I've been a little disappointed with some of the modern songs... Either the melody is too simplistic or the words are simple. Like right now, I'm a little annoyed with Ne-Yo's "Let Me Love You" where it sounds like he is just practicing scales that they'd teach in singing lessons. Or what really got me was Carley Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe"... "I threw a wish in a well", hmmm I don't know about her, but I throw a
penny into a well to get a wish
out of it (I guess her way keeps the well populated with wishes). And I still can't understand how you can miss anything before it actually came into your life. If you never knew about something / someone, you couldn't miss it. You might wish you had something like it, but that is a different emotion...
Probably the biggest factor with modern music is the editing that they do with the songs. Sampling of other songs, having the singer overlap lines, etc. all takes more editing than just putting words to music. Because of the skill involved, I sometimes like mashups more than the actual songs the DJ mashes together. The really good ones can weave together several different songs to create a completely new song that actually tells a story or expresses some emotion. DJ Earworm is one of my favorites... I first heard his mashups when he started doing his year-end mashup of the top 25 songs of the year. Here is last year's (2012):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q0dsG8fTHY (notice how often "tonight" or "night" gets used by the various songs)
Some other of my favorites of his are Mama (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8o23Ko_69s) which is a hip-hop song dedicated to mothers, No More Gas (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCsMnF34wns) which is a fun one about how we have insatiable appetites even while we are using up the resources that provide for those desires, and another year-end mashup (2009 - Blame It On the Pop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNzrwh2Z2hQ) that even during troubling times, has us just pick ourselves back up and look for a more optimistic future.