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buldog5151bass
Kibble, milkbones, and P Basses. And redheads.
Justin Beiber
Boyz 2 Men
New Kids on the Block
Menudo
REO, Styx, Journey, and all the bands in the 70s that were considered bland, faceless corporate sellouts (yes, they were).
Monkees
Partridge Family
Nancy Sinatra
Herman's Hermits
The Color pumping Elvis into those terrible movies with poor songs
All were hit-makers in their day.
Yeah, you're right. Bad but popular pop music is ABSOLUTELY a new thing . . .
Boyz 2 Men
New Kids on the Block
Menudo
REO, Styx, Journey, and all the bands in the 70s that were considered bland, faceless corporate sellouts (yes, they were).
Monkees
Partridge Family
Nancy Sinatra
Herman's Hermits
The Color pumping Elvis into those terrible movies with poor songs
All were hit-makers in their day.
Yeah, you're right. Bad but popular pop music is ABSOLUTELY a new thing . . .
The formula has been around at least since the 80's it just got more % since then. I worked at a radio station, we got albums early, before the were 'popular' and I played them at parties usually to blank stares or "take this off please" comments, fast forward a few months after massive radio playing and the same people were saying 'hey this record is great!". Bands like U2 or the Clash or The Bangles or thr Go-Go's, Prince or whoever it didn't seem to matter.
My current gig plays everything from Elvis, Motown, and Led Zeppelin to Bruno, Timberlake, and Walk the Moon. While I certainly have my preferences, I will play whatever puts people on the dance floor.
That said, I've seen a growing split in what people know and respond to. Older crowds don't generally know the newer tunes. Younger crowds are tired of hearing Classic Rock. Motown remains safe.
Playing cover material has gotten more challenging in terms of playing what people want to hear. I quite like some of the newer material; but, it is discouraging when people don't know it and sit down.
That said, I've seen a growing split in what people know and respond to. Older crowds don't generally know the newer tunes. Younger crowds are tired of hearing Classic Rock. Motown remains safe.
Playing cover material has gotten more challenging in terms of playing what people want to hear. I quite like some of the newer material; but, it is discouraging when people don't know it and sit down.
Kinda funny watching this thread while my kids are in the basement blasting poopy pop music on my PA...
Autotune and extensive ProToolsing are the plague of modern pop (and other musical styles as well, I'm thinking about some modern "metal"). The human element is barely needed anymore, just as in most other aspects of life. Machines are slowly taking control over everything, including music.
Autotune and extensive ProToolsing are the plague of modern pop (and other musical styles as well, I'm thinking about some modern "metal"). The human element is barely needed anymore, just as in most other aspects of life. Machines are slowly taking control over everything, including music.
My theory is the people with any brains went into technology and not the arts. There are competent technicians in all fields of the arts but a striking shortage of creative genius. You can argue all day long about best shredders, best bass players most lightning fast this and that but music starts with great material and there are really no great songwriters. This is also afflicting classical music. There are tons of great players but Bartok and Stravinsky are dead and their replacements, Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley etc. don't cut it as geniuses. John Adams is probably the best of the lot in that one can listen to a lot of his works more than once. He is 70 though already. My .02 cents
You would think these people had never heard of the Brill Building.
I think pop music recently hit the bottom of the barrel with the "song" Despacito... To me, that song represents everything that's wrong with today's pop. Autotune by the boatload, programmed beats, poopy lyrics, poopy video, etc. etc. etc. And that poopy pseudo-flamenco guitar makes me want to puke out last night's dinner and beer...
Have I told you I reeeeaaaally hate that song?
Have I told you I reeeeaaaally hate that song?
Yes this sucks, of course, but at least you can tell it was played by humans.
Funny mini-Moog solo!
I almost like it...
Tripe? Yes. But that's gourmet tripe compared to today's pop fare.
Fact is that I've noticed a lot of kids today are very interested in 70's and 80's rock and that's somewhat encouraging. I'm not hearing as much Nickleback of late.
My only hope is that now that it's being said on youtube that more millennials will take it seriously enough to investigate older music to see what they've been missing.
There's still very good and original new music being made. Problem is that it's not on the radio.
My take is this.
I dont hear melody anymore. Ive recently started looking hard at pop stuff from the 70's.. and I mean everything from the cheese to the clever stuff.. and what I hear is melody and interesting chord turnarounds.
