Reply #40: Modern rock is very dissonant to me...

[SacredCow]

Sometimes it seems to exclusively use 5th's in the chord structure, which are neither major nor minor, exclusively, so you don't really get the tension from movement into major and minor chords. After a while, everything starts to really sound the same. What's more, you hear very little difference in guitar sounds- everything is layers of distortion with no clean or jangly (I'm thinking Byrds kind of sounds here) tones.

In all honesty, modern country music sounds more like rock music in its chord progressions. I was at a bar this weekend, and Kellie Pickler's song "Red High Heels" came on. Her voice is ultra-twangy, so it is clearly a country song. But the chord progression is your basic 3-chord bonehead rock song from the 70's or 80's. The Bangles could have easily recorded this song, and it would have been a pop/rock song.