Pop music too loud and all sounds the same

Hmmmmm, pop music = bad and will bring down the establishment.

Heard it before. The same claim was made decade after decade for the past 60 years. And before that swing drummers complained about bop drummers. The list goes on.

I see someone quotes Stevie Wonder and Cat Stevens from the 70's. Great lyrics to be sure. Here is some more 70's lyrics
"I wanna rock and roll all night
And party every day."

Deep.
 
Thanks mate.

As for pop music... it is what it is and always was. Happily I do not watch TV, nor do I listen to popular radio. My experience with pop music is limited to students presenting ipods with tunes they wish to learn. For me it is all the same, Avenged sevenfold, Led Zep, Beyonce, just more stuff to transcribe. :)

I am more old school. I ignore the charts and search for new music. Mainly because I enjoy that method. I do think it silly though for people to look for depth in pop music. What an oximoron. I would rather listen to Irvin Mayfield play his trumpet that Beyonce sing. But then sometimes I enjoy listening to pop. Notes on a page... ;-)
 
On the other hand, sometimes interesting songs become popular:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVNT4wvIGY

Ok, the lyric is fairly asinine but there's some interesting things going on. The melody is vaguely Phil Collins-esque (in the good way) and the instrumentation is totally off the wall. The video is great. There are gems out there.

Watch the album charts, too. Those are often much more interesting.

Ha - I've heard this song a few times since and it's really growing on me. The vocals are outstanding - very expressive. Agree about the melodies, instrumentation and video too.

Funny thing, just been watching the Burns jazz series and the early bop players complained about all the commercial swing going on at the time Harks back to Wy's post). They had some pretty crappy stuff back then too - Dad used to like Kay Kaiser (a swing/pop big band leader) and I thought the music was very dull, cynical and lacking dynamics in much the same way as some of the recent compressed stuff.

Of course, some of the "pop" back then was great too, eg. In the Mood.
 
Funny thing, just been watching the Burns jazz series and the early bop players complained about all the commercial swing going on at the time Harks back to Wy's post). They had some pretty crappy stuff back then too - Dad used to like Kay Kaiser (a swing/pop big band leader) and I thought the music was very dull, cynical and lacking dynamics in much the same way as some of the recent compressed stuff.

Of course, some of the "pop" back then was great too, eg. In the Mood.

For sure! My Dad, who was a jazz fanatic, born in the 20's and played drums until he died in 2000, complained all the time about the crappy / cheesy stuff that so many tried to sell over as jazz. That being said, he didn't take too fondly to bop either.
 
And also remember Jazz is pop music as are all of it's offshoots(rock etc)

But rock is not an offshoot of jazz. Rock is a direct descendant of southern guitar blues.

And jazz stopped being popular music when big bands began dying out and bebop became the new model.
 
But rock is not an offshoot of jazz. Rock is a direct descendant of southern guitar blues.

And jazz stopped being popular music when big bands began dying out and bebop became the new model.

Once pop music always pop music. Symphony and Opera is still pop in my book. Rock is not just the descendant of southern guitar blues. R&B (a type of bigband jazz with a heavier backbeat) is also one of it's direct predecessors as is C&W. Rock is an amalgamation of the pop music of the first half of the 20th century. in terms of song structure it owes a lot to C&W. in terms of rhythm and beat initially it bore much more resemblance to jazz. Listen to the drumming on early rock records. swing beat with snare on 2 and 4 while the guitar and piano hold down straight eighths giving a polyrhythmic feel. eventually things got evened out. straight eighths started holding sway. Also jazz is an offshoot of blues,ragtime, and marching music or was initially. regardless of how these genres are perceived now they all started as music for popular consumption and at their heart remain so.
 
Once pop music always pop music. Symphony and Opera is still pop in my book.

Some of it was pop in its day for the upper classes and some wasn't - big difference between Mozart and Varese. Since then new genres have sprung up and classical music had to be recontextualised.

Another thought ... popular with whom? Classical came from church music and was popular with the upper classes. The peasants at the time would have played folk / indigenous music but you don't hear so much about folk music of the classical period because peasants don't feature so much with historians.
 
Some of it was pop in its day for the upper classes and some wasn't - big difference between Mozart and Varese. Since then new genres have sprung up and classical music had to be recontextualised.

Another thought ... popular with whom? Classical came from church music and was popular with the upper classes. The peasants at the time would have played folk / indigenous music but you don't hear so much about folk music of the classical period because peasants don't feature so much with historians.

Half of the so called folk music of that period can be traced back to operas and other works of a century or two before. melodically anyway. i know people who have insisted that Oh, Susannah and Dixie are American folk songs when it's pretty clear that they were written for minstrel shows and are thus pop/theatre songs. These tunes get popular and then the origins get forgotten. And as to church music. That started getting infiltrated by the pop music of the day as early as the mediaeval period. cross pollination, the motet form serving as both sacred and secular. Most of the composers wrote both secular(pop) and sacred(church) music Palestrina included.
 
Back
Top