Doechii, also nominated for Record of the Year and Song of the Year, samples the 2011 hit Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye featuring Kimbra, which in turn sampled Luiz Bonfá’s song Seville, also from 1967. (Thanks to American YouTuber and musician Rick Beato for this information) I am especially disappointed with the lyrical content of dancehall songs nowadays. I am no prude, but I am overwhelmed by the preponderance of violence and sexual content in many of the songs. I believe in freedom of artistic expression, but I feel the genre has stagnated.

I miss buying albums and reading liner notes, learning not only the lyrics of songs but also about the songwriters, producers, and personnel on the tracks. Nowadays, when accessing songs, this information is rarely displayed. You simply make a couple of clicks on a device, and the song you want to hear plays. I do not think the present generation of our youth appreciates musicianship the way we did in the past, either. Decades ago, we would see more bands and often knew at least some of the band members, which instruments they played, and appreciated their musicianship. Nowadays, the charts feature more solo acts and way fewer bands, and the appreciation for musical expertise is not what it was before.

Music is constantly evolving. I embrace some of the evolution I see, but I am missing several aspects of music I used to appreciate.

Michael Abrahams is an obstetrician and gynaecologist, social commentator, and human-rights advocate. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and michabe_1999@hotmail.com, or follow him on X , formerly Twitter, @mikeyabrahams