Interesting article regarding Pop culture and music...

Article

Your thoughts?

craigb


I think it will continue to decline if the bulk of the crap produced keeps squashing the content and reusing the same lame material.  Let's face it.  Most of the current so-called "Pop" offerings are overly loud, contain simplistic music and feature mind-numbingly immature lyrics with mostly offensive wording.

I dunno Craig....as much as I agree with your post, the other side of the coin is we can never judge pop while being musicians. The reason being, we're not the buying public when it comes to this style of music and those that do buy it could care less about the things we think about like production, strength of composition and arrangment, song difficulty, artist performance etc.
 
All they think about is "can I move to the beat, can I remember the lyrics, can I sing along to it and act like a star, do the lyrics move me, are the lyrics dirty enough, is there enough bass, are the vocals sexy, is the hook memorable enough to tell others that you can't get it out of your mind so you spread the word?" etc. etc.
 
You'll never hear a listener of this style of music comment on a synth patch, how clean the vocals sound, whether the drums are real or fake, whether they can hear enough snare drum, whether the song has guitar in it or not, whether the bass was real or fake and had a good sound. This music (though I must confess that I like it and it has its place to me) is a sugar high for people like a diabetic in need of a quick sugar boost with a piece of candy.
 
They don't care if the song has longevity...there are 300 more sort of like it that they can bop their way through during the course of the day. It's a completely different class of people that listen to this stuff in my humble opinion. Granted, some big producers are into it as well, but they know the drill. In this business, if you can make bucks doing something that caters to the masses that aren't into music like musicians are, it's actually a dumb move NOT to cater to them.
 
I don't think we'll see a decline in this for a long time if ever. And even if we do, it will just come back in another form. Disco type stuff is in most of this...which proves though "Disco" as an entity died, the element of it remains and is stronger than ever in my opinion. Same structure, same beats, same hook, only the instrumentation has been altered for the times really.....and even some of the old instruments are being revived again to get those old classic sounds. If it hasn't died by now, I don't see it happening any time soon....but that's just my 0.2. :)
 
-Danny

In 2012 the world has turned into the mind set of raking in money ..as much and as fast as possible ....quality of product be damned 





The silly episode of the Brady Bunch ...Greg Brady being a star aka Johnny Bravo because he fit the jacket ..... More true today than ever 


There was a time when companies including record companies ...made profit off of quality ...


Those days are gones


Now they want profit ....out of thin air ....

Hence the crap we get today in all products ....including music 


The heart has been taken out of everything ...commercially .... You have to go non main stream now to find heart in anything 

kson


Article

Your thoughts?

My son has the right of it. He never wanted to be "famous" but wanted to make a living in a "music related way". Yeah, a couple of times, he held a non-music related job. Sometimes for up to two years. Yes, he makes a few dollars in his Death Metal band Impaled (impaled.info, warning: graphic gore), and he occasionally plays in the orchestra for local community theaters. But after holding a contract position for a game company that makes a guitar learning tool, he became a full time employee using his incredible ears as a "note tracker" (i.e. he tells the programmers what notes or chords the instrument is playing). 


Although my son has always been on the avant garde side of music and not one to go for Pop music per se, he now analyzes classic rock songs (pop of the day) and helps them become part of a computer based program to teach guitar. 


That's one angle I take from the article.

Hi,
 
(long and somewhat detailed)
 

The reason I want this discussion out in the open is to get us past the idea that today’s musician needs to concentrate on fan purchases for financial support. It’s certainly one way to survive as a musician, but not the only way.

 
I am not sure that this is stated correctly. In some ways, this is sort of like saying that all the bands and music before only existed because of the fans, and we know that is not correct ... as specified ... but it is also specifying "fan" as a person that would spend money to help the record company, or corporate entity, and not eexactly the "fan" that goes to the jazz bar every Saturday night and hears great music and purchases it.
 

... Just as it is possible to couple your music with non-music goods and services to generate income, it is also to possible to decouple your music from non-music sources of income...

 
Agreed. However, defining this can be hard. I remember Gong's first tour in the US in 1995 and I was telling them ... you gotta have a web site with all your CD's and stuff ... can not wait for a record company. And the following year, they had GAS up there and it is still going and selling fairly well, or their bands would not be able to do as much as they do and go different places. It has also allowed and provided for them to be able to release even more material than before, specially now that CD's are so inexpensive.
 

... Think of successful rock bands from the 90s, and imagine that they lacked the funds to circle North America and Europe four or five times within a couple of years. Without that funding, without the essential groundwork of developing an audience, most of the successful 90s bands just wouldn’t be around...

