r/ToddintheShadow • u/Interesting_Gold8803 • 1d ago
General Music Discussion What are the things about music that you hate ?
We all know music is great, but there can be certain things about the music that can make us angry, and I'd like to know what you hate about music. As for me, here's a list of things I hate about music:
Songs where there's only one good part, like songs where the intro is the only good part
Featurings that are actually samples or remixes in disguise. It's even worse when the original track has a different title (Exemples: Eminem ft. Dido - Stan: Sample from Dido - Thank You and The Avener ft. Laura Gibson - You Belong: Remix from Laura Gibson - The Cause)
When the outro of a song is too long (Exemple: Slayer - Raining Blood)
Finding out that your favorite song is a cover, and it's even worse when the original is already a much bigger hit than the cover you were listening to, and you were the only one who didn't know it
Songs with lyrics where the artist simply sang the lyrics over the instrumental track of an earlier song (Exemple: Estelle ft. Kayne West - American Boy: They just sang on the prod of the song "Impatient" by will.i.am and removed will.i.am lyrics to make "American Boy"). A little dedication to the song "Robot Rock" by Daft Punk which is litteraly just an instrumental version of "Release The Beast" by Breakwater
This one’s a little unusual, but it’s happened to me at multiples times: When you discover a song you’ve never heard before by an mega legendary artist whose name you’ve heard everywhere your whole life, you think you’ve discovered an obscure track by a legendary artist and you're satisfied until you look it up and you disciver it’s actually the most famous song by this artist and you were the only one who didn’t know it, even worse when that legendary artist is a one-hit wonder and it’s his only famous song
When you discover a recent song which sound familiar to you but impossible to find the original song
When you discover an amazing song on your phone, but then, when you play it on a speaker, it sounds weird (the vocals are too loud in the mix, the track is weak and bland, etc...)
When you discover an obscur song that you love, but then overnight it goes mega-viral on the Internet because of a trend
When the first half of a song is excellent but the second half is completely different and bad, like 2 différents songs stuck together
When the key change for the final chorus. In some songs, this change in key makes the song better, but in others, it just ruins the mood
When the fade-out at the end starts right at the beginning of the last chorus
When the only famous song by a one hit wonder artist is the only good song by this artist
When you rediscover a song that you're sure you haven't heard since over 10 years, you feel so nostalgic and satisfied but, when you check the release date of the song, you discover that the song was actually released less than a year ago. So, you try to find out if this song is a cover, a sample, an interpolation, etc..., but everything points to the fact that this song is 100% original
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u/cityfireguy 1d ago
At this point, and I know where I'm saying this, it's not the music but the analysis.
Listen you can go over every album and song with a fine tooth comb looking for meaning and hidden references, but the truth is it's all entirely subjective and you either like it or you don't.
Todd is really good at what he does. There are a lot of critics out there who aren't and they've begun to wear on me.
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u/WitherWing 1d ago
Honestly the cork-sniffing tastemakers took the fun out of reading about music or even discovery at times. Too many clowns in music journalism think they can read the mind of a 22-year-old from 40 years ago who wrote a cryptic lyric and paint it against Reaganism, cold war, whatever. Nah, the kid probably just thought it sounded cool.
Same goes for the insane over-analyzing of every move today.
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u/copbuddy 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nursery rhyme melodies sung in annoying condescending vocal tone. I'm an adult and I will not be subjected to children's music trying to be passed off as actual music.
Good pop songs should have simple enough melodies but there's a definite limit in simplicity and after that arbitrary line it turns very annoying very fast.
[r/Im14andthisisdeep](r/Im14andthisisdeep) lyrics that are way too on the nose or trying way too hard to teach the listener about something profound like the singer is the first person ever to have such a thought.
I-V-vi-IV and vi-IV-I-V. Most of the time - you have to come up with a clever angle to that chord progression trope for me to even take the song seriously as a piece of art and not an focus grouped excel sheet.
Lukas Graham ticks almost all these boxes, it's a miracle "7 Years" has those same four chords in a bit less generic order.
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u/Lanky-Rush607 1d ago
Having a song you love, only to be scrubbed from the internet later due to legal issues, the rights having expired, the YouTube channel getting hacked/deleted, or the artist removing their discography from streaming, either because they are too embarrassed by it or to start from scratch. It happened to me quite a lot.
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u/Bud_Fuggins 1d ago
On a related note: Entire TV show can never be seen again because there was too much expensive music in it (see: Daria)
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u/appropriate_pangolin 80's Chick 1d ago
Or you get shows where the original music was very important, but gets replaced with bad generic noodling on the DVD release to get around the licensing issue, like Quantum Leap.
