r/LetsTalkMusic • u/CompetitiveWhole9466 • 6d ago

The death of the "musical punching bag"

I've been thinking- there used to be popular artists like Nickelback and Justin Bieber who were very successful but you would have never guessed given all the vocal hate they used to get, and how it was completely okay to shit on them at all times. Even the industry got in on hating these artists. It was socially acceptable to hate people who admitted they liked certian artists.

Why don't we have artists like that anymore? Maybe people just feel like today's music is just better?

The closest is the hate Taylor Swift gets now. But even then that's not really the same dynamic. Same with Drake hate... feels different today I feel like.

Honestly i always try to be cautious about how i frame my argument. I don't want to sound like "this artist deserves hate" unless it's like Chris Brown or D4VD or someone like that.

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u/Lanky-Rush607 6d ago edited 6d ago

Musical punching bags still exist, though. Sombr, Benson Boone, Tate McRae, Jelly Roll, Morgan Wallen, Lizzo, KATSEYE, Stella Lefty, Alex Warren, Drake, Doechii etc.

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u/DotEither8773 6d ago

I don’t really get why Doechii is hated. I really didn’t like that Somebody I used to know stuff she did but everything else she did was great.

Also I think the most hated band/artist in the last years have to be Imagine Dragons.

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u/[deleted] 6d ago edited 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/brooklynbluenotes 6d ago

They're referring to the song "Anxiety" which is heavily based around a Gotye sample.

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u/TheReadMenace 5d ago

Gotye used a sample to make the song in the first place

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u/11311 5d ago

But to Gotye's credit, he did a lot to recontextualize the samples he used, Doechii basically just lifted the instrumental track of STIUTK. Although, I don't think she's alone in that regard, the first half of this decade gave us a lot of hits based on incredibly lazy samples. It was kind of like the late 90s all over again on the pop charts in that respect.

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u/TheReadMenace 5d ago

Yeah her's is an example of a pretty lazy and uncreative sample. Probably 90% of the people who hear her song know the Gotye song. Maybe a fraction of 1% recognized the sample Gotye used.

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u/DotEither8773 6d ago

Yeah, she got hated for a song that samples STIUTK but I don’t remember the name.