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Religious music was never restricted to the church, and folk music has always existed outside of Irish pubs. Music has often been used as a service to be exchanged for goods or currency, but it is innacurate to suggest that music does not exist outside such a paradigm.
You are right in that "pop" is hard to define. I don't think it is a single particular mode of music, because public choices are always changing. Pop is short for "popular" so it is more of a goal and more of a happenstance.
Music that suddenly becomes top 40 is then "pop." Let's take the Swing revival of the 90s for instance. Many of the bands that were swept up in it had been doing the same thing for years before. However, musical tastes changed to it as a fad all the sudden, and without trying The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and No Doubt had written inadvertent pop songs (ie I'm Just a Girl, and The Impression That I Get.) Not caring if they were pop or not, The Bosstones kept doing what they do, and eventually faded out of the public eye again. No Doubt, and specifically Gwen Stafani, didn't want the party to end, so they changed a little to write more radio friendly songs. The ska vibe would only keep them alive for so long, so eventually Gwen ditched her band and went full pop diva.
Another version of this can be seen in Metallca's career. They were never a "pop" band exactly, but the Black Album still sells a ridiculous amount every year. Critically listen to all of their pre-Black Album releases and that one, and it doesn't take long to see the difference. The riffs and songs became more simple, the lyrics less detailed, the choruses easy to sing along with, etc. They never quite matched that album after, because they tried to bring some of the more complex or heavy elements back in, and the public won't have it. They want Enter Sandman.
Pop, as a genre, changes its sound but never its goal, which is to sell more. With that goal in mind, the songs are simple, vanilla, and conform to whatever modes are popular in music at the time. So while on the surface there may not be a surface correlation between pop of decades past and today, if you pick it apart, and put them in the context of their own time, you can see a few threads that run through them.
I think by quitting after two minutes, you missed the very well put together arguments.
Ric5
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I've not watched the video (I think I might have some time ago), but a lot of comments in this thread seem to be suggesting that all young people have no taste in music and that all modern music has no value.
As a young(ish) person, I'd like to semi-respectfully tell you just how wrong you are. The music industry is completely different to what it was decades ago- the cookie-cutter pop dreck fills up the Top 40 because so much of it exists, but the Top 40 is most definitely not an accurate representation of the state of things. Again, there's a lot of music being made. Most young people (I'm not saying millenials.) find all their music online and have very little interest in the radio, and so people's tastes are very diversified. All this pop appeals to people who just want something catchy to listen to in the car or a club, but there's a ton of other things going on right now that are amazing. I honestly and truly believe that there's music being produced today that's the equal of anything from the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's or 90's (except for Dark Side of the Moon, I guess)- you just need to look in the right places. St Vincent proves there's even good pop.
The reason this winds me up so much is that the more people think that there isn't good music out there, the less people are going to go looking for it. And then there really will be less. I don't see the value in having long conversations about how X or Y is really poopy, it's not productive. We should be picking out and celebrating the wonderful creative talents that we have now, rather than looking backwards all the time. And if you can't see any, well, that's your problem.
As a young(ish) person, I'd like to semi-respectfully tell you just how wrong you are. The music industry is completely different to what it was decades ago- the cookie-cutter pop dreck fills up the Top 40 because so much of it exists, but the Top 40 is most definitely not an accurate representation of the state of things. Again, there's a lot of music being made. Most young people (I'm not saying millenials.) find all their music online and have very little interest in the radio, and so people's tastes are very diversified. All this pop appeals to people who just want something catchy to listen to in the car or a club, but there's a ton of other things going on right now that are amazing. I honestly and truly believe that there's music being produced today that's the equal of anything from the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's or 90's (except for Dark Side of the Moon, I guess)- you just need to look in the right places. St Vincent proves there's even good pop.
The reason this winds me up so much is that the more people think that there isn't good music out there, the less people are going to go looking for it. And then there really will be less. I don't see the value in having long conversations about how X or Y is really poopy, it's not productive. We should be picking out and celebrating the wonderful creative talents that we have now, rather than looking backwards all the time. And if you can't see any, well, that's your problem.
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While I wholeheartedly agree that people who can't find good music being made today aren't looking in the right places, I think the spirit of the OP is in regards to the regurgitated and watered down drivel that the mainstream stations push on the unsuspecting public, and I didn't see where it has anything to do with age... it's been going on since before you got here.
It's not your fault!
