Rap and rock are both too well-trodden to produce anything new and decent, no matter how they're combined or who collaborates with who.

Turning on a commercial rock or hip hop station is as boring to me as turning on a classical station, but at least with a classical station the arrangements are dynamic, not the Aural Exciter over-compressed monotone brickwall productions that are so shiny they dull your ears easy.

The range of most rock records is tiny; seems to average between -8 and -16 dBfs. I wish artists would wise up and start releasing 'loudness mixes' and 'natural mixes' where not everything is boosted to stupid levels. I think a lot of modern artists might not sound so good if we could hear mixes of their music at -24dBfs and below where the peak limiter doesn't hit 0db every second.

The problem is not so much the recording techniques as the absolute lack of inspiration and talent.

The pop music pablum that we are being fed nowadays could be just as easily (and for the most part -- probably is) generated by computer algorithms rather than human artistry.

This applies to rock, country and just about any other category/genre of popular music.

The talent is out there, you just have to look for it. I've noticed that all music goes through phases, hot phases, cold phases, check cashing phases. We're just in the check cashing phase right now. The problem is with people who don't stick with it, don't recognize what it was they liked about the music and flee to something reactionary out of spite and irritation. Or you have people who are so eager to find "THE NEXT BIG THING!" that anything in their catalogue over 2 months is considered "dated and worthless" (unless of course the music is popular then it's a hipster collectors item). The OP reminds me of those poor misguided souls who embraced experimental jazz but never really listened to jazz anything before 1970. All those people who thought Miles was hot shit, even when it was clear all that pot and heroin turned his brain to mush.