Why does pre 20's american music sound so much better and

>>74958301
>why is ragtime lively
whole fucking point of the genre

>>74958301
>better
Bullshit
>lively
It's no different now as it was then. There's a ton of slow, maudlin pop songs from the turn of the century and earlier. Parlor music was one of the first popular style in America, and it's mostly sappy, sentimental ballads.

Your perception of "old" music is mainly a result of what you've been exposed to and what we as a culture hold onto. A lot of early popular music has faded into obscurity, especially the boring and embarrassing stuff.

>>74959159
Yeah the 50s wasn't all Little Richard and Chuck Berry, there was a lot of saccharine crap like Pat Boone ruling the charts back then.

>>74959179
Definitely, and it makes sense why we do that. Boone and that kind of traditional pop is just a continuation of a genre that has been around more than a century, while Berry, Richard, etc. were something new and influential.

>>74958301

Music wasn't a multi-billion dollar industry in those days

>>74959159
No there was something else. The music was better. Also, the amount recorded those days was minuscule compared to today's output. Only the best survived
This >>74959460 is probably the reason

>>74959625
That's some classic nostalgic bullshit right there. Recording was necessarily limited by availability and technological constraints, but if you look at sheet music, the most widespread form in which music was consumed then, there is ton of vapid, forgettable shit. But I'm not going waste too much effort fighting your rose-tinted delusion that exists in some other reality.

>>74959340
Not really, beat-driven dance music could be traced back to music brought over by African slaves, as early as 1690 there are accounts of colonists horrified at how young people would dance to the rhythmic music of the slaves.

>>74959830
The whole world culture has gone to shit after the war. The best music of that era is miles ahead of the best music of today.

>>74959962
The rhythmic aspect of early rock is only one facet of it, and I wasn't claiming that was the driving novelty behind its popularity. Berry in particular developed a style of songwriting that was unique for its time and style, which captured people's attention and spawned a slew of imitators.

>>74960021
Sure thing buddy

>>74958301
Music recorded before the 50s has shit quality

Big Joe Turner claimed that he was playing rock and roll in 1939. However, Chuck Berry's true innovation was his songwriting explicitly focused on teenager life, which was a novel idea at a time when American teenagers were prosperous enough to have a distinct culture of their own for the first time. The average teen's weekly allowance in the late 50s was $10.45, or roughly the weekly income of a working class family in the 1930s.

>>74960115
So basically the audience got wider and composers targeted younger and impressible demographics? The songs must have gotten better then!