Before coming to ACU, I only listened to what is now considered “mainstream” music.
You know, the Katy Perry tune about cherry lips, the catchy Justin Bieber ballad about apologizing for your faults and Shawn Mendes’s medical emergency about getting stitches. However, many people now consider mainstream music tacky, old, uninspiring and overplayed; as if songs about being stressed out or chasing waterfalls isn’t uninteresting or tacky at all.
You may be unsure of what is considered mainstream? Here’s the break down: Mainstream music is simply an umbrella where all popular songs reside. That’s it. If you like a song that is played on the radio, then you like mainstream. Sorry to break it you granola people.
And let’s be honest, everyone listens to mainstream music. Whether we like it or not, we all have a favorite Taylor Swift or One Direction song that really makes us want to dance and feel like a twelve-year-old again. Just because you listen to Jon Bellion, Local Natives, Walk Off The Earth and The 1975 does not make you an entrepreneur in music discoveries.
Think back to One Direction in 2011, when it only had 500,000 fans across the United Kingdom. Girls in the U.K and the United States felt empowered by the idea of knowing a band when it was “alternative” or “original.” Fast forward five years and look where the band is now: selling out stadiums to millions of fans across the world and finally becoming the band they always dreamed of. Today, they are considered mainstream; just another band with hyped-up lights and sound systems. Why? What happened to it’s “loyal fans?”
Every artist wants to be known and heard on the radio and we, as spoiled millennials, don’t want them to. We want to keep them in our little shell where only we know who they really are, so we can be the ultimate, original fans.
“They just became too popular,” “I used to like their old songs,” “It just became too ‘mainstream,'” and the complaints go on and on.
Believe it or not, all music will become mainstream, so let’s stop hating on it and just accept it.