 
Bullpuckyand selffullfillingmerde!
 
If you look at Marillion, they were broke one time and they got their fans to put up the money to get their next album done ... they have not had issues since and their website has been major in helping them. If you look at Porcupine Tree, they started on cassettes, graduated to website (Steven Wilson is a major geek and then some!) ... and took off from there ... they did not need a "record company" and Steven did not go after one ... why should he ... he was selling three to four times more and bringing money in from his garage venture alone! Dream Theater made their money off their own website and selling their own ... they did not need a record company.
 
Pretty much ALL of the "metal" and "prog" (as it is called today the stuff like Dream Theater) made their money on their own and they were not waiting for a record company to come and ki$$ their lovely bummies!
 

... Summary: be solo, or a duo, because a full band is financially untenable; work much, much harder, under much more stressful conditions, than bands of earlier generations had to. Be very young, or have the ability to take the broke-ness, the physical and emotional knock-around, that very young people can....

 
I disagree. It all depends on what you all together focus on and how you present it ... if you are going to reinvent the wheel again and do a copy of the Sex Pistols, or Nirvana, or Dream Theater ... and call it "bruhaha metal" with a different sound effect as the only separation between you and the next band ... good luck ... you are not going to be around a lot. But I would like to dress the Coffee House Band in Devo outfits and play a couple of metal pieces in their live show and make fun of this commercial stuff ... complete with visual effects and nekkid dancing girls ... and I bet you this will get more attention than these other copy bands do!
 
Again, it all depends on your own inner constitution, and how far you dedicate yourself ... nothing else! It doesn't matter if you make a nickel or a million, if you are into it because it is what you love and that's that ... you either love your child or kill it ... what is your choice? ... be a man and be honest, not a jerk!
 

... Studios have reduced production costs by paying stars only a fraction of their official “quote” or asking fee ...

 
WRONG ... the software world has made most of these studios redundant and stupid and over expensive nobodies!
 

... The entirety of Western culture hates old people. And classical music thinks it’s being revolutionary by trying to go along with this. Just what we need — one more cultural entertainment arena that disdains anything and anyone with grey hair and acts like you might as well crawl into the grave when you’re 40....

 
There is a valid comment here. The "old" establishment is no longer in "charge" of the money that made the "music" ... the folks that decided that the Beatles and Rolling Stones were not worthwhile music and such ... check out the worst business decisions ever made!!!!!! The real problem is that those "richies" and these "corporate" groups are no longer being the ones making the most money and they are trying to figure out why ... how to make money ... from the hits ... not how to improve their chances of making money from artists ... MORE artists ... specially today when things can be so cheap to put together.
 
And, in case that goon has not noticed it, there are many bands in gray hair that are making a lot more money off his stupidity than otherwise!
 
All in all, articles like this are about kissing the corporate thing, and making sure that you do not enter the music business and take away their valuable dime.  Or, it is sort of like ... here ... it's just fun ... and some people love to tell me once in a while that they are doing this for fun, not for "serious" ... and if you can tell that difference, I will gladly die now and leave the earth all the better for you!
 
You either do it or you don't ... because it is what you love to do ... you might or might not make it ... but if that is the difference in the quality of your work, it will be hard to "make it" ... but if that is who and what you are, far be it for me to define and say that you can not do that.
 
But you have to make a call on your "art" ... and perhaps that is the point ... if you "elevate" what you consider your work to be, the likelyhood is that ... you will try a bit harder!
 
Not a great article, but it is certainly written by someone that is trying hard to make sure he can make some money since he no longer has a cushy job in a record company doing nothing ... ohhh excuse me ... delivering goods to a radio station! Hahahahaha!

Ooo... "Dream Crusher" - Cool name for a band!

 
Dream Rush'er (psychedelic band, of course!)
Dream Crush'er (anti feminist band, or course!!)
Dream Mush'er (what the heck are dreams, anyway!!!)
Dream Pusher (what we need to do better ... so we can write more!)
 
There you go ...

I dunno Craig....as much as I agree with your post, the other side of the coin is we can never judge pop while being musicians. The reason being, we're not the buying public when it comes to this style of music and those that do buy it could care less about the things we think about like production, strength of composition and arrangment, song difficulty, artist performance etc.

 
I like your sensitive post. It makes a good point, that you and I as teenagers, did not care for Elvis, because Jimi and Jim and Janis was a lot better and more fun to listen to and above all ... not fake from our point of view.
 