EW&F, Bee Gees , Neil Sedaka, Eagles , Manilow, Jacksons, Philly Soul, Frankie Valli , etc etc and a ton of other stuff that we all love and hate in equal measure...the common thread, melody and clean musical arrangements/production.... to me much of todays stuff sounds flat and monotone in comparison.
I dont hear melody anymore. Ive recently started looking hard at pop stuff from the 70's.. and I mean everything from the cheese to the clever stuff.. and what I hear is melody and interesting chord turnarounds.
EW&F, Bee Gees , Neil Sedaka, Eagles , Manilow, Jacksons, Philly Soul, Frankie Valli , etc etc and a ton of other stuff that we all love and hate in equal measure...the common thread, melody and clean musical arrangements/production.... to me much of todays stuff sounds flat and monotone in comparison.
Actually, in some instances, the mehtod has partly changed to using multiple teams of collaborators. There are production teams like Stargate Music Productions that use separate teams for lyrics, hooks, recording, production as collaborative tools. There's a good article in the New Yorker called The Song Machine about Stargate.
"We always start out with a musical idea. Great effort goes into creating a solid melodic core. We both play the keyboards and program, but in general Mikkel plays the instruments and controls Pro Tools, while Tor has the executive overlook as well as lyrical input. However, we both are hands on and have no rules or limitations. When we have some killer beats and musical starting points, we hook up with one of our favorite topline writers, who gets cracking on the lyrics and melody. We make sure there's a lot of melody in the track, so it can inspire the writer. Together with the topline writer we work, often tweek and simplify the song, and never quit before we feel we've got a killer hook." -- Stargate
Obviously, this method has been used before, but now, you can have this kind of collaboration digitally, across continents, which changes things a bit.
So, like everything else, the answer is money.
Duh!
Duh!
It's kind of a trivial sidebar, I guess, but I wouldn't entirely dismiss The Monkees as nothing but a '60s version of New Kids on the Block or whatever. Mike Nesmith was a good songwriter, which fact he demonstrated more once they got rid of Don Kirshner and started doing what they wanted to do. People tend to forget things like their being one of the first acts to introduce the Moog modular synthesizer to a wide audience on "Daily Nightly" and the psychedelic/conceptual stuff they started experimenting with at that point. They didn't manage to do it as well as The Beatles, of course, but some of what resulted from their attempts to mature into something more than a manufactured boy band wasn't bad. One of their more trippy latter-day pieces, "Porpoise Song," was used in Vanilla Sky when Tom Cruise starts having his (seeming) psychotic break.
Fuddy-duddy nostalgia or not, I do remember being able to turn on MTV in the early to mid '80s and finding a greater variety of genuinely good stuff getting mainstream attention. You'd flip on the TV and see everything from Peter Gabriel to Sting to Eurythmics to The Fixx to Thomas Dolby to Prince to Kate Bush to...well, anyway. People who were very idiosyncratically themselves with their own singular vision and voice who hadn't had all their unique edges sanded off to make them fit neatly into a currently favored formula, as tends to happen a lot now. An awful lot of interchangeable pop divas singing over electronic instrumentation that's still sizzling with buzzy supersaw chords (how is that tired device even still a thing after all these years?). It's stuff that was going on in more underground club music a long time ago before finding its way into mainstream pop. Which is kind of what Madonna did on Ray of Light two decades ago (bringing underground trends into mainstream visibility), but at least that resulted in a genuinely good, landmark electronic pop album thanks to William Orbit.
Fuddy-duddy nostalgia or not, I do remember being able to turn on MTV in the early to mid '80s and finding a greater variety of genuinely good stuff getting mainstream attention. You'd flip on the TV and see everything from Peter Gabriel to Sting to Eurythmics to The Fixx to Thomas Dolby to Prince to Kate Bush to...well, anyway. People who were very idiosyncratically themselves with their own singular vision and voice who hadn't had all their unique edges sanded off to make them fit neatly into a currently favored formula, as tends to happen a lot now. An awful lot of interchangeable pop divas singing over electronic instrumentation that's still sizzling with buzzy supersaw chords (how is that tired device even still a thing after all these years?). It's stuff that was going on in more underground club music a long time ago before finding its way into mainstream pop. Which is kind of what Madonna did on Ray of Light two decades ago (bringing underground trends into mainstream visibility), but at least that resulted in a genuinely good, landmark electronic pop album thanks to William Orbit.
No time to read the whole tread but the Monkees stuff is diamond plated cheese of the highest quality. Short concise commercial song writing is hugely skillful and its all over those tunes.
