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How does very bad music get made?
Topic Started: Jan 6 2014, 12:29 AM (1,662 Views)
Caro

I was going to put this on to Questions Questions, but since it is about music I will put it here. Our radio in the summertime and on holidays has two presenters who are something of musos and comics (serious in their day jobs of producer and film and arts critic) and they play the most ghastly music and joke about it and read out witty emails for four hours.

But I wonder how some of this stuff gets produced for public consumption. They have just played Are You Lonesome Tonight by a Swedish Elvis impersonator whose name I didn't catch. It was quite appalling - off key, tuneless, badly timed. Who pays to have this on disc? Books that are that bad can only be self-published, so how does music get through? There is a popular song on NZ request sessions, which is a jokey thing called Love in a Fowl House - the silly lyrics are one thing, the fact that the singer, a well-known country singer in NZ, can't keep to the beat, drives me to distraction. How come people a lot more interested in music than I am not notice these deficiencies?

I think some do become cult celebrities - did a Chinese singer called Wing become popular in places other than NZ? Absolutely dreadful but people loved her. Her appeal evaded me, and it seemed to me a little patronising to enjoy her.
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rumbaba
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Something truly dreadful can sometimes be more more interesting than a lot of the competent, bland, processed, unremarkable stuff you hear on pop radio. I would rather listen to Alex Chilton murdering 'Waltz across Texas' than anything by Kanya West, Beyonce or whatever is laughingly referred to as 'R & B' these days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4boqCDulgE
Edited by rumbaba, Jan 6 2014, 04:08 PM.
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AmosBurke
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One persons bad music is another persons good.

For really bad music try some Florence Foster Jenkins or Kazooed on Classics. On the other hand some songs are so bad they are good http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo8DhbQw_O4
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Caro

I wasn't talking about bad genre music - I like awful country and western music with ridiculous lyrics and two chords and a strong beat. But they aren't actually sung badly - the ones I am talking about are off-key, flat singing that makes your ears hurt, and beat that suddenly goes wrong (not deliberately).

Here is Wing 'singing'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqBWvmhS-AY (Though mostly she stays in tune, just very shrieky.) That probably is so bad it can be good. But some music doesn't even have the possibility of becoming cultish - it's just plain bad.
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