what's the "cool adult music" of today?

But actually Scandinavia rules adult coolness with:

Royksopp
Bjork
Sigur Ros
Lisa Ekhdal

"mom and dad USA" have never heard of travis, MAYBE saw the coldplay video once when they were inching up the dial towards ESPN or Bravo, white stripes no idea but it doesn't feel right.

i think the question is grate; 'what happened to cool adult [x]' where x is any part of popular culture i think could actually hold, too?

here are my choices:
The Donnas
Groove Armada

(that makes it look like her name is "Old Annie Lennox" or something)

Yeah, exactly, like "Repo Man," "Desperately Seeking Susan," "Blue Velvet"... movies I associate with, again, my folks.

Where's the "1999" of today, maaaaan?

Perhaps it will be "Elephant," or some as-yet-unrealized Bjork record.(Portishead and Massive Attack are dead-on, btw.)

(insert your own comment about suddenly feeling old in this space)

I don't know, though -- I was a little tiny tyke in the mid - late '80s and I think I would've freaked out had my parents not listened to the '60s Motown and '50s doo-wop they listened to. They were the ones responsible for getting me into Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, and Stevie Wonder, among others, and without that sort of base, as well as the '60s British Invasion music I also heard on the oldies radio (esp. The Beatles, The Stones, and The Kinks -- oh GOD how I loved The Kinks!), I wouldn't have made any wise music choices. I think little kids should be exposed to that sort of thing, you know, the music of the '50s and '60s. It'll get them a good basis on what to judge "pop" (as in popular) music on.

"Liquid Sky" is another one in that "group." The "sorta yuppie but also cool and sophistocated and edge-of-'New Wave'" paradigm. I associate it with people from Germany drinking wine and stuff. I associate with the metro D.C. area. This is all obv. hopelessly bound to my specific childhood experience.

I guess my point is that I have this idealized childhood memory of this '80s cultural space at the intersection of yuppie and New Wave, where groovy people in their early 30s (but not necessarily "hipsters," whathad those were then) had cool stuff to listen to and watch - something that seems largely gone now.

I guess the equivalent today would be the latest U2 and R.E.M. albums (if they still made albums people wanted to hear).

I get so appalled by the little I hear of today's music that I stopped trying to dig through the haystack years ago. This suddenly became more of a problem because I'm not just insta-judging people for having "bad" music taste but I'm also starting to paint groups of people with same brush. Not that music taste has any significance to whether I become friends with anyone, but it's depressing because music is so damn important in my life and I'm attributing today's crap to all of today's youth even when they aren't around.

I almost need validation that there is some good stuff out there that is popular with young adults in order to rekindle hope for today's generation and stop bitching about it. I wouldn't be throwing shade if the new music, that I inevitably hear somewhere, hadn't become more and more depressing for me. Can yall help me rekindle the flame?

i don't really get the premise of this thread. when i was a kid the coolest adults i knew listened to jazz, avant garde type stuff, lots of international music, experimental shit, etc and afaict that continues to be the case. i like a lot of the bands listed itt but none of them strike me as particularly "cool adult music"

I remember when Coldplay was good enough to go on winamp playlist at a college party

I like The Paramores. My stepson tells me I'm cool every time I ask him.

xxp

I took this thread to be about AOR for "cool people" (aka college young adults) but I could be mistaken

I get so appalled by the little I hear of today's music...

/r/lewronggeneration

There is so much good music out there being made. But critically acclaimed baby-boomer MOR is a heritage genre now, this happens to most genres, nothing new to see here. If you still want to listen to Brothers In Arms and Graceland then fair enough, the CDs are still available in shops, probably on vinyl too now.

I actually wanted help finding new music but I 90% wasn't expecting any when I resurrected the thread

No, I do get that, and I appreciate it's an honest request, but how do you go about recommending music for someone based on what you have said? If anything will do then there is a thread where people list music they are enjoying in 2017. If not, then what?

I mean you are correct. I dunno if it's my bad luck randomly trying to discover stuff or what, so in a desperate moment I clicked *submit post* anyways

So you're looking for good music in the mainstream in 2017?

in the *Cool* mainstream

there is no mainstream

nothing is cool anymore either

it's never the music, it's you. next.

haha otm

Maybe it's not intentional but from this year: Tennis, HAIM, Fleet Foxes, Jens Lekman, Slowdive, Ryan Adams and Thundercat sound like dad music... don't know about cool tho.

And you likely wont hear them on the radio.

are you looking for the stuff the kids like that _you'll_ like, flopsy, or are you looking for music the kids like that isn't awful? because when i think of music kids like it's stuff like danny brown, frank ocean, and that stuff doesn't mean shit to me but i'm not "appalled" by it.

I mean, yeah, there's lots of good stuff out there that kids listen to these days. And a lot of crap - same as it's ever been, really. You've just gotta dig a bit and stay far away from whatever radio stations are playing because they play so much crap.

i don't really get the premise of this thread. when i was a kid the coolest adults i knew listened to jazz, avant garde type stuff, lots of international music, experimental shit, etc and afaict that continues to be the case. i like a lot of the bands listed itt but none of them strike me as particularly "cool adult music"

Oh shit, now I'm an old guy

i don't really get the premise of this thread. when i was a kid the coolest adults i knew listened to jazz, avant garde type stuff, lots of international music, experimental shit, etc and afaict that continues to be the case. i like a lot of the bands listed itt but none of them strike me as particularly "cool adult music"

The artists in the OP were 'cool' in the sense of popular as well as 'cool' in the sense of acclaimed, respected, and fashionable, but with adults in the 80s. As a kid, most of them were familiar to me via radio, MuchMusic, and the newspaper, but I did not listen to them, nor did any kids I knew, nor my parents or any of their friends. However, a cool English teacher would have been into this stuff, or a family friend who was studying poli sci. People who were listening to Fred Frith improv records were music obsessives who were only cool in the eyes of other music obsessives.

(Not that I knew any as a kid in the 80s)

conversation

FlopsyDuck, maybe if you list what artists/albums/genres you're in the mood for you'd get lots of great recommendations. I don't know anything about "mainstream cool" releases myself, but personally speaking, I've been almost overwhelmed with the amount of great releases within the past few years; I'm sure I'm not alone on that front.

a good place to find cool adult music is always the soft jazz/quiet storm/grown folks radio stations

when i was a kid the coolest adults i knew listened to jazz, avant garde type stuff, lots of international music, experimental shit, etc and afaict that continues to be the case.

lol i didn't meet anybody irl who listened to any of this till college

I bought myself Kind of Blue as an 18th birthday present.

ban FlopsyDuck

i think the answer to the thread question is Lana Del Rey

The National

the answer here is Arcade Fire. know multiple sets of adults aged 50 or 60+ with their last few albums.
them and Mumford & Sons. these bands make parents feel cool as fuck.

the "cool adult" i knew when i was a kid was my uncle. he knew all the jazz, and he also listened to shortwave and knew all the world music. one christmas he gave me a tape with elmo hope on one side and don pullen on the other. one of these days i might still get into elmo hope. took me thirty years to find again that don pullen record. i was probably the only person who started listening to mingus on the grounds that don pullen used to play piano for him.

When I see this thread title I think of indie pop and singer/songwriter stuff that gets covered on NPR--Waxahatchee type stuff. Maybe some alt-r&b too.

Minneapolis has a whole station built around this premise, listen to this for an hour and you'll get the idea

http://www.thecurrent.org

http://www.billboard.com/charts/triple-a

Mac DeMarco

http://www.billboard.com/charts/triple-a

This is pretty much what I think of as the contemporary equivalent, yeah.