And many of the youngsters around us ... don't really care what we think, anyway ... and they might not even be interested in the conversation.
 
There is a side of that ... which I thought was dangerous in the 60's ... too much "I don't care" ... and too much "reactionary" distance to the whole thing ... WHICH WE ALSO DID ... in our own way! All in all, it did not help our "revolution" in those days ... and "forgotten sons" was long gone and wasted when you hear the news media show you a wife in an arab country say ... I'll have 20 children to fight the American invaders! ...
 
In the end, it is all about "perspective" and something that you and I gain when we're 40 or 50 ... hopefully ... and learn to appreciate a lot of other things before and after the event, arts included ... and this is the tough part for teenagers.
 
I did not do grass or dope in those days ... and when I got to California I did even less ... why? .. it was a FAD ... and I used to love saying that Hitler was a FAD too ... with a gun instead of a joint! And then you saw the picture on the tv of someone getting his brains blown out ... and I knew that this was serious and then some ... but then, I was a child of WW2 and I know that advertising was a serious problem ... and I heard the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe enough times to know they were bombarding Russia with Beatles and Rolling Stones because folks in there could not get them!
 
It wasn't difficult ... but too much of "culture" is more about what you DON'T WANT to know, than it is what you learn or want to know ... because one is usually tunnel vision and the other passes you by before you know it!

. 
  
  
  
 

Yesterday I was in the elevator w/ someone who had headphone on. All I could hear was the hat pattern - the same I hear everywhere, all the time. Actually, to be fair, there's probably 3 or 4 variations upon which most pop music seem to be based. 

I started thinking - give me just the drum track to Master of Puppets by Metallica and I'll instantly recognize the song. Where Eagles Dare by Iron Maiden - same thing. The Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin - pretty much every song has something unique even if you listen to just the drums.

The irony is that, contemporary pop is almost entirely based around drums - yet it's always the same beats. And I don't think it's just the result of using drum machines instead of drummers - Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, and others used them abundantly and you could still tell one track from another just by the drums.


The difference may be that there were strong leaders in the pop charts back then - the Beatles for exemple. Even if a lot of the music on the charts was based on repetitive formulas, the Beatles and a few others were leading the way and creating new trends all the time, stretching boundaries all the time.

rain
...  The irony is that, contemporary pop is almost entirely based around drums - yet it's always the same beats. And I don't think it's just the result of using drum machines instead of drummers - Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, and others used them abundantly and you could still tell one track from another just by the drums. ...

 
I've said that differently many times, but it is something that is difficult to explain and get across ... the first thing that most DAW's deal with? .. the metronome! ... immediately adjust the music! And that takes your ability, mistakes, and what not out of it and takes the humanity out completely.
 
I specially like one of the best examples of inspired ... chaos ... when Keith Moon went on to try out for that one group ... he got there threw the drums all over theplace and left by saying ... anything else? ... and you have to be a total a$$idholus to get that point across today, and one of the reasons why Mike P (ex-Dream Theater) is not that great a drummer, when compared to Mani Neumeier, Pierre Moerlin and the likes of Keith Moon, who used drums as more of an instrument to help illustrate the music, rather than just keep time. Neumeier is still improvising at his age with the likes of Acid Mothers Temple ... total thrashing quite often ... but it doesn't phase him. Pierre shows his ability in Mike Oldfield's Exposed DVD ... and if you have not heard Gong's You album, one of the greatest exhibitions of drumming that one will ever find, with no pretend that I'm great ego to show off ... just plain, pure music, and you can see why he ended up playing with Mike Oldfield later, who also showed up on Pierre Moerlin's Gong ... which was nice but already a bit metronomic for my tastes.
 
I keep saying it here that if you want time, get a metronome! Why waste the talent of another musician just to keep time, and imperfectly at that? ... it's a bizarre notion, to my imagination! ... but many folks, even here, will get defensive about that ... I keep joking, why don't you create a piece of music without that beat? I think you might like it, and ... might even have some good sales instead of no one listening! Let the voice fly ... let the fingers fly ... you don't need the metronome for that beauty, unless you're scared of it!

I never liked Keith Moon's drumming. Strangely enough, I recently learned that Pete Townshend didn't either.

Interesting reading. Some related links:

This blog entry led me to Emily's original blog and David Lowery's response...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2012/06/19/155313212/a-perpetual-debate-owning-music-in-the-digital-age

Emily: http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2012/06/16/154863819/i-never-owned-any-music-to-begin-with

David: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

J