The Electric Pop Music Of Today's Culture

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Oftentimes, when listening to the radio with my dad, he will exclaim, “What happened to all the talent? Where is the real music?” Now I can’t say I blame him for thinking this way, the electric pop music of today’s culture is much different from the hard rock music of his youth in the 1980’s. However, growing up, this caused countless petty fights about what is and what isn’t good music.
Many times I’d be sitting in my room, listening to my music on my stereo, when suddenly my dad would barge in, saying that whatever I was listening to was trash. Of course he was joking, my dad is a huge lover of all kinds of music, yet at the same time I couldn’t help but see the superiority he felt in his own music. He constantly teased me about how his …show more content…

For most of the trip we listened to classic rock music, my dad’s favorite genre, but after a while the radio station started playing the same songs over and over again, so we began to surf the channels for something new. That’s when Ke$ha’s song “Your Love Is My Drug” came screaming through the speakers. I excitedly turned up the volume and began to sing along when my dad grunted, unenthused. I admit Ke$ha wasn’t my favorite artist, nor was she the most talented, but it made me a little upset that my dad couldn’t appreciate her music with me. When the song was over I turned the music down and asked him why he didn’t like the song. To which he replied, “This isn’t real music, it sounds like it was made by a computer.” I just thought of the song as catchy and fun with a nice beat to dance along to, it had never occurred to me that people didn’t like the song because of its auto-tuned aesthetic. For me, a good song was anything I liked to sing or dance along to; yet, for my dad, a good song was something that had to have live, authentic instruments with little to no altering, or in his terms, “real talent.” Ultimately, this got me thinking: What qualifies music as real and not real? Who determines what qualities of music make it good? And what defines

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