Pick a song from today that will be relevant 50 years from today

I win.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxOviBI-8fc

Music genius wrote:

Death Grips, JPEGMAFIA, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, xxxtentacion, SixNine, Ski Mask the Slump God, Ed Sheeran, Kendrick Lamar, Joanna Newsom, and Tyler the Creator may be relevant in 50 years.

Kino list!! Joanna Newsom is awesome. Did you know that she played the mommy in the music video for kids by MGMT?! I'd add Deafheaven, Lil Ugly Mane, and Mount Eerie

I think pretty much all of today's music will be remembered as a time capsule without meaning beyond that. I find it amazing that "the 60s" is still held up as cool after all these years (and that the "evil 50s" are still denigrated). The counterculture of 68 continues its implosion and will be replaced. The music of today will be looked back on how we view calliope music today. Pretty meaningless.

Probably none.

Every generation has its medium. The mid 60s to mid 70s produced the greatest pop music and rock music we'll see. The mid 90s to mid 2010s produced some of the best television we'll ever see . A hundred years from now, people will still enjoy Seinfeld, The Wire, and Game of Thrones

polterzeitgeist wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIKqgE4BwAY

DAMN. wrote:

Kendrick Lamar very well could become the greatest rapper of all time. DAMN. will be one of the top albums of our time(unless he makes a better album that overshadows it)

To pimp a butterfly and maad city are definitely both better albums than DAMN

I've been paying attention to music since around 1973.

My guess is that the wedding DJ of 2068 will still be playing Hey Ya! from Outkast. It's all about the hook.

Anything from Lil Wayne, really.

zzzz wrote:

I can't name a single song from 2018 off hand. I listen to the radio, but mostly NPR. If I turn to a pop station for a while, I don't pay attention to the artists, or know if they are new or old, unless I recognize a familiar song. There might be something out there that I would think is awesome, but I haven't noticed. I find music new to me mainly on youtube, but it's not necessarily current.

I'm the same way with movies. I have little idea what's currently playing. When I go to the library to pick out some DVDs (streaming is expensive where I live, and our main library has huge room with a gigantic selection), I'm as likely to pick something from 1942 as I am to pick out something from 2017. I go with what sounds interesting.

No one cares. Why did you post all this crap if you don't care about the subject?

Dromano19 wrote:

DAMN. wrote:

Kendrick Lamar very well could become the greatest rapper of all time. DAMN. will be one of the top albums of our time(unless he makes a better album that overshadows it)

To pimp a butterfly and maad city are definitely both better albums than DAMN

maad city, yes; Pimp a Butterfly, no.

If you google top songs of the 1960s and 1970s, the lists will give you a good idea of what will be relevant 50 years from now. It primarily has to do with popularity at the time as well as name recognition. The Beach Boys, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, Queen, Led Zeppelin, ABBA, Fleetwood Mac... these are groups that had long successful careers. Songs like "Good Vibrations", "Hey Jude" "Dancing Queen", "Stairway to Heaven", "Landslide", "Bohemian Rhapsody", while not played as much on the radio, are still very much part of the public consciousness. A better example would be Michael Jackson's music, which I believe will continue to be relevant 50 years from now. And again, Michael has had a long fruitful career and benefits from name recognition that other artists of his time cannot compete with.

In my original post, I only focused on music that has come out in the past 1-2 years. If we extrapolate the argument presented to music of the past decade, I would major artists like Taylor Swift, Adele, and Katy Perry. These artists have not been as massive as they had been in the early part of the decade. But songs like "Shake it Off", "Blank Space", "Someone Like You", "Rolling in the Deep", "Firework", "Roar" and "Last Friday Night" are songs that have the best chance of being relevant 50 years from now. I don't include Lady Gaga on this list because her output with the most staying power, particularly "Bad Romance", came out before 2010. Also to note, Taylor Swift's most enduring work will be her album "Fearless" (think "Love Story" and "You Belong With Me"), and though popular now I don't believe that "Reputation" will have the same impact as "Fearless" or "1989". But comparing to the enduring artists of the 1960s and 1970s, judgment should be reserved to see where the careers of these artists will go. In any case, Taylor and Katy have been relevant for 10 years, while Adele was extremely popular from 2011-2016, but her lack of recent output is slightly concerning for inclusion on this list. I may also include Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking out Loud”, which for sure will be a wedding staple for the next 20 years, although I don’t know much about his career/output.

