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 ...

squarepusher

more squarepusher

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!

Record execs around the time of the late 1980s and early 1990s, started to use music to become a more toned down, intrinsic type sound just to cater to the masses. Simple beats, simple words, and a simple music structure as a whole were used. Low & behold, you have a number one on your hands. It is now common for music today, and artists that many hardcore music lovers would disapprove of are the artists that the commercial masses actually love.


It’s not to say that sticking to your artistic value won’t work, it’s just the likelihood of it happening is slim to none. R&B artists Maxwell and Sade sold numerous copies in the first week of their last released albums and both were certified platinum, but we can properly accredit that to the long delay album and their fans yearning for their music. Even with that said, the fans were excited and anticipating the release of their respective albums because these two artists know how to supply great artistic vision in their music. The respect level is high, and they are one of the few artists against the pop music machine to actually sell records. It happens, but not enough for other artists to rely on it. 


 This is mainly why many artists today and older music fans speak out against “the machine” and this generation’s current choice of music. Popularity is what matters now, and it’s essentially irrelevant if you do know how to rap, pen a song on social change, or can sing or play an instrument that can contest the audience ears. The tragedy of it all results in record execs caring mostly about the dollar instead of the talent. To the record executives, if you don’t sell off of their heavily calculated formula, they will leave you alone and find another one who will. Music is an art, not something to be exposed or exploited. It’s supposed to mean something to the listener, to be the song that we can remember where we were when it came out. Music is supposed to capture the moment, magic, and essence of an era. But it is now seen as entirely too late. 

. 
  
  
  
 

kson


Record execs around the time of the late 1980s and early 1990s, started to use music to become a more toned down, intrinsic type sound just to cater to the masses. Simple beats, simple words, and a simple music structure as a whole were used. Low & behold, you have a number one on your hands. It is now common for music today, and artists that many hardcore music lovers would disapprove of are the artists that the commercial masses actually love.

I'd say that was going on a lot earlier. The pop charts of the '60's and '70's are really not that dissimilar to those of today.

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.

Well...all I know is that the more of a thing there is then (generally) the less that thing is worth.  Quality still counts for something...but seems to count less and less as the days roll on.  This is certainly the case with popular music.  Heck, even defining what "objective quality" might be in an almost totally subjective product like pop music is problematic to say the least.  Back in the early days of "popular music" it was not only finite...making it rarer and more valuable, it was more difficult to produce.  You needed actual musicians in (usually) large groups who were both capable of performing and desired to do so under fairly harrowing conditions and with very little in the way of "tour support" (i.e. decent facitlities, adequate vehicles, "p.a. systems...ha ha", etc)  In those days popular music as precious and valuable.  Even into the 50s and 60s when rock n roll started to emerge most young lads and lassies valued their "45s" as some of their most prized posessions.  Listening to their favorite tunes either on the record player or a transitor radio over and over developing deep emotional attachments to both the song and the artists that sang them.  Music, in short, had value.

Not any more.  "Music" is so ubiquitous and so fragmented into an almost infinite amount of niches and can be produced quite literally by "monkees on typewriters" by the millions world wide...every minute of the day 24/7....365 per year...that it's value is for all practical purposes NIL.  It's simply become another near instantly disposable commodity that spends it's fleeting moments in the ethos distracting its listeners from the vagaries and unpleasantries of life. 

I used to take note when almost anyone touted this or that piece of "music" as being of better quality in any way than the surrounding morass of cacophany and immediately trot off to listen to it.  But it soon became self-evident that most accolades had no discernable objectivity attached to them save that I might or might not happen to agree with them.  That one man's ceiling is another man's floor is a truism, of course,  but as in all things there has to be solid, objective measures by which we can accurately gage anything to find the difference between the chaff and the wheat...the s#*t and the shinola. 

For let me tell you, me droogies....shinola is in mighty short supply.

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!

yorolpal ...Not any more. "Music" is so ubiquitous and so fragmented into an almost infinite amount of niches and can be produced quite literally by "monkees on typewriters" by the millions world wide...every minute of the day 24/7....365 per year...that it's value is for all practical purposes NIL....

While this is hard to fathom and deal with, in many ways, I think it is good ... you are SO blasted with SO much, that there is only one thought or solution to the problem ... WHO ARE YOU ... that will be the ONLY difference in the definition of any music.

What folks refuse to see, in the history of music, wether we factor in rock music all the way thru 2011 or not, is that the DIFFERENT ones are the ones that were remembered ... so it is really strange when a comment/suggestion is made to do something diffferent, that folks (even here) get defensive ... or worse ... as happened at KTYD a long time ago, when one DJ interrupted Golden Earring ... and said ... "it's not rock'n'roll" ... and Guy slowed the record to a stop, and said out loud ... "who cares, it's great music!" and then restarted it ... the song? ... "Are You Receiving Me?" ... need more examples of inane comments by people whose intelligence is really dubious? And the commentary is not in sync with the music! But they had the "power" and they were the DJ's getting the girls, the dope and the KISS leather pants, and some diseases, too!