Posted in: Musicouching by Stephen Pomposello on June 11th, 2011 | 0 Comments
What is with all these classic old music artists selling out? Why would they use auto-tune when they have a great voice and can sing? I’m so confused. Part six of "Why Today’s Mainstream Music Sucks" examines veteran music artists who are selling out to today’s trends.
When all else fails in today’s music, you would think you could rely on the veteran artists from before the 2000’s who are still around, right? NOPE. It looks like the only veteran artist who is sticking to her guns nowadays is Sade, she has been doing a great job of maintaining her image and style without integrating today’s horrific trends. On another note, veterans like Usher, Mariah Carey, Diddy, Brandy, Britney Spears, Timbaland, J-Lo, and Eminem have fallen victim to crap like auto-tune, wack beats, and uninteresting music videos.
Image via Wikipedia
How does Britney Spears go from “Baby, One More Time” to “Till The World Ends”? It’s as if she jumped from smooth pop to electronica/dance. It’s totally unlike the Britney we used to know. Just forget classics like “Baby, One More Time”, “Sometimes”, and “Stronger” and listen to this new electronic/dance garbage. Then there’s Mariah Carey, one can never put classics like “Vision of Love”, “Fantasy”, and “Always Be My Baby” in the same boat as “Up Out My Face” and “H.A.T.E.U.”, you might as well put an innocent little kitten in a large cage with a serial killer.
I can’t remember the last time Mariah Carey had put out an interesting song, I believe it was somewhere around the mid-2000’s perhaps, but lately, her stuff stinks. If you notice, nowadays, she rarely hits that high note which she was so popular for and instead does a lot of “talk-singing” in her songs. What do I mean by that? Listen to some of her verses on “Up Out My Face” and you’ll notice she’s “talking” her lyrics with a singing voice and not really “singing”, she’s trying to rush out as many words in as few rhymes as possible, the end result is cringe-worthy.
Look at Timbaland, he went from smooth Hip Hop like “Lobster and Scrimp” to boring sleepy music like “Say Something”. Then we have Usher, who is now using auto-tune and welcoming the whole electronic/dance angle into his music. Are you kidding me? Usher!? Mr. “You Make Me Wanna”? The last good song he put out was “My Boo” with Alicia Keys (who I must say is doing an excellent job of sticking to her own style) in the mid-2000s and that was the last we ever saw of the old Usher. You’re never going to see him put out a classic album like “8701″ ever again, the stuff he’s done lately doesn’t even touch that.
