Reader bcg asks me to discuss "Why pop music got so terrible after illegally downloading became easy and accessible."
Did it? I mean, I have been known to express this opinon myself, of a sunny Sunday afternoon. On the other hand, the belief that music today just isn't what it used to be has a long, not to say tiresome, pedigree. Frederick Lewis Allen, on the contemporary reaction to that noise the jitterbuggers like to jive to:
Among many of the jitterbugs--particularly among many of the boys and girls--the appreciation of the new music was largely vertebral. A good swing band smashing away at full speed, with the trumpeters and clarinetists rising in turn under the spotlight to embroider the theme with their several furious improvisations and the drummers going into long-drawnout rhythmical frenzies, could reduce its less inhibited auditors to sheer emotional vibration, punctuated by howls of rapture. Yet to dismiss the swing craze as a pure orgy of sensation would be to miss more than half of its significance. For what the good bands produced--though it might sound to the unpracticed ear like a mere blare of discordant noise--was an extremely complex and subtle pattern, a full appreciation of which demanded far more musical sophistication than the simpler popular airs of a preceding period. The true swing enthusiasts, who collected records to teh limit of their means and not only like Artie Shaw's rendering of "Begin the Beguine" but knew precisely why they liked it, were receiving no mean musical education; and if Benny Goodman could turn readily from the playing of "Don't Be That Way" to the playing of Mozart, so could many of his hearers turn to the hearing of Mozart.
There is a model by which music gets awful as soon as copyright becomes unenforceable--the French experience with abolishing copyright around the time of the Revolution does offer some evidence for the notion of a race to the bottom in an IP-less world. Certainly, it's fair to say that pop acts are focusing less on catchy songs and more on catchy performers, the better to sell concert tickets.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that musical talent is eroding so much as being dispersed. The rise of cheap distribution means there are more genres and sub-genres than there used to be--and also that acts don't need to broaden their appeal so much as they once did. If you don't need to get on a top forty station to make it big, you will lose the elements you once might have added to attract that audience. Conversely, the pop acts will stop trying to appeal to the genre fan base, so their music will sound worse to those of us who didn't much like top forty in the first place.
A few months ago, I was hanging out with a friend who's about six years younger than I am. We were idly looking at Billboard's Top 100 songs for various years. I was unsurprised to find that I stopped recognizing many of the names on the list after the early-to-mid nineties. What was surprising is that his recognition stopped around the same time mine did--the era when our demographic embraced indie music and stopped paying any attention to what was playing at the top of the charts.
Overall, I think that fragementation is a good thing. Though I do worry what happens if the downloading generation fails to transition to paying for their music. Concert revenue does not actually seem like a very good substitute for CD sales--people only have so many nights a week to stand around in bars.
A good case could be made that teenagers adopt music and dance styles, in large part, in order to outrage their elders. (Or, to be kind, to differentiate themselves.) And said elders are duly outraged.
For those who think this is something new in the world, see the furious denunciations at the time of its inception of that horrid, lacivious dance style . . . the waltz.
One part of getting older is hating the currently popular music.
In my case I think it's mostly due to not being as immersed in "the scene". Most of the music I listened to when I was younger didn't make the Top 10 back then either, and I had a network (pre-internet!) of people to learn about and share below-the-radar bands. That's not to say I ignored pop; once in awhile a catchy song would come along. And those are the songs we now hear on "I love the 80s"-type radio stations and shows. We don't remember the garbage, and as a wise man said, 90% of everything is crap.
Another part of getting old is giving up on new music entirely. Which is why I recently picked up the new Death Cab For Cutie CD.
What a non-copyright future looks like: Sponsored content. Just as was done during the renaissance where a book was dedicated to a patron. In the future music and books will go back to that model.
The one thing I've noticed is all the Misfits and Guns and Rose's t-shirts that teens keep wearing. The common music cannon stopped growing around 1999 or so. Movies and video games have taken music's place in the culture.
Chinese Democracy drops this year, baby!
THE WORLD IS READY.
Seriously, when albums were on 8-track, the whole thing had to be good. You weren't going to hear that song, at best, for another 6-7 minutes.
The cassette held its own... but when the CD came out, everything went to crap. Instead of making enough music for 40 minutes (10 strong songs) they decided that they had to make music enough for 55... and "music" quickly became "content".
Seriously, buy any rap cd anymore and put up with 100 silly/stupid filler comedy bits between the songs. Or not even. It's phone messages. "We love you out here in the West Bay, PEACE!" *BEEP* "You come to