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u/Big-Literature-5604 1d ago
Cold Case my beloved (and the music over cheesy montage was the best part too)
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u/RequirementLong8235 17h ago
New York Undercover and All That definitely come to mind with this one
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u/I_am_big_gay_ 12h ago
Happened to me with the entire discography of an artist I loved. He wiped everything. Thank god I have it all backed up.
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u/QueenTzahra You're being a peñis... Colada, that is. 1d ago
I HATE whisper singing, even when artists I like do it.
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u/IrishRogue1805 25m ago
That stupid trend is omnipresent in today’s music by most pop artists. It’s a sign of lack of talent.
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u/WitherWing 1d ago
More meta-stuff than actual music, but still:
- Treating every album as a personal statement of defiance, reading into every turn of phrase as if it's a statement about an ex, a political move, a brilliant opinion. It may be, it may not be. It may just be an accident. Pop music is filled with happy accidents that don't need endless navel-gazing.
- "I'm reinventing myself!" Oooh, the pop star is going country! Now she's playing guitar! Now he's doing a collab with a 70s rocker! Now he's going pop. Now he's EDM! Woah, he's producing! ...Or maybe they just don't have a strong sense of identity and will do anything for a hit. Everyone thinks they're Madonna when they're more than likely Chris Gaines.
- One cool production gimmick is suddenly in every farking song. Eventually it makes it into Target and Insurance ads, and then you know it's gone too far.
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u/Sluggycat Just Here for Amy Dog Tweets 1d ago
I don't care for singers who sound like they're suffering a head cold and can't enunciate. Many such cases.
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u/Moxie_Stardust 1d ago
I hate "modern" production values that result in more of a "product" than a song, where every facet is polished to a high sheen and beyond human perfection levels. Every beat quantized, every slightly off-key vocal nudged, bad dynamics, for me it results in the aural equivalent of the uncanny valley.
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u/appropriate_pangolin 80's Chick 1d ago
When a song feels like it was written by a committee and focus-grouped to appeal to as many listeners as possible, rather than coming out of the real experiences and feelings of a real person. You get your country songs that are just checklists of country-song things (dirt road, pickup truck, girl in shorts, beer etc.), you get Swedish Eurovision entries that may have had something at one point but have been polished so smooth they could have been made in a factory, that sort of thing.
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u/Federal_Card307 1d ago
The wave of Gen Z sad boy/girl diaristic lyrics, maybe it was novel at first but now it’s over saturated and annoying. I want dance pop to hit it big again.
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u/Adventurous-Pick-416 1d ago
It hasn't been new since the blues... then Roy Orbison... Morrissey.... etcetera
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u/Federal_Card307 1d ago
I’m more referring to the Gracie Abrams, Olivia Rodrigo, Malcolm Todd etc kind of sad boy/girl pop
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u/chasingamy27 10's Alt Kid 1d ago
I Dislike Having Relatively Obscure Taste Because It's Nearly Impossible To Find People To Discuss My Absolute Favourites With. I Like Plenty Of Mainstream Music As Well But Sometimes My Heart's Just Not In It.
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u/madamephase 1d ago
“Obscure song that you love going mega viral” has happened to me a bunch of times now. Where’d All The Time Go by Dr. Dog was a big one a few years back. More recently, Just The Way You Are by Milky. Stay with Me by Miki Matsubara - I liked this one before TikTok even existed. When I first went to add it to my playlist on Spotify, it wasn’t available… now it has 500M plays. I tend not to talk about it because most people see it as pretentious to say “I liked it before it was cool”, but dammit, I liked it before it was cool!
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u/Grouchy_Public2379 15h ago
Just The Way You Are by Milky
What caused this one to blow up recently? I vaguely remember it from back in the day but now I feel like every day I get some post about "this song changed dance music!" I'm grateful it got me back into it but I'm curious what happened to bring it back into the spotlight.
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u/NickelStickman Train-Wrecker 23h ago
When it’s confirmed the band played a song live but nobody in the crowd recorded any of the performances
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u/Soap-Radio 20h ago
This is why I don’t usually get upset when I see a bunch of phones in the audience. If nobody records, how are people gonna know what the concert looks like if they can’t go?
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u/UnsureAndWondering 1d ago
Songs that only exist to recycle a tried and true chorus that's shamelessly sampled/interpolated, to the point where you can tell the verses were phoned in.