I think it is too soon to determine whether artists who have gained popularity in the middle of this decade will continue to be remembered later in the century. Notice also that the songs from the 60s/70s artists that I have cited are not from the beginning of the respective artist’s careers. These songs that endure for decades are often not ones that these artists burst onto the scene with. So for the person who said Shawn Mendes and Alessia Cara, I would be slightly more cautious.

One point that I did not address, and that “lol state of boomers” did mention, is that the means by which music is shared will likely evolve. Think about how the cultural obsession with irony and memes has given songs like “Africa” and “All-Star” renewed life. It’s hard to predict what people may find ironic in the future, but I expect there to be some popular songs of the past decade which are found to be entirely frivolous, giving them cultural capital in the future.

To the people who are throwing out artists that are pitchfork-popular, either you are flaunting your music taste or you are completely delusional. Death Grips will be relevant in circles probably for the next 20 years, but I suspect that as time goes on, less popular artists will be filtered out of public consciousness, to the point where the only ones we remember are the extremely popular ones. More importantly however, to the question posed by OP, what individual song do you expect to endure? People like JPEGMAFIA, XXX (rest in peace), Joanna Newsom, Deafheaven, Lil Ugly Mane, and Mount Eerie do not stand a chance because they hardly have any popular appeal. That’s why someone like Kanye, someone with both critical and mass appeal, has a great chance of being an enduring artist of our time. For example, look at the top rated music for the 60s and 70s. These charts are heavily populated with popular artists of the time. It is possible that times are changing and these more niche artists with critical appeal could continue to be remembered on a similar scale as their more popular contemporaries, but I highly doubt it.

And that brings me to my final point, a defense of Drake as the premier artist of the present (not the decade, but from 2016-2018), whose music will be remembered in 50 years. He has both mass appeal and critical appeal, he has been popular since the beginning of this decade, and he is currently riding a massive surge in popularity/recognition. To the people who don’t like Drake’s music (even comparing him to Nickelback, a comparison with certain merits beyond their origins from Canada), I think it is irresponsible to let that cloud an objective judgment of what will be remembered in a half-century’s time. And again to all of the (I’m assuming) older folks unilaterally dismissing hip-hop, you’ve clearly missed the boat and history will leave you behind; it is quite obviously the music of the present. However, I do have sympathy and don’t blame you for sticking with music that is familiar to you. To the people saying that the music of the 1960s will be more relevant in 50 years than the music of today, I might agree. Like I said before, I think Michael Jackson’s music will continued to be played at the end of this century and will overshadow a lot of music from the late 1900s.

-- an excerpt from American Psycho 2: The LRC Message Boards.

the hamilton soundtrack

Definition of relevant

1 a : having significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand

b : affording evidence tending to prove or disprove the matter at issue or under discussion relevant testimony

c : having social relevance

http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com/legacy_blog/1965-ONA-2016-sm.jpeg

When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, the most popular music from 50 years back was big band hits like In the Mood and Minnie the Moocher. In the 70s and 80s, music from 50 years back was completely foreign to the current popular music and was from a completely different genre.

Today, music from 50 years back is Led Zepplin's Good Times, Bad Times, James Brown's Cold Sweat and Mrs. Robinson by Simon and Garfunkel. While these songs are nothing like Cardi B or Kendrick Lamar, they really are not that far off from a lot of pop music being played today. So, while pop music is spinning off into infinite variations today, it is really not as far away from pop music from 50 years ago especially compared to what making the same jump in time was like in the 70s and 80s. So, aside from some nostalgia, I do not see pop music "holding up" the way it used to because the idiom is pretty much played out.

But I think this one has a shot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aLYvZ5sX28