The jokes or the horror stories?
I think there are times when musical innovation hits the doldrums. I remember a time just before punk rock emerged when I couldn't stand most popular music. I never got into the Steve Miller or Peter Frampton era of the seventies. It was a breath of fresh air when that phase came to an end. It feels to me like we're in a similar kind of phase at the moment. If it doesn't feel that way to others, then I suspect those people feel comforted by consuming art in a corporate playpen. Different strokes for different folks. Sprite and Skittles can be everybody's best buddies. Take a look at NASCAR. Some people like it all manufactured and administered to them. They were probably anesthetized back when they bought their first Playstation.
^^^Ditto, I use a Alesis SR-16 drum machine as a scratch drum part. Depending on the tune, sometimes I'll program an elaborate drum machine part, and other times just use the "canned" preset parts as a click track or metronome as I'm laying down the other tracks. But I will have a live drummer play a human drum track later. All of us, not just drummers will push or lay back on the rhythm just a hair to suit what's going on in the other parts and sometimes that's what is needed.
Yeah, I'm still using that old beast, too.
Fair enough. You are on this forum, so you are probably a musician, and have a well-developed ear and desire for music that has value beyond having the same BPM, key, & hook as 10 other songs (or being based on sampled hooks from other songs) and that has value beyond short-term commercial viability. I suspect you are not the target demo for contemporary mass marketed musical product. Some folks see music as background noise, or something disposable to listen to in the car. They like whatever Pavlovian musical biscuit is popped in their mouth. If that's all they know, and that music is now essentially free, well then that's the actual product that is mass marketed and promoted to them specifically. What's different is that the homogenized nature, the time frame for success, and the mixes are all hyper-compressed.
We can check back on that suspicion, but my guess is it'll look as silly as all the other selective lionizations of the past against whatever is emblematic of garbage in the present. Popular trope... "jungle music" versus jazz. Right Said Fred versus Kraftwerk. The Archies versus the Beatles. Nirvana versus real punk. Been hearing it awhile. What we remember from any decade/genre is the good stuff, and what people overwhelmingly focus as a matter of complaint in the present is ephemeral and gone tomorrow.
I used to do this, with a Roland R5 'Human' drum machine and it would take weeks to program a song up. Even then it was a bit too rigid. Eventually I bought a Roland TD30 kit (well budget creep and all that..) and now I use the R5 to lay down a 'click track', record my guitar parts and vocals, etc then overdub 'real' drums. I think the results are much better, even though I'm not a pro drummer by any means.
The cream rises to the top, true, but perhaps there is a reason some of the music from the past was cream, and that's kinda what this thread is chasing?
Right, the cream rises (only from the past apparently), we forget the garbage, continue criticizing "today's music" as a whole and don't seem to note the disconnect when the cream of our own time invariably rises in common conceptions.
I'll suggest that people have always criticized "today's music" - sometimes even credibly. I'll also agree that it is not always possible to know, in the moment, what will stand the test of time and what won't. That said, the cream analogy is apt. When you milk a cow the cream is not on top, it is still part of the milk. When someone mechanically milks a cash cow and sells you watered-down powdered milk it can be glaringly obvious if you've tasted cream. I think you (you!) know it when you hear it.
