My rant on today's pop music

For one, this is why I rarely listen to the radio outside of classic rock stations. There is a ton of good new music out there, but it's not going to be on the radio.

There is some great new music that can be found on the radio, you just need to look hard enough.

Last year I discovered this radio station in Melbourne that plays many genres of music and even has an audio archive on the net: http://www.pbsfm.org.au/

...and please don't judge too much by what you hear on the record, often an artist sounds much different live...but I have to admit some things would be rediculous live (like that "Friday").

BTW there is this website called http://www.archive.org/ that has these uncopyrighted recordings of live concerts.

So, yes you can still find some great new music, just look in the right place.
 
My teenage daughters and their friends also recognize a lot of the music from the 1970's and 1980's, because those songs are used over and over again in TV commercials and movie soundtracks. Whenever I hear them singing along, my natural tendency is to ask them how they know that song, and then they give me that look like "duh"....

That's one cool aspect of how music has remained relevant and stabilized somewhat over the last 40-50 years. Today's music is more closely linked to the music of the '60s & '70s than the music of the '60s & '70s was to the vaudeville, big band, jazz and crooners of the previous 20-30 years. Today if you listen back 20 or 30 years, music is still quite 'current'. I suspect that the musical and cultural similarities have narrowed the generation gap somewhat. There was a much greater gap between me and my parents (who grew up in the '30s & '40s), than seems to exist between today's teenagers and their parents who grew up in the rock era. That is, kids and parents today tend to have more in common musically and culturally than they did a generation or two ago.

So it fascinates me that so many parents view their kids' music as empty, not real, etc. I mean, I understand why my parents didn't get the Beatles, they didn't grow up with anything like them. But today's parents/adults in their forties or fifties have a musical experience more closely-related to the kids.

Bermuda
 
my 2 cents

Nirvana, Pop Rock... the list can go on and on and on and on, like those old shampoo comercials.

So Popular music is not the problem but the Music Business and how they promote the bands/artist that make it.

Business has nothing to do with quality.

The ebb and flow of what people like will continuoulsy shift, I lived through the 80's and was into Metal, if you wanted to hang with girls you had to listen to what I thought was crap... 20 years later you can see the artistry and desire to explore music with new found technology in that stuff, like New Order and such.

I don't think the basic rock band will ever die...

Jay (i don't like your style) Z said it best... Death to AutoTune.
 
ALL modern music is superb, especially everything mainstream. I love how clean & precise everything is these days. No more crappy distorted guitar or horrible glassy cymbals, & ALL the singers are so good. Modern drum sounds are so powerful too, not like those old empty boingy things I used to hear. I don't know what's up with you guys, can't you hear how wonderful the instruments sound? Everyone's so good these days, there is no better anymore. How cool is that!

What date is it?
 
There is some great new music that can be found on the radio, you just need to look hard enough.

Last year I discovered this radio station in Melbourne that plays many genres of music and even has an audio archive on the net: http://www.pbsfm.org.au/

...and please don't judge too much by what you hear on the record, often an artist sounds much different live...but I have to admit some things would be rediculous live (like that "Friday").

BTW there is this website called http://www.archive.org/ that has these uncopyrighted recordings of live concerts.

So, yes you can still find some great new music, just look in the right place.

Cheers, but I don't think I'll be getting a radio station from Melbourne in Los Angeles.

Yes, the net is the way to go. When I said radio, I was referring to standard every day over the airwaves. Internet radio is a whole other animal.
 
In my band, we play (and I sing lead on) Cream's Sunshine of Your Love. When we play out at restaurants where younger kids can see us, they recognize the song despite it being from 1967, because it was on one of the Guitar Hero video games...

As much as I am NOT a video game person, I think this is actually a cool aspect of Guitar Hero/Rock band.

All these old songs are getting new life with a new audience. Kids today actually have some sense of music history, even if said history is limited to rock-n-roll of the past 40 years.
 