Trouble is as with everything now with the iphone generation (Im a pro 9-5 media photographer), everybody thinks they can do it.......they cant and that's especially true of crisp 3 minute song writing.
Trouble is as with everything now with the iphone generation (Im a pro 9-5 media photographer), everybody thinks they can do it.......they cant and that's especially true of crisp 3 minute song writing.
"What is pop music?"
"Correct. We also would have accepted Punk, Blue's, Rock 'n' Roll, Reggae, Folk, Country and EDM."
"I'll take musical styles for $800, Alex."
"And the answer is... A Daily Double"
Really, you think so, in POP music? I.e. "top 40," what the "kids" supposedly listen to? Except for the few Bruno Marses out there, in that demographic specifically, which is what I think this thread is about, I see the opposite. I see the manufactured "pop stars" of today "singing," (ahem...) dancing, being whatever their image is supposed to be, sometimes even on a stage, but rarely does one ever even see a band -- real musicians playing real instruments, and visible to the extent that kids may say, "Hey, that looks cool, I wanna play bass..."
Extending the "good time to be" a solid bass player idea, that implies that there are lots of local, live band opportunities in that genre (again, the kids' "pop" music), since how many of us are going to be the ones on the next Sabrina Carpenter record? There would need to be lots of local clubs, festivals, etc. wherever the vast majority of us find gigs, for that to be true.
I think it's pretty much only in Country, Folk/Americana, some Jazz, Blues, maybe some Latin, Jam bands, genres like that where there are realisitc gigging opportunities that value a solid, groovin' bass player. I honestly don't see 14 year olds making it a point to go out to see/hear live bands. Your locale may differ...
Look, I only know this from an European perspective and Scandinavian perspective. You know what? It wasn't to be played on national broadcast radio, because they had ships on international waters that sent "piracy radio" akin to todays/or a couple of years backs illegal piracy sites, like pirate bay, Napster and Kazaa a decade or two back. You have simply no idea how "new" pop music where perceived over here back then. And who had preferential right of interpretation of what should be on top lists and what to air on radio. It was just after mid 60s they loosened it up, and this wasn't at all in communist countries. In middle Europe they had Radio Luxembourg sending out to European countries. Mind you, not anyone was commie country. The new music wasn't around when it was brand new. It wasn't anything like that in the US. And when this "new" pop music hit the waves, you bet your *ss that even the Beatles were perceived as shock-rock, like punk did some 10-15 years later.
I know of none of my friends who's dads liked Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, et al. They just thought it was a racket, noise, and no form. And these friends TODAY are showing the same resentment towards todays music. "Pop" music. Even if you don't detect it, "pop" music like Britney Spears, Lady Gaga is really hard rock songs WITHOUT any distorted guitars at all, without anything sounding like barbed wire. If you take "I did it again" and spray it with "Whitesnake" color, and loud dirty and "ugly" guitars, you get "Whitesnake".
You have a cognitvie bias when you're determining pop music from past and present. It was the same with all the Kinks, Merseybeat things, and the Beatles, lets not talks about Rolling Stones, where they first came out, my parents balked at them. Some of my friends where FORBIDDEN to listen to that kind of music by their parents (non christian), even if it was on radio. I have yet to hear anyone prohibit their kids to listen to Bieber these days. Maybe there is? Remember Iran forbid all music when Aytollah kicked in his laws, and allowed only "pastoral" and music geared towards their religion.
I have a cognitive bias too, the songs from the Who, Zeppelin and so on rings a bell but to call Zep "pop" is a stretch. They were on the lists though, at least the Who. The difference is that I acknowledges my bias, and have very much understanding of the kids today feeling the same. They're gonna think the same about futures whatever is pop then, they will just shake their heads, and go "... is this!?!?!" You can't objectively judge whatever is on the lists today.
The only thing that riles me up today, is the final loudness war mastering that occurs on every track, which makes it sound like static. Which is maybe why you get fed up very fast of it, since "everything sonds the same". But it doesn't it just sounds like that. HA! Everything in the smack in the brick wall mastering with no dynamics puts a toll on the listening fatigue of people.
Mind you still, I didn't listen to that much pop music in the 60s and I didn't care. When I got interested in any music, I just went for the music that was totally underground and not showing up on lists. British blues boom, hard rock, and later progressive stuff was my thing. Some barbed wire, ugliness, agressiveness, Then I grew up... ha ha...I couldn't care less about ABBA and stuff.
