My parents gave me their record collection. I don't remember this at all as a kid but I wrote DooDoo on the front of the the album with a pen. I kind of laugh everytime I take this record out for a spin.

41 yo Massachusetts man. His score for the film "The Proposition" is one of my all time favorites.

Where's that confounded bridge

36. Have been listening since my late 20s. My wife discovered him because of me and she’s no doubt a much bigger fan than I am at this point.

We’ve seen him live a few times. The best time being when he performed in Cambridge with just a piano. Me and wife got invited to sit on stage right next to him while he performed all night.

Definitely one of the best moments of my life.

Since I don't see it addressed in the top comments, I'll explain the survivorship bias. In survivorship bias you associate good qualities to the things that have survived the longest and assign those qualities to that class of things as a whole. A great example is construction, only the old buildings that were well built and well maintained survived. All the bad construction doesnt.

Same applies for music. The hits from previous eras of music have been filtered and separated from the chaff. If you bought a bunch of random albums from the 70s, most people probably wouldnt like most of the music. My favorite example of this is Elton John. The man is a wonderful composer and performer across multiple decades. But he makes great singles, but not great albums. Everyone has a copy of Queens Greatest hits, but few people have their entire discography. Some bigger mainstream artist did produce great albums, but they still would have iffy albums now and then, and their popularity is partly because the music was good and evolutionary.

The bigger problem you face isn't the quality of music, but being forced to listen to it, which is annoying in most cases. My friends and I were in a diner getting breakfast recently and I realized the country song that was playing was just not a good song. It would be like 8 or 9 on a track listing of a decent artist, but since the Playlist was playing hits from the 70s to today there was nothing good ear catching to the song. The next few songs were different hits and it was self evident why they were good. But this one country song was so much filler noise it annoyed me the rest of the day.

Anyone blasting their music in a shared public space is an asshole. But that has nothing to do with the music.

And Kenny’s! As cheesy as he is in the internet realm, he could sing and they compliment each other well on that tune

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That may be mainly the Bee Gee's virtue though... but Dolly's vocals on it are great.

I love him and I love this so much.

But the voice is measured mainly by the tones in which a person speaks, right?

What I found confusing is that countertenor is said to be the male equivalent of alto/contralto, but apparently this isn't accurate since countertenors have a range of E3 to E5 (and they use falsetto, otherwise their voices are tenor/baritone) and contraltos have a range of F3 to F5 and contralto is more masculine (or at least deeper) sounding than the countertenor voice.

However, there are contralto singers which aren't that deep, like Eula Beal.

Also, I hear that the stereotypical female singer is soprano. However, there is a significant number of mezzos and I just discovered that children's voices are mezzo (A3-A5) and personally my own voice didn't change in a perceivable level since childhood. I sing soprano (last week the choir conductor asked me to correct it a bit since it was sounding a bit deep in the beginning) so I am suspecting I am actually a mezzo. However, there are times in which I cannot tell a mezzo from a soprano, a mezzo's voice doesn't necessarily sound youthful and sopranos can sound youthful (such as Anita Auglend from Sins of Thy Beloved).

Another detail: this choir only has, in theory, four voice types: soprano, alto, tenor and bass, so I suspect that some might be in the middle and perhaps the basses are actually baritone, since basses are rare.

Another thing that is confusing me is that, when I watch videos of voice types for fun, this video and this video apparently have singers of multiple ranges singing the same note. How can that be? 🤔

I would appreciate if you helped me to see it more clearly.

Same age. I’ve dabbled in his discography a bit. Mercy Seat is a fuckin great song. I’m a massive Tom Waits fan, and his stuff has some parallels.

Most people have a smartphone and Bluetooth headphones have become somewhat socially tolerable if you're not talking on them.

Do yourself a favor and start your own outfit. Give your best effort to yourself. Nobody else will.

Rap has been shoved down people's throats for so long, it's all anyone knows anymore. What if people in the 70's or 80's could have jumped 40 years into the future to hear our music? They'd come back irreversibly infected with the kind of cancerous shame anyone with a shred of self-respect feels hearing even one note of Cotton-Eyed Joe in a bar.

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We painted all our kittens white

I need to hear this story and spare no detail

Me

That's because you have big music publishing and labeling companies who need to promise more to their investors. They are a business first and have fiduciary responsibilities to the people invested in them. They have to make projections, and a company doesn't get invested in if they don't keep growing. Like any company, they adhere to the most secure methods to ensure continuous growth, so they base their growth & the amount of investment money they've attained on what music has worked before. And that's when they've reached the point where the music they make has become less about, "What emotions do I feel right now that I think can connect with different people?", and more about, "What music is going to appeal to the most people that an algorithm can share with as many listeners as possible?" And having algorithms that can do that is a big game changer in the present world of streaming digital music. The music is safe & easy, so it's low risk to the investors. And that's why today's pop music is incredibly shallow & stale, and the level of creativity is as dry as dirt. Reduce the risks to guarantee success. It's all about money and business growth. They do not care about how creative music can be. Not one iota.

Most people who aren't children who listen to this music are either A: Simply not that into music and will just listen to whatever's popular to pass the time (Turning on the radio during their commutes, playing "accessible" music playlists at parties, etc.), B: Care less about musical ingenuity and more about whether or not the music is trendy and if they can dance or get laid to it, or C: Just really like it and don't feel the need to delve deeper into the music genres, even though they definitely should do that because it would help broaden their horizons and augment their appreciation for the genres they listen to instead of just listening to whatever the record labels and radio broadcasters shove down their throats.

The pop music industry has trained the masses to expect less from how far creative minds can stretch. In the world of art, music can sustain our minds and emotions like nothing else, so when big industries are steadfast in selling the most basic & least inspiring music they can because it's easy to make and will guarantee financial success, they're straight-up deceiving you. They know they don't have to try hard or push creative boundaries because the music they've been selling for so long has worked, especially in recent decades since growing populations have developed short attention spans (Great job Tiktok) and could care less about deeper, innovative, and instrumentally & lyrically challenging music.

To escape this, I listen to modern prog rock & prog metal, where the level of writing and musicianship is god-tier, and takes actual attentiveness to absorb & enjoy, and I genuinely love it.

Their best imo. Love em all but this is my personal fave/their best.

Old man, like everything from Fela Kuti to Eno to Chat Pile. My interest in Nick peaked with The Birthday Party. I still have my copy of his early band The Boys Next Door. I reckon its fairly rare by now.

That’s really dumb.

“I’ve only listened once or twice but they’re both solid.”

Well, I remember being at a public park for a jog with families and young children playing... with some teenagers blasting rap that was literally rapping about what the rapper's girlfriend's p***y smelled like.

Or the time I was waiting in line at a local food place with my young niece that had gangster rap playing on their speakers with a rapper rapping about beating women who got out of line

Respectfully disagree--I think the PG is kind of a bloated mess. It's got some good tracks (like HOTH) and would have made a pretty good single album. As far as I am concerned the HOTH album is the last really good record they put out.