Fair point, DED, but Rebecca and her ilk represent the lowest common denominator. I don't think we can judge today's pop by that standard. I'm not fan of today's pop but that song of hers posted here was the pits. Actually, I quite like those old Bee Gees tracks so go easy on the Gibbs :) Bermuda ... of your collection, I have stuff by Faith No More, Fatboy Slim, Ella Fitzgerald, Fleetwood Mac, Four Tops, Peter Frampton, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Aretha Franklin, Free (not pop), Springsteen, Santana ... Some of the pop in my collection includes Anastacia, Macy Gray, Supertramp (love 'em), The Cure, 10CC, Bryan Ferry, Chris Isaac, Coldplay, Frente, The Go Gos, The Carpenters, Kate Bush, Nellie Furtado, Pointer Sisters, Sade, Simply Red, The Killers and Wham! Just cos I'm into King Crimson, Uncle Frank, Henry Cow, Mahavishnu, Weather Report, The Who and Led Zep doesn't disqualify me from also being crazy about good pop. All I ask is that artists write and play music from the heart and go easy on the formulas, samey-ness and machines! Hopefully all this mechanised pap will go away, but I doubt it will happen anytime soon. We'll have to wait for Gen Z's kids to rebel and p1ss off their parents with "horrible" acoustic-sounding music :)

Well, Pol, you and I have had this discussion before; but any song can be interpreted in a more artistic manner. Taking for example Casandra Wilson's version of Last Train to Clarkville. On then other side, I heard a modern rock band play a classic rock tune the other day and butcher all the phrasing and dynamics. Don't remember what it was.

Compare Ce Lo's Forget You to Joe Jackson's She Really Going Out With Him? The Real title of Forget You is F&^%You, the chorus continues . . now ain't that some sh . . There are three songs in the BB Hot 100 with the word "Fk" in the title. But Forget You, or Fk You whatever you prefer, does have an infectious hook, and you have to get the unedited version to hear that he does actually use the f word in the chorus, as well as the word sh and n&^%, " Oh, sh shes a gold digger, just thought you should know n&^%." It certainly is a lot less innocent than the Joe Jackson Tune; but lyrics like "pretty woman walking with gorillas down my street" or "staring out the window while my coffee gets cold." Pretty good stuff. It's gotta have a good lyric. One of the artist that I enjoy was up for a Grammy for best song this year. No it wasn't for Meg White, although that's a killer tune. I think it is the first time in decades I owned an album with a Best Song candidate song on it.

The big difference is that you no longer have AOR, and there are so many good songs or good bands like Porcupine Tree, that just never get heard and that is a crime.
 
Last Train to Clarkville. .

Now there is a song that was meant to be pop, but is just a killer track.

Yeah, it has all the makings of pop dribble: Written by outside song writers, sung by a then fake band, using mystery studio musicians, recorded with the sheer purpose of cashing in on the Beatles craze.

Yet, the results were great.



Joe Jackson I still can't think of as generic pop. He was coming from a punk/new wave back ground, and was heavily influenced by jazz. I'd put him more in the college-indie scene than commercial pop.
 
Well, I must admit that I listen to the new pop side of Def Leppard, some good songs / some not too good!
 
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Now there is a song that was meant to be pop, but is just a killer track.

Yeah, it has all the makings of pop dribble: Written by outside song writers, sung by a then fake band, using mystery studio musicians, recorded with the sheer purpose of cashing in on the Beatles craze.

Yet, the results were great.



Joe Jackson I still can't think of as generic pop. He was coming from a punk/new wave back ground, and was heavily influenced by jazz. I'd put him more in the college-indie scene than commercial pop.

I think you're over stepping. A lot of the studio guys have become legends, and the wrecking crew played on most of the singles Herb Albert or Sonny and Cher, to the Association, Beach Boys Simon and Garfunkel, The Byrds, Mamas and the Papas, etc. They probably even played on The Archies, Sugar. The wrecking crew was a band for all intense and purposes. The Beach Boys were not. The Wrecking Crew consisted of 7-8 main players and another 10-15 standbys for extra horns over dubs or because there was too much work.

Everybody used session guys back then and even James Brown would still call in Purdie to do the shuffles. A lot of bands were session bands, like later Steely Dan or Hall and Oates. For their demo, Lynryd Skynyrd used the Swampers who were session band based in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Paul Simon continued to use studio guys, and even had a great band with Richard Tee, Eric Gale, Tony Levin and Gadd at one point, all session guys.
 