While I wholeheartedly agree that people who can't find good music being made today aren't looking in the right places, I think the spirit of the OP is in regards to the regurgitated and watered down drivel that the mainstream stations push on the unsuspecting public, and I didn't see where it has anything to do with age... it's been going on since before you got here.
It's not your fault!
I was more responding to certain comments I read throughout the thread as opposed to the video itself. Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but there's a few people saying 'old music was x' and 'new music is y' and it's too much of a generalisation.
I've got nothing against music created using a computer if it's done well. I've mentioned before on a similar thread that English-spoken radio here in Malaga is where the 70s is always in fashion. Today, they played the UK Christmas chart from 1996 (I know, the worst records come out at Christmas, but most had been charting for several weeks). I thought "This'll be OK. Better albums/acts appeared in 1997, but I was 31 then and there was good music in '96"
Blimey, it was awful - I mean, teeth-grittingly bad. From 20 down to 10 there were two passable songs, Jamiroquai's Cosmic Girl (their single pony had long gone lame by then) and The Beautiful South's Don't Marry Her which had no dynamics or discernible difference between verse and chorus (another band whose sell-by had gone). The decent, innovative songs I knew of weren't in the chart or the shopping mall - so not much has changed.
Two songs in the top 10 I did turn up (one very loud). The Prodigy and Robert Miles (RIP), with their damned electronics.
PS, my 19y.o. son listened to the UK best-selling rundown of 2017 and confirmed it was all ***t. He's got the time and energy to look further afield.
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I did, but you can't blame people for TLDW - pseudo-scientific uber ramble in the most part.
TN does get a bad rap.... But yeah, give me some Buck Owens or Tom T. Hall for the country music.
but im not agree with you if that's possible if we are saying the same.
i do not believe pop music sucks, its people what sucks. SOME music is as crap as people who listen to it, but what i believe its the wrost thing: the fact that we MUST carry all the people in the "correct way"and they have in their mind money is a key for living. That's what they teach people: Money is the key for your life.
We (as musicians but i wont do it) must carry them in the correct way. i dont really care what are they going to do with their life because they want better things and at some point they are going to want my music. but i wont give them it, i'll give my music to people who work and its in the street looking by themselves.
Im not agree with the title of the thread because other SOME of music its still good as pop music and some of it goes deep pop and its still good, for example, St. Vicent the last two albums.
but not going to groopie, it can be analyzed in macro.
wifey grew up very hard and very poor. She never got to see any movies until she was an adult and married. Because of this she is fascinated by movies that appeal to younger audiences. She will ask me to watch a movie with her, then ask what i thought about it. My stock answer is I’d love it if i was fourteen. Music is not much different, you start out on the stuff targeted at kids but as you age your tastes evolve and you begin your journey up the ladder where music is more adult oriented. You don’t get burned out on Tiger Beat, you outgrow it.
OK.
0:25 - On what basis does one call Sgt. Pepper "pop?" It SOLD, of course. It was also a complete outlier and not representative of anything else going on. Is this going to be apples-to-apples? What is the comparator? If it's the greatest album of all time, a masterpiece, then is this video dedicated to asking why other albums are not also the greatest album of all time?
1:05 - "Bob Dylan to Brittany Spears, Kinks to Katy Perry, Led Zeppelin to Lady Gaga."
Bob Dylan - 18 top ten albums: 3 top ten singles (US charts)
Brittany Spears - 9 top ten albums (but that's ALL of them), 11 top ten singles
Kinks - 3 top ten albums: 5 top ten singles
Katy Perry - 4 top ten albums: 14 top ten singles.
Led Zeppelin - 9 top ten albums: 1 top ten single.
Lady Gaga - 5 top ten albums: 13 top ten singles.
While it's maybe a bit of rhetoric rather than analysis, this string of comparisons reveals the problem with the whole concept to the video; as I said in an earlier post, he's making something out of nothing (or out of not very much) by comparing apples and oranges. The singles-oriented pop of Spears, Perry and Gaga is simply NOT a comparator to the album-oriented rock of the Kinks and Zeppelin, or Dylan's folk. Led Zeppelin was not the Lady Gaga of their day.
ca. 3:00 following: timbral diversity. The sleight-of-hand here comes from the attempt to make the claim "scientific" by making it statistical. The thing is that volume will wash out variation. In other words, suppose that in 1965 2000 songs were released, and in 2015 10,000 songs were released. 500 of the 1965 songs achieved high timbral diversity and 1500 had low timbral diversity. Of the 2015 releases, 500 songs achieved high timbral diversity and 9,500 had low timbral diversity. Then one could say that 25% of 1965 music had this quality but only 5% of 2015 music did, and that would be true. And yet it's ALSO true that just as many timbrally diverse songs were issued in 2015 as in 1965. Good music didn't "die;" there just got to be a lot more bad music to sift out to find the good.
