The Loudness Wars, as described by yours truly about four years ago:
The quest for airplay usually results in something that sounds like everything else on the playlist, just so it will fit in better. And these days, everything else on the playlist is loud, louder, loudest: it is now understood that you cannot exceed 0 dB in the digital domain without horrendous distortion, so everything is cranked up as high as possible, with a hard limiter shoved in right below the distortion point. Dynamic range is conspicuous by its absence. And once we’ve compressed the life out of it, we compress it some more to save disk space.
Gagdad Bob Godwin sees something similar in the actual attitudes behind the music:
If you read the wiki article about the loudness war, you can see that something analogous has happened in mass culture vis-a-vis our tediously transgressive pop stars. Loud and crass as it was, whatever tawdry thing Madonna was doing in 1985 no longer shocks the sensibilities (which it probably never did, since it was old and decayed before it even came out of her piehole), which is why Miley Cyrus has to be that much louder and cruder.
You might say that she clipped Madonna of all *subtlety* and compressed the monotonous sexual message to soul-shattering amplitude. Just as louder CDs result in the image of the digital brickwall … the range of human reality of a Miley Cyrus is extraordinarily narrow but shrill and in your face. The only way she can continue her courageous artistic development is to embrace straight-up pornography.
What Madonna was doing in 1985 was pretty standard discofied synthpop; she didn’t start catching serious flak until the largely misunderstood “Like a Virgin,” which, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, didn’t actually suggest that first-timers ought to proceed to boink their brains out. But Madonna was anxious to crank it up, whatever “it” may have been, and Cyrus manifestly shares this anxiety.
The anti-Miley, of course, is Rebecca Black.
Source:
http://ift.tt/1oFawei