I think you're over stepping. A lot of the studio guys have become legends, and the wrecking crew played on most of the singles Herb Albert or Sonny and Cher, to the Association, Beach Boys Simon and Garfunkel, The Byrds, Mamas and the Papas, etc. They probably even played on The Archies, Sugar. The wrecking crew was a band for all intense and purposes. The Beach Boys were not. The Wrecking Crew consisted of 7-8 main players and another 10-15 standbys for extra horns over dubs or because there was too much work.

Everybody used session guys back then and even James Brown would still call in Purdie to do the shuffles. A lot of bands were session bands, like later Steely Dan or Hall and Oates. For their demo, Lynryd Skynyrd used the Swampers who were session band based in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Paul Simon continued to use studio guys, and even had a great band with Richard Tee, Eric Gale, Tony Levin and Gadd at one point, all session guys.

Where did I say session players were bad players?

Obviously the wrecking crew were all great players who are regarded as legends.

I never said anything negative about the quality of the players.

It's the presentation. If you watched the Monkees as a kid, there is no indication it was session guys behind the song. You're lead to believe the four "band members" did it all. That part was fake.

Same with the Partridge family and other assembled musical groups where the use of sessions guys was hidden, and the illusion was they weren't used. And had they had today's sequencing/midi options, they would have used that over paying the wrecking crew to come in.
 
Today's pop music has no soul. There, I said it.

That pretty much says it all.

I have no problem with synthesizers. In fact when I was younger like 1962, I was playing the piano and envisioned a keyboard that could sound like any other instrument. Some guy name Moog beat me to it. But today every bit of music is so digitized if that is the proper word that it is very hard for me to like any of it. I finally found a station here in Tampa that played popular music and most of it is pop. Their ad says we play everything except Rap. The music is terrible. So I am back to talk radio, where the politics is just as depressing as the music, and listening to iTunes.
 
Well done, Mary and Bermuda - you guys really know your lyrics! At first I was thinking it was too easy and got about the first 9 or 10 without drama ... after that, then the wheels fell off lol

Andy, I think you have just made the transition from valued member to troll :) Larry, yes, he has the backbeat backwards haha

Seriously, Andy, you've hit the nail on the head. The slick production is all, like opening a Xmas present with fabulous ornate packaging - so exciting! - then you open the box only to find a few (heavily) used condoms inside.

Ken, it's a fair point - the reliance on swearing can somewhat close the door to deeper lyrics - opportunity costs. I like both the Ce Lo and the Joe Jackson tracks you mentioned. Ce Lo's track is more from the amygdala - like he'd lifted the dialogue straight out of an argument whereas Joe's was filtered through the prefrontal cortex :) Both are valid enough, as long as neither becomes a formula. For the record, I far preferred %^#$ you to Forget You.

GD, does modern pop lack soul more than old formulaic hits? Perhaps the extra soul in those old hits was accidental - they simply didn't have the technology at the time?

I think the intent was similar, although the bean counters' influence has increased. They've really refined the formula - gradually stripping away the artistic nuances bit by bit until not much more than the beat, the sex talk and the hook remains.

I suspect that one day it will be rebellious for teens to get into organic music. I'm not sure it's possible to be more formulaic and mechanical than the Rebecca Black track:

funky drum machine - check
hip autotune - check
catchy hook - check
hip rapping - check
hip electro-sounds - check
teen lyrics and vibe - check
cute girl - check
dancing - check.

Kids, we have a hit on our hands!

The production guys Rebecca's parents hired are just the modern day equivalent of Stock Aitken and Waterman ... even the the name aptly conjures up the idea of a team of accountants.
 
It isn't just you.

Im younger than you and can't stand it.

Just because there is a danceable beat, some really easy synth line, and using autotune to change the pitch of the "vocalist" doesn't mean I like it.

The songs don't give me the same emotional rush as say "last" by nin , or even "freedom" by ratm.


It seems like putting a statement in the music, or writing songs that touch you emotionally, all that is aside. The only point is that it has a "good beat and you can dance to it."

I play a game. I try to count the amount of songs that have a dance beat and/or autotune on the radio at any given time. Most of the time in ten minutes time I hear more than five songs with this formula.

It is all crap.

I like pop music. Not what is passed off as such today.
 
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