Yes it’s a music-centric week here on The Barbaric Gentleman. I’ve alluded to it before, and now we’re doing a whole piece on it—wuss music!

Which is to say, music made by wimps, music written with particularly wimpy musicality, and consumed predominantly by the less-than-virile.

Now, just to clarify, when I write all that I am NOT referring to mere Top 40 crap. Top 40 crap is certainly terrible but I would not classify all of it as “wuss music”. No, by “wuss music” I am explicitly referring to music that has all the “oomph” of a wet fart; a singer that sounds like he (And it’s usually a he) is slowly dying of leukemia. Instrumentation that is equally as threadbare. All in all, wuss music is the musical equivalent of a flaccid penis.

This is what makes it different from good music that just happens to put men in a position of weakness—many good songs have been written about heartbreak and sadness, but they didn’t sound like somebody waking up and eating a jar of ranch dressing for breakfast.

Still don’t understand? Here’s a few examples:

To go into more academic detail and turn this into another music lesson: As far as I can tell (since there’s no genre explicitly referred to as “wuss”), wuss music is characterized by a “perishing voice” (in which the singer sounds like he’s either wasting away from consumption or is just incredibly bored), and slow and mild instrumentation.

The “perishing voice”has been around since the 1960s at least, but it became most popular around the 1990s and has largely remained popular ever since.

While the perishing voice is usually (And rightfully) associated with the worst sort of whiny white boy rock (“rock” in the loosest definition, of course), the mere existence of Drake’s career will show that the wuss gem has infected rap music as well.

(I used to have a link to an IceJJFish song as an example of “wuss rap”, but seeing as I have recently learned that Mr. Fish’s musical career is probably an elaborate joke—to the point of having its genesis on a sketch comedy show—I have removed it)

So seeing as we have defined wuss music to the extent that it can possibly be defined (any genre can presumably be wussified), the question now is: why?

Why did mainstream music become so utterly flaccid, and who’s buying this?

It has been discussed elsewhere that the modern music industry has only become MORE homogenous with the rise of the internet: billions of data points floating around at once has shown record companies exactly (to the individual note) what sort of music the lowest common denominator wants, and have rehauled all mainstream music around it—to the point that a computer program was able to predict which songs in a year would be the big hits with 96% accuracy. So that would explain why it’s becoming so prevalent—but why did this become popular in the first place?

I personally do not believe that it was some sort of top-down dictate to pussify music in order to pussify men. Rather, I think this is a good old application of Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to deliberate malice what can be attributed to stupidity and lethargy:

The music industry periodically has cycles of more versus less production—and there is always an element of pretentious twats demanding “3 chords and truth, maaaaaaan!” These people will also likely believe that skillful singing is “Fascist” or whatever.

At the same time, the phenomenon of weaker, scrawnier boys getting into the arts in order to get girls is occurring (As it likely always has to some extent). And while some of those fey young men will become great musicians (Prince, David Bowie, Tom Petty, etc.), many of them will never get beyond plodding flaccidity in their music because, hey, your average thot will be just as impressed by that as with actually good music, so why bother?

Similarly to works of fiction, the biggest buyers of music are women, so the industry caters to them. And if they’re going after throaty-male-whispering garbage, the industry will give them more of that, and keep promoting the clowns who sing it.

And mainstream culture continues to dwindle in both quality and sales, and most people with any sense of music appreciation keep looking to various independent scenes. So if you want the mainstream music to be better…I don’t know, convince young women to have some sense of what good music is. But seeing as that’s incredibly unlikely, vote with your wallet and support your local unsigned, non-crappy band or singer.