>As much as I love hip hop and electronica, and as difficult as it is to make excellent music in those genres, it really is very easy to make okay music.
Before finishing reading that sentence, i was ready to get upset, but the ending made it so that I perfectly agree with you.
Modern music production experience allows for a fairly easy way to make ok music, but to make good or great music, it is still just as difficult (if not even moreso, albeit not for financial reasons anymore, unlike how it used to be in the past). Basically, easy to learn at a beginner level, still difficult to master. Which is imo the optimum, because some of the best competitive games ever are set up like this. E.g., learning the rules of chess is easy, mastering chess is an extremely long path.
A bit off-tangent, but we also gotta understand that genres evolve from infancy to maturity as well. In terms of music production and composition, 80s/early 90s hip-hop was indeed fairly basic and primitive. Lyrics, similarly, were also focused mostly around the same cluster of topics related to living a tough life surrounded by crime and police brutality and such. But it was new, original, and covering bases that were not covered before in the same way.
Hence why it started gaining traction and popularity. As genre matured and evolved, music production for it got much much more complex and involved, where the ceiling for "well produced hip-hop" has went up massively. Just compare any track from Kanye West's "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" (2010) to some classic like NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" (1988). Both groundbreaking albums for their time, both still enjoyable, but there is no way to compare them in terms of music production/composition in a serious manner in 2021, as it is just night and day. The sheer complexity of MBDTF is something that set the new bar for the entire industry on its own. Lyrics on MBDTF are also touching topics that early hip-hop would never touch with a 10-foot pole back in the day.
TL;DR: fully agreed, music production became much easier to enter and produce beginner level stuff, but the ceiling went up significantly as well (which is a good thing). What was groundbreaking level production in the late 80s/early 90s will get rotten eggs thrown at you in 2021. Which makes hip-hop music production (as well as most other genres that are evolving) just as difficult of an art to master these days, if not even more difficult, but only because the bar is set much higher. The actual availability, cost of equipment, learning material access, etc. has become insanely easier.
The funny thing reading this post is that you can replace "music" with "software" and your point still holds.
Nowadays it's very easy to create OK software - with modern frameworks, tooling and templates we've enabled an army of "high performing beginners". For web software we can even deploy it with two clicks thanks to modern cloud providers.
However making something that is good or great, as ever, requires a huge amount of knowledge and experience. The kind you only get with years of practise and learning.
Before finishing reading that sentence, i was ready to get upset, but the ending made it so that I perfectly agree with you.
Modern music production experience allows for a fairly easy way to make ok music, but to make good or great music, it is still just as difficult (if not even moreso, albeit not for financial reasons anymore, unlike how it used to be in the past). Basically, easy to learn at a beginner level, still difficult to master. Which is imo the optimum, because some of the best competitive games ever are set up like this. E.g., learning the rules of chess is easy, mastering chess is an extremely long path.
A bit off-tangent, but we also gotta understand that genres evolve from infancy to maturity as well. In terms of music production and composition, 80s/early 90s hip-hop was indeed fairly basic and primitive. Lyrics, similarly, were also focused mostly around the same cluster of topics related to living a tough life surrounded by crime and police brutality and such. But it was new, original, and covering bases that were not covered before in the same way.
Hence why it started gaining traction and popularity. As genre matured and evolved, music production for it got much much more complex and involved, where the ceiling for "well produced hip-hop" has went up massively. Just compare any track from Kanye West's "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" (2010) to some classic like NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" (1988). Both groundbreaking albums for their time, both still enjoyable, but there is no way to compare them in terms of music production/composition in a serious manner in 2021, as it is just night and day. The sheer complexity of MBDTF is something that set the new bar for the entire industry on its own. Lyrics on MBDTF are also touching topics that early hip-hop would never touch with a 10-foot pole back in the day.
TL;DR: fully agreed, music production became much easier to enter and produce beginner level stuff, but the ceiling went up significantly as well (which is a good thing). What was groundbreaking level production in the late 80s/early 90s will get rotten eggs thrown at you in 2021. Which makes hip-hop music production (as well as most other genres that are evolving) just as difficult of an art to master these days, if not even more difficult, but only because the bar is set much higher. The actual availability, cost of equipment, learning material access, etc. has become insanely easier.