You have your big groups and your indie bands, your classical composers and your jazz legends. You have the pop stars who have been around for decades and the Latin hits that consistently rank high on the charts. And then there are the music tropes: the common and overused songwriters’ clichés that seem to make their way into every single genre, from rap to rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop.
If you’re into songwriting and music production, you know how hard it is to come up with fresh ideas. Every chord, drum fill, melody, and even lyrics get recycled over and over again, and it’s getting harder to find something that hasn’t already been done or doesn’t sound suspiciously familiar. You’ve surely been there, listening to a new tune and thinking, “Hey, doesn’t this sound like that song?”
We all have music formulas that we secretly like, while others have gotten so boring and annoying that we’re ready to rip our headphones off and throw them across the room. So which tropes in music are trite to the point that people explicitly said they couldn’t stand them anymore? That’s what we’ll find out today, thanks to a Reddit thread that asked people to name the music clichés they’re sick of hearing. From the classic “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back” love story to excessive auto-tune, we’re calling out all the overused music elements that make people want to hit the skip button!
#2
"Love songs normalizing cheating... Like the singer saying they can't help it, dont tell my xyz, lines like "i know it's wrong but it feels good". Please stop.
Oh and kids choir."
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36points
#4
"When singers start randomly start listing location names in songs. Most of the time it has nothing to do with the rest of the song.
The one that bugs me the most was when Jennifer Lopez said it in one of her songs. She once sang:
"Brazil, Morocco, London to Ibiza Straight to LA, New York, Vegas to Africa."
What kind of dumb arse flight plan is that? You start off in Brazil and then go to Morocco. From Morocco, you go to London. That's not too bad so far. But then you go back down to Ibiza. Then you go all the way back to LA. Then, rather than to Vegas first, you fly all the way to the other side of the USA and then head back Vegas. And then, fly all the way back to Africa. Which, by the way, you have already been to because you went to Morocco. Makes no sense."
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36points
#5
"Girls like Mariah Carey who think that because they can warble all over the range, think that they should and that it improves a song. It is like the singing equivalent of a car skidding on ice, all over all the lanes and you are just wincing waiting for it to end."
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35points
#8
"Sirens. Screw anyone who puts a siren in their song, that is not an instrument."
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29points
#9
Adventurous_Yak_9234 wrote:
"Pop remixes of old songs."
"Pop remixes of old songs."
asking--questions replied:
"But what if it's a painfully slow, stripped down version with flat, melodramatic vocals? That's always great art, right?"
"But what if it's a painfully slow, stripped down version with flat, melodramatic vocals? That's always great art, right?"
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28points
#10
"Saying who you are at the beginning of the song or something along the lines of "You already know who it is!" No... we really don't..."
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28points
#12
"This is specifically about Contemporary Christian, but these 3 minute songs are getting stretched out to 10 minutes. The song runs its course, but then goes back into the bridge and spends 5 minutes repeating it, lowering the instrumental until it's acapella, and then just when you think it's faded out, the drums start going again and it swells back into the chorus, and then the cycle REPEATS???? It's ridiculous. I might understand it if it only happened when the songs were played live, and everyone was really feeling it, but this happens in the recordings, which is simply unacceptable. There's a few songs that I really like but always skip after the first 3 minutes because there's only repetition from there."
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26points
#13
"In the early 2000’s I don’t know why everyone found it necessary to fit the word "tonight" in to the song as much as possible."
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24points
#14
"I hate handclaps. I also hate excessive use of chanting, ESPECIALLY when they get a group of children to chant lyrics. Seriously, wtffffff."
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22points
#15
"Beautiful intros that resolve into a totally predictable and boring maintro."
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21points
#16
"Everyone has to use some extreme inflection but it just kills it. That's why I hate remixes and modernized covers of old songs."
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21points
#17
"That raspy whisper indie female voice... idk how else to describe it. It’s typically paired with just an acoustic guitar."
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21points
#18
"Constant songs about relationships. How about some new topics? That’s one of the reasons that I like “Lights” by Ellie Goulding. It’s a pop song about her childhood fear of the dark."
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20points
#20
"The annoying hi-hat beat found in many modern rap songs. Old school rap had a variety of beats, but I swear I hear the same one in half of rap songs today."
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19points