Opinion of easy listening music

[DPKdebator]

What is your opinion of easy listening music?

[Cactus Jack]

I'll admit to having a fondness for using, say, Coldplay and Billy Joel to give my eardrums a break from being sandpapered with blues and rock.

[Enduro]

Define easy listening music. Is it just softer music of every genre, or do you have a specific style in mind?

[pbrower2a]

Define easy listening music. Is it just softer music of every genre, or do you have a specific style in mind?

the insipid, witless mood music that appeared on many channels of FM radio, typically with call letters "EZ" until about 1990, typically pop-rock or show tunes stripped of its lyrics, movie or TV themes, always recognizable. "Elevator music". At Christmas, carols would appear.  Common arrangements were sting orchestras without violas, the absence of violas giving an etherial effect, with perhaps some gimmicky orchestration. It called itself "beautiful music", but the beauty was shallow. 

It was music for people who didn't want to think -- music intended to anesthetize people's moods. In stores it might be designed to have subliminal messages such as "I don't really want to shoplift today". In a casino it might have the subliminal message "I feel like a winner today".

It was superficially attractive, but empty.

I'll take a string quartet by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorak, Bartok, or Shostakovich any day.      

[dead0man]

It's what my dad listens to.  Boring as all get out.

[vanguard96]

Music for dentists' offices for the most part. And it soon became "Lite Rock - with none of rap or hard stuff" TM - a phenomenon that has been exacerbated by corporate radio like Clear Channel buying up so many stations.

There are individual artists through out the span of time that I may like certain songs by them such as The Carpenters, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, Tom Jones, etc. but generally speaking I am not a fan of these artists on the whole.

I do appreciate some of the more derided AOR / 'yacht rock' more than some other people do ( early Kenny Loggins, Ambrosia, Christopher Cross for instance) but that is out of a general fondness of 70's pop and rock music and its place in particularly American culture as a countercurrent to the new wave, disco, punk, metal, and reggae flourishing of the same time period - all of which aside from '76-'77 chart punk I enjoy immensely, by the way.

Overall though in that smoother sound I generally prefer artists like Boz Scaggs, Steely Dan, or Hall & Oates which touch on that have a little more sophistication and oomph to their production and like certainly not their entire careers but definitely more than just one or two songs on the radio. And they tend to fit a lot better with R&B, disco, and funk and also interestingly art rock and new wave.

The 80's & 90's ballads though were mostly horrid - that was the means to success - I mean aside from the one song did anyone listen to Eric Carmen? Who liked it? Same thing for Mike & the Mechanics. Aaron Neville and Linda Rondstadt artists with a successful past teamed up for soundtrack drivel. Corporate radio.

[Skunk]

Usually garbage.

[Fight for Trump]

Grew up listening to The Carpenters.

[Lechasseur]

Freedom Music

[vanguard96]

Freedom Music

Freedom to change the station or turn it off unless its a no repeat work day and its on the loudspeakers in the plastics factory you work in for a summer job. Then it's forever associated with a mind-numbing, deafening inferno. Gloria Estefan - Come On Everybody Do the Conga playing on the seventh layer of hell