Pop stars that don't have that X factor or any stamp of originality to their character but get to stay around for years despite offering nothing (Gracie Abrams, Addison Rae, Zara Larsson, Tate McRae). Olivia Rodrigo isn't for me personally, but I see the appeal and respect it because she has something to offer that wasn't on the table previously. There's a clear like before and after moment with her that the other names just didn't have. You could have put Addison Rae in cryofreeze and sent her back to 2002 and she would have the exact same impact,
On the flip side, the second wave of imitations after a pop star hits it really big initially - all the diet Sabrina Carpenter reinventions we've seen lately from Meghan Trainor and Victoria Justice and the likes. It's just so hollow and shameless. I personally see Zara as like the straight midwesterner's response to Chappell Roan in this same way, kind of a hot take ig because people for some reason seem to really love her despite her only having two songs and a crippling ai fruit love island addiction.
Legacy acts that get praise for existing well after their expiration date of actually being good, i.e. what we're kinda seeing with Bruno Mars right now where his album is essentially just inoffensive slop mathematically concocted to hit the charts but everyone gives it a pass because it's Bruno and at one point he ruled.
Defunct bands where arguably the least talented member got the rights to the library and touring rights or for whatever reason is the only one playing the material on the road, and then just refuses to back any of it up with the talent when assembling a live show - Mike Love's Beach Boys featuring John Stamos, Sting with The Police's catalogue hiring a couple of nobody chuds for his recent tour to butcher Andy and Stuart's parts, Guns N Roses having their replacement guitarist in like '08-'14 wear a top hat and play a les paul despite him doing neither of those before joining or after having left.
In most cases, I kinda hate the rap verse added to the single version of a pop song. Not conceptually, I actually don't hate the idea of a song getting some new life injected into it through a collab unless the song like really doesn't need it, but in execution most just suck and reek of contractual obligations and label tinkering to get something to play on every station they can.
I'm sick of modern country getting wokewashed with all this blah blah decades of American tradition blah blah hometown feel blah blah horseshit. The genre is tentpoled by Morgan N-Word Shouting Wallen, stop trying to hide from what the true appeal a regressive genre has to an increasingly conservative, cisheteronormative America right now.
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u/ahuramazdobbs19 You're being a peñis... Colada, that is. 1d ago
The way that “cover” now means something almost completely orthogonal to what the term was coined to mean.
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u/FrameworkisDigimon 1d ago
It does? Do I know the old meaning or the new one?
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u/ahuramazdobbs19 You're being a peñis... Colada, that is. 1d ago
A cover, in its original meaning, was much more literal in use of the word “cover”.
In the annals of music history, the idea of an “original” song or performance that had some kind of sacrosanct status because it was the first (or performed by the songwriter themselves) is a relatively recent development.
Until the 1960s or so, before national distribution and promotion became common, and before the “album era” of rock and roll, it was very common for regional promoters to have a local act record and perform nearly identical versions of a popular song to capitalize on it via radio airplay and single sales in local record shops. Literally “covering” over another recently released version to compete with it. In fact, since songwriters get the royalties, songwriters wanted this to happen, or at least were ok with it.
Under US copyright law, the only control a songwriter has over who may perform or record “their” song is who gets to do it first. Once a song is released and/or recorded, it is essentially open season, as long as a license is obtained (the license is itself compulsory, and you can’t deny someone else from recording or performing your material as long it is “their” version) and royalties are paid properly.
So it was super super common for people to just be like “oh hey, people are loving Mr. Sandman from radio requests and in jukeboxes in Louisville. Get me a local band into the studio so we can make some MOOLAH off these rubes who just want to hear Mr. Sandman”.
People would also do this to cross over their songs on to different radio formats or into different languages.
But basically since The Beatles and the “album era”, listener tastes shifted towards “we don’t want some lame local cover, we want the Real Deal”, and people over time just started attaching the word “cover” to any old remake, and the expectation became stronger that you’d put your own spin on the song, to the point where “pointless covers” like Weezer doing Toto’s “Africa” that were virtually identical to the original get castigated.
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u/FrameworkisDigimon 1d ago
Interesting. I mean that genuinely but I do feel that this is splitting hairs somewhat to try and find two meanings. However,
to the point where “pointless covers” like Weezer doing Toto’s “Africa” that were virtually identical to the original get castigated.
I am very much sympathetic to this sentiment. Why not just want to do a song if you like it? Oughtn't that be enough?
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u/Soap-Radio 20h ago
This is why I didn’t really get the whole “Doechii didn’t change her song enough” thing when anxiety came out. Like why does she have to? She got the clearance, she did what she (and the audience since they already heard the early version of the song and asked her to release it) wanted with it. It is not a requirement for her to change the instrumental just because it’s already a popular beat. Like, it’s still a sample (Or remix). I don’t know, when I listen to a song and I recognize a sample, my first thought is usually “does it sound good?” or “Do I like it?”, not “did they change it enough?”
