Pop music isn't so bad... if it's done like this
I would submit playing an improvised performance over a pop hit melody isn't "pop music" it is jazz
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I would submit playing an improvised performance over a pop hit melody isn't "pop music" it is jazz
It depends on the 21 year old male. Perry's song "Swish Swish" is definitely geared towards the dance club going gay male (and female) market.
I have never understood Cyrus' career so I can't tell you who her market is. As a culture icon I think she has a broad reach.
Bieber is definitely marketed towards younger girls.
That's not pop. By definition, a "pop" release is something that is all over the place and easily taken in by a large audience. An indie release someone produces by themselves may have the ear marks of a pop song, but if it isn't "popular" it won't earn that name.
Pop is still run by large record labels. Everything else is more fragmented for the reason you stated here. Everyone can now produce their own vision relatively easily. The downside is that not everyone with a voice has anything worthwhile to say.
Pop music isn't so bad... if it's done like this
I definitely have different musical tastes than you do. That was horrifying.
Agreed. There is more music available now, you just have to work harder to find what you like. Pop has always been simple, vanilla, and consumable. It has never been a good yard stick for musical quality. I would also say that Sergent Pepper maybe isn't a pop album, at least not the way Help was.
But the production aesthetics have leaked over. In a lot of cases "Pop Producers" are using DAWs to build tracks from samples in home studios then overdubbing the vocals and processing the crap out of them later.
On that I like to say, "Aretha Franklin sounds like Aretha Franklin. Beyoncé does not sound like Beyoncé." Meaning if you put a mic in front of Aretha and gave her a count off she would sound like the album pretty much. If you did the same with Beyoncé you would start with the mic, compress the crap out of it, throw delay and reverb on it, put it through a light distortion, autotune it, copy and paste double track it, and edit out the breaths. Then it will sound like Beyoncé.
The fact is that I will wager that 9 of the top 10 pop songs right now could be recorded and produced in a closet.
But part of the point I was trying to make with the whole speech about storage medium and cost is that it also makes you choosier about the music you are listening to. If you are a dinosaur like me who still listens to cds you only have so much space to carry a Walkman and cds so you are going to have to think more about what you want to take with you. As opposed to an mp3 player with 400 songs on it you will be less choosy. If you are downloading at $1 or less a song you will be still less choosy.
C/S,
Rev J
How about a Grammy nominee who only uses studios for chairs, and records everything on his iPhone? Meet Steve Lacy.
The Guy Who Produced Kendrick Lamar's Best New Track Did It All on His iPhone
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Honestly it's not even really work to find what you like or seek out new music in your favorite genre anymore. It's harder work to complain about not hearing good new music than it is to actually go get it IMO.
I agree with your comments on pop.
I disagree about pop always being "simple and vanilla". Pop doesn't necessarily denote "lowest common denominator". At least it didn't used to.
Facelift had Man in a Box.
Yes, it happened without Nirvana. It had been going on long before Nirvana. But it didn't overtake hairband rock in the general public's consciousness until Nirvana happened. I don't know who else would have been more appropriate for the alternative scene breaking out into middle america than Nirvana. Nirvana killed that once and for all, and made alternative mainstream.
I first heard Nirvana on a local station in a small town in a rural state. I was already an AIC fan. But I knew things had REALLY changed once I heard Nirvana, in a rural town pop/rock station. I remember not liking it at all at first. Sounded like all the high school garage bands I was in or around. But that was part of the allure. They were unpolished, awkward, and vulnerable. And yet it was still a well-produced album. And I loved that about it. I knew that it meant I would finally get to hear stuff that was real and varied being promoted in the mainstream again. I also seriously remember thinking how great it was that I wouldn't have to wear leather pants to rock out.
I agree. I don't have trouble, but there are those that think that the radio is still a viable medium for music. They don't want to read music sites or search Spotify. It is laziness with a hint of bitterness.
Doesn't it?
Pop means "Popular", right? To make something as popular as possible it has to appeal to the biggest possible audience. Everyone can agree on the flavor of vanilla, not because it is good, but because it is simple and visually basic. People may legit like vanilla, but if you had to buy one flavor for 100 people, you would buy vanilla.
Music is the same way.
Keep it simple, basic, and don't expect much from the listener. Easy money. If the Beatles tried releasing Revolver or Sgt. Pepper right out of the gate if would have never worked. They had to do bubble gum stuff like Please Please Me and With the Beatles to get there. It is very common for pop artists to start simple and work their way up to more complex, artistically gratifying music after they have established their brand. Or, they do the reverse, where they start off where they wanted to be, and then "sell out" to gain market share. Metallica and Genesis did pretty good by doing this.
