Trends and movements can be synonyms, but in the music world the two couldn't sound any more different from each other. Divya Gunasekaran explains how, like highschool, following the trends mindlessly just results in really embarrassing pictures.
One thing that never fails to get on my nerves is trends -- the particularly heinous variety where everyone jumps on the bandwagon and the market gets saturated with the same uninspired product until overdose is imminent and vomiting must be induced. And even worse, no category of artistic expression is safe; fashion, movies and music have all been tainted.
Take Crocs or Uggs. Why don't people realizing that these abominations are ugly and stop wearing them?
In horror films, it seems like every single child has inexplicable connections to the supernatural world. Children are creepy. We get it.
And then we come to music, where trends can be just as superficial and ill-founded as in other mediums; the symbiotic relationship between awful music and fashion choices does not help matters (see: Hammer, M.C.). Once they've met their expiration date, these trends have you asking, what the hell were you thinking? By then, though, everyone is following the next fad like lemmings, not realizing the error of their ways until they're falling off a cliff.
With music and many other fields, there are trends and there are movements. Through movements, music evolves and advances. Psychedelic, metal, punk and alternative, to name a few, all brought in new styles of musical expression, building off one another and splintering into a million subgenres. Movements bring about new ideas, whether it's a simply twist to an established form or a violent reaction against the norm.
Trends, on the other hand, have no inspiration outside of the confines of what already exists. One artist gets a hit song, and twenty other artists spring up, copying the same formula to try to achieve the same success, and you can't ignore the ever-important contribution of the media (which I guess technically includes me... kind of... at least a little?). The hot songs are the ones that are in constant rotation on the radio and the ones with music videos that get nonstop play on television.
Let's take a closer look at a few trends. When I say take a closer look, you, of course, understand that I mean ridicule (oh, how you know me so well).
One infamous trend in the '80s was the metal hair bands. To be honest, I don't recall much about the music, per se; all I know about that trend is the hair -- big teased messes of hair -- which certainly says something about musical integrity of those artists. Or lack thereof.
More recently, there has been a surge of young pop-rock bands like Cartel, Envy on the Coast, Plain White T's, Amber Pacific and Quietdrive. These bands have essentially the same overly sweet melodic vocals atop light, catchy ditties, and I'm reasonably certain even the bands themselves wouldn't be able to distinguish their music from one another.
The recent trend that has generated the most backlash is "screamo," which seems to stem from post-hardcore genres and is characterized by screamed verses and melodic choruses. Many bands express disdain for this genre, even though some of them have been grouped into this category. The formulaic aspect of this style and the extent to which it has been overused has resulted in its mass derision. Some bands, however, utilize the combination of power screaming and melodic singing so well, avoiding the predictable form and creating something worthwhile, that they avoid the disparaging label, which has, according to most people, become just another word for "suckiness" (which, as Microsoft Word informs me, is not even a real word).
There might be a silver lining to all of this. One could argue that trends encourage reactions against themselves that result in new music. If you don't like the direction in which music is being taken, respond to it, work against it and overcome it. While some bands will make such a conscious effort to disassociate themselves from a trend, many bands simply ignore them, allowing trends to gain momentum until they inevitably die out and are replaced by an equally insipid one. Without any self-awareness or musical discourse, the music world doesn't gain much.
In certain other regards, trends are useful. They capture pop culture and, 20 years later, provide material for laughter, mockery and VH1's "I Love the [Insert Decade Here]." Yet, as big a fan as I am of "I Love the [Insert Decade Here]," hearing what is essentially the same song by twenty different artists one after another on the radio or reading an article about the next rising rock star that could apply to any one of 50 bands still annoys me. I guess I just have to take solace in the knowledge that one day, I'll look back and laugh at it all.
Divya is a staff writer for The Mirror. In her free time she arranges her songs on iTunes in chronological order, using dates the lead singer was born.