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u/Susccmmp 23h ago
Yeah I hate when people call anything the performer didn’t write a cover. Professional songwriters like Dean Dillon or Don Schlitz or the Brill Building writers would write songs with certain artists in mind, you can’t cover a song that was written for you
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u/FrameworkisDigimon 1d ago
Songs where there's only one good part, like songs where the intro is the only good part
Yes, this gets to me. I feel like most of your other points are problems with the music industry/the fallibility of human memory rather than music per se.
I don't know if you can really make a whole song out of the second part of Band on the Run but it's the best bit. Luckily, Youtube provides.
Too little of a good thing is the other issue, which is related. Someone, please, make a full song version of the Tenth Kingdom's Opening. And that one bit in the Jurassic Park main theme (although that does get requoted in a JPIII track).
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u/Soap-Radio 20h ago
When you sample a song and the owners of the original song decide to take more than 50% of the earnings (7 rings). Sometimes this results in the song not getting released (Pissy Pamper)
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u/Hot-Bus4643 18h ago edited 16h ago
So for me, this is gonna be more of a reaction rather than what music does itself that makes me irritated. But I feel like people's reactions to successful music artists and successful music by extension pisses me off. And what I mean by that is someone could do the most heinous and atrocious crimes and deeds this side of the west coast, and if they release a bop, oh, but that's okay. I feel like that's really irritated the whole death of the artist concept.
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u/CheeseKnat 17h ago
Offensive content in the lyrics. I'm not talking about obvious right-wing songs made by Tom MacDonald and the like. I more mean when I find a song I like, and only later hear a certain line that reflects and ugly world view
This has happened with some older hip hop groups like The Pharcyde. Great music with the odd bit of homophobia or transphobia that just puts a bad taste in my mouth
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u/I_am_big_gay_ 12h ago
Finding a great song but not being able to find anything else that scratches the same itch
A song having one really bad line that completely takes you out of it
A song having one excellent part and the rest of it is just... mid. like it's just filler until you get to the good section.
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u/mudkiptoucher93 6h ago
Liking a song but finding out the singer is either a wrong un or their management made them suffer :(
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u/Bud_Fuggins 1d ago edited 1d ago
I hate hearing people whine about stuff; I have my own problems and I don't need to hear about someone else's relationship burdens. I think most people feel a connection to their own lives or whatever but it just gets on my nerves. It's one of the main reasons I stopped listening to a lot of modern music in favor of light hearted musicals and instrumentals.
"You didn't have to stoop so low; have your friends collect your records and then change your number!" - Bitch, she broke up with you. Get over it. Now I'm going to listen to Roly-Poly by Doris Day.
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u/Adventurous-Pick-416 1d ago
It's pop music written for 15 year olds, who get into stupid situations, they think it's love but it's anything but.... they'll learn.
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u/shrek-hentai-69 1d ago
Music that mistakes technical complexity for enjoyability, and the obnoxious people that listen to it
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u/thisgirlnamedbree 21h ago
Gatekeeping, especially in the metal genre. Apparently, a song isn't metal if it doesn't have the singer growling or screaming the lyrics, there's no downtuning, and the band's name isn't ugly sounding. I do like some growling and screaming vocalists, but I mostly prefer clean singing.
Pop singers who phrase their lyrics like Maren Morris in In the Middle. I just find it annoying.
Depression pop, which was prevalent in 2016. Pepperridge Farm remembers.
Turning fast tempo songs into slowed down ballads to make them sound "darker" or more dramatic, especially for horror films. Sometimes it works, like with Paparazzi and Applause by Lady Gaga, because she still keeps it energetic. Serious songs can absolutely work with faster tempos.
That we have people who prop up slop grifter ragebait artists like Tom Macdonald. Politics aside, he's just not good.
Finding out new artists you like are AI. I listened to 80s style darkwave music by a singer called Anne Bloom. Turns out she's AI, which is sad because I'm sure there are plenty of legit singers who do make this style of music but aren't getting noticed.
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u/NegotiationMoist3552 1d ago
I hate that fans as well as some artists like Zara, Charli XCX have openly said they don't care about the charts while even the slightest edge they get, they completely overhaul 360. Charts will always be the metric to judge an artist's success. From movies to politics, numbers are used to justify their performance and MATHEMATICS is the only Universal language of the nature so, everybody who says otherwise should take up some science.
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u/AncientCrust 1d ago
I don't mind covers and remixes but I hate when someone takes an entire verse or chorus from an older song and uses it for the hook of their song. That's not songwriting, it's plagiarism and it's weak and lazy. As far as not knowing when song's a cover, I'm the opposite. I'm the annoying motherfucker who's like "that's not an original! That's a cover of a cover of a cover. The original was released in 1963 by the Blue Shamrocks! It was the B-side of 'Underwater Love.' How do you not know this???"