I guess it comes down to whether you are a pessimist about people or an optimist. I think the bell curve of our population has the largest group of people being at a moderate to low level of intelligence, patience, and interest in depth. They don't think very hard about things, and that includes music. Give them something catchy to remember, wave your car keys in front of them, and they will follow you anywhere. Smarter people can nit pick over finer details of music, production, lyrics, composition, etc but 80% of the world will never notice on a conscious level. What we do is black magic to them. It has an impact on their listening but they don't know why. That's why, as the OP video explained, half a dozen middle aged white dudes have figured out how to write more hits than anyone else. They have a working formula and aren't hung up on high minded ideas like "art."
Lots of cognitive bias and self-serving bias in this thread. Imagine that; a forum of musicians elevating the value of music. Pop is popular, meaning widely liked. So, keep in mind what George Carlin said...
FYI:
Cognitive bias - Wikipedia
Self-serving bias - Wikipedia
FYI:
Cognitive bias - Wikipedia
Self-serving bias - Wikipedia
Well, in an "academic" context, blues, r&b, country, reggae and jazz would all be considered "popular music" (as opposed to "art" or "folk" music), so it depends on what exactly you're talking about when you use the term "popular music". "Pop" is a bit of a nebulous term. There's "pop" and then there's "bubblegum pop". There's "pop" vs "rock" as a means of labeling what otherwise might be considered rock - if it didn't contain synthesizers or drum machines,or more lush arrangements. I think part of the problem with a thread like this is that not everyone is subscribing to the same notion of what constitutes "pop". To me, Steely Dan's "Peg" is pop. Some people might disagree. To me The Art Of Noise's "Beatbox" and "Moments In Love" are pop. Again, some people would no doubt disagree. How much of what makes something pop is the intention and how much is the actual piece of music? How much is in the visual image and the marketing? Take my friend Grace (from my avatar). To me she represents the perfect pop culture icon, but she was never going to be someone who had the popular appeal of a Madonna or Michael Jackson. Her most successful records (outside of "Slave To The Rhythm") were made with a reggae band and an added synthesizer player. Not a bad formula for appealing to an 80s British audience (who were receptive enough where reggae was concerned) but hardly the most obvious way to appeal to the North American market (where reggae had never really broken through). So, is someone not "pop" if they are not being packaged in order to appeal to the widest audience possible? That would eliminate a lot of artists commonly categorized as "pop"...
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I was in Maine when it dropped. I was also a teenager and bought into the hype that it changed everything that has become the popular narrative. After media oversaturation I was over it and of the opinion it really wasn't that good. About a year after Cobain killed himself I got more critical and started to question the phenomena.
The first thing I realized is he wasn't a genius. Sorry to say it but it's true. The next thing I realized is how much of it was media manipulation. Hearing the soundbite from David Fricke from Rolling Stone saying, "Kurt Cobain was as close as this generation is going to get to a John Lennon," and realizing that was a load of crap. All of the hype about not seeing it coming when the last song he recorded was called "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die" and was hospitalized after the Hendrix Cocktail (wine and sleeping pills) in Italy 2 weeks before he ate the bullet. Then there was this little bit that I kept hearing after his death, "You know what Cobain said, 'It's better to burn out than to fade away,' ". Funny he must've told Neil Young that when he was 8 years old.
I started looking at his song structures and lyrics and saw a formula. I also noticed that the riff from "Teen Spirit" sounded like "Louie, Louie," and later learning that Killing Joke had been in the early stages of a lawsuit because the riff from "Come As You Are" is just "Living in the 80s" slowed down, that Cobain attested to it, didn't want to release the song because of it, and their management claimed that he didn't even know who they were. Killing Joke responded with a signed Christmas Card from Cobain.
Having played Nirvana songs in cover bands thinking "Oh crap! Another mumble in E minor followed by scream in G Major thing. More muttering about how depressed he is followed by a gun reference. And people are surprised that he shot himself."
The numerous parties in Youth Hostels where acoustic guitars came out and someone who had only been playing for 3 months would play Nirvana and sound better than the original. Then there is the irony of schmucks using "Polly" a song about raping a woman to get pussy. Then for the hype machine to laud praise on him and the scene for breaking away from heavy metals misogyny is laughable.
Then there is the press play response that I get from Nirvana fans when I actually question and critique the popular narrative. After the time I have spent reading about the music business and analyzing the popular narrative of the scene compared to business if I point things out and inconsistencies I get a rehash of the Kurt Loder, David Fricke music journalist popular narrative version of what happened. Told I need to listen to them more and analyze them deeper.
And I still say that if Cobain was a 40 year old with dreadlocks and a graying beard (which is a self description ) playing the exact same music at the exact same time you wouldn't have given a rats ass. The music business is still more about selling an image than music just like before Nirvana. The Music business is still about cashing in on trends just like it was before Nirvana. The terms of record contracts still suck just like that did before Nirvana. The industry is still looking for small independent regional scenes to cash in on just like they did before Nirvana.