And then again... is "A day in the Life" typical of 60s pop?
4:10 - drum machine, keyboard, sampler, computer software, as a list of the limited palette of "instruments" modern pop is made with. The problem here, of course, being that the samplers and software are not "instruments" in the sense that a timpany or saxophone are. They are devices for digitally producing the sounds of timpanis and saxophones and a million other instruments besides.
4:30 all the songs on the radio sound the same. Indeed, but radio does not hold the same position on the market as it did fifty years ago or even twenty years ago.
5:00 the Millenial Whoop - you can find the same pattern in the Police, in piles of 80s pop, and older. Giving it a name doesn't make it new.
6:00 - lyric intelligence. Morrissey? Since when was Morrissey ever "pop?" And again - apples to apples. Is fleischer-kincaid analysis of songs really covering songs that occupy the same space in the musical landscape, or is it just that the diversification and splintering of the musical world means that more lyrically complex pieces no longer count as "pop" and leave the field to the simpler tunes?
9:48 - you would play an album you bought over and over and over again because you spent so much money on so few songs. This is supposed to be a form of consumption that made music better. But back around 5:00 wasn't it a bad thing that we liked familiarity and repetition, and it was making music worse?
10:40 - the loudness war. He mistakes what all this is about. It's not that everyone's trying to make their songs louder. It has to do with settings of music listening. In a concert hall, or sitting alone with a stereo in your bedroom, where everyone is silently attentive to every sound the orchestra makes, big variations in volume are dramatic and powerful. But at a party or over a car radio, there's a lot of competing background noise - people talking, the engine, etc. Big dynamics mean that the pianissimo parts of a song disappear entirely while the fortissimo sections suddenly blare out and disrupt your conversation and make you frown and turn the volume down. So compression evens out the volume and keeps a steady forte to dance or drive to. It does mean losing a powerful musical tool, but in the settings where the music is being heard, big dynamic range just means the song doesn't get heard at all, really. Not exactly a sign of the decline of music.
14:00 - right after he says that 50s-70s record labels would pump money into marketing acts, he then claims that the public would only respond to the work of the really talented artists. But in modern music, record labels pump money into promoting artists, and the public doesn't care if they're any good, because the record labels "brainwash" the public into liking them by... pumping lots of money into marketing them. Since you hear the music over and over again, familiarity makes you think you like it. Totally unlike how you listened to an album over and over again until you learned to "appreciate" it because you had invested so much money in it... "Good" music means you like it the first time you hear it. Huh?
19:00 - "music as an art form is dying." Pleeeease...
Basically, what appears to be a logical and scientific argument is actually built on apples-to-oranges comparisons, circular reasoning and special pleading.
In the '90s, a musician friend of mine discovered a child singer who was performing on the NYC streets (with her mother close by). He had an old music school acquaintance who was by now working at Sony Music, so he set up a meeting. The Sony guy told my friend that he'd like to help, but Celine Dion was going to be huge in six months, and he was busy with a lot of work until then. Absolutely baldfaced and blatant admission of the existence of "The Machine."
Now think about how the Beatles had control, rather than vice versa. The four guys were committed to having different sounds on every song. In one case, this resulted in their engineer Geoff Emerick close-miking the bass drum on "Paperback Writer." This was in direct violation of an EMI rule (which was there to safeguard the equipment); but after the success of "Paperback Writer", the rule was changed to exclude Beatles recording sessions.
In other words, during the Beatles and their immediate aftermath, the inmates ran the asylum, the record biz moguls had no idea how to steer the creative people, and we got great music.
Now think about how the Beatles had control, rather than vice versa. The four guys were committed to having different sounds on every song. In one case, this resulted in their engineer Geoff Emerick close-miking the bass drum on "Paperback Writer." This was in direct violation of an EMI rule (which was there to safeguard the equipment); but after the success of "Paperback Writer", the rule was changed to exclude Beatles recording sessions.
In other words, during the Beatles and their immediate aftermath, the inmates ran the asylum, the record biz moguls had no idea how to steer the creative people, and we got great music.
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