You can stomp your feet and continue to scream that Nirvana changed everything but that isn't true. The only major change is that artists have more ability to run their careers, control distribution, and do everything that a record label does. And Nirvana had NOTHING to do with that. If you truly want to understand that side read up on Prince, and Frank Zappas lawsuits with Warner Brothers and Todd Rundgrens ongoing work about the internet and using technology for music distribution.
C/S,
Rev J
You're not really hitting a nerve here; I would feel the same way if you were making such grossly under-researched claims about any band. I'm not the biggest Nirvana fan, but I've done my homework and you haven't. You've totally missed out 1) where Nirvana came from and 2) how uneasily the band, and Cobain specifically, handled their fame and success. Plus, for somebody that has "analyzed (sic) music literature" your analysis is astonishingly shallow, one-sided and emotively written. It is basically opinion-as-fact, written in an antagonistic and basic manner. You've also made the somewhat lazy assumption that anybody who disagrees with your bilge is somehow nothing more than a bitter fanboy.
I can make spurious claims as well! The Beatles ripped off The Byrds at every opportunity. They both used 12 string guitars after all...
Whereas Black Betty was written by Shakespeare himself.
Most of your writing in this thread makes me cringe. If you're trying to win people over to your side of the argument then you aren't doing it in a particularly persuasive manner. Your fixation with a single Nirvana song is just baffling. If you were trying to be clever and use the song as an allegory for all of Nirvana's recorded output then I would maybe understand your case against Nirvana, though it would demonstrate that you've never listened to anything from Bleach, Incesticide etc.
Grace Jones is an outlier in many ways, trend setter in others. Her persona was well known in an early 80s context, but not much beyond that. She adopted a style and presence that was shocking yet timely. One might argue that the modern pop-tarts that rely on shock value and being train wrecks before becoming "serious" artists (Gaga, Cyrus, Spears, Perry, etc) owe everything to Jones. However her music is more or less a dead end in pop culture. I remember her videos, because of the visuals, but can't remember a single chorus or song title.
That says a lot about "pop" music. The package is often as important as the music, if not more so.
If we want to tear "pop" apart into its bits, I think the follow elements are fairly ubiquitous:
Short: most pop songs are 2:30 to 3:30 minutes long. Old LPs from the 60s had very short songs on them.
Simple construction: Because of the time limits, keeping things to a verse-chorus-verse-chorus format is the way to go. If you want an intro our outro, base it on the riff used for the verse or chorus. If you can eek out 4 minutes, an emotional crescendo just after a second chorus is good.
Keep it 4\4 & major: Somewhere online there is a video of a guy with a keyboard playing 20 pop hits using the same time and chord progression. People like to know where to tap their feet or snap their fingers. Familiarity in song structure goes a long way. Minor keys\chords are OK for love songs and power ballads. Anything below 90bpm can be boring, anything above 120bpm may be too aggressive.
Everyone row in the same direction: In 60s and 70s it was true that there was a lot more instrumentation happening, but often these were working together in an orchestrated way. Solos, counter point, or complex syncopation detract from the basic melody and harmony of the song.
Keep the arrangement light: Most instruments in pop are kept fairly light in the arrangement. Thick layers of distorted guitars are for rock, not pop.
The vocalist is king\queen: Pop is really all about the vocals. The band is there to be a backdrop and that is it.
Don't forget about appearances: Pop is as much about presence than anything. Because it is tied to pop culture, and humans are largely visual animals, we want a look to go with our music. Elvis' pompadour, the Beatles black suits, Michael Jackson's red zipper jacket, Lady Gaga's meat dress, Katy Perry's foam spraying bra, etc.
Remember the kids: Pop is largely for young audiences. In the past that meant keeping the lyrics and subject material of hit songs pretty light weight. Changes in cultural memes have changed and our youth are now subject to some of the worst humanity has to offer thanks to the internet. Tongue in cheek sexual innuendo has given away to blatant near-p0rn level lyrics, but even some things are still off the table (see every Cannibal Corpse song ever.)
Not every major radio hit will adhere to these, but one nine out of ten probably will.
The irony is that the video that started this thread uses its familiarity bias towards Sgt Pepper as its opening premise, then proceeds to knock familiarity bias later. He says we've been "brain washed" into liking modern pop because we hear it so much, completely ignoring the decades of brain washing pop audiences have been subjected to by hearing Beatles songs over and over.
Insane.
(By the way, Roger McGuinn said that he bought his electric 12-string Rickenbacker immediately after seeing George Harrison use one in "A Hard Day's Night." So... you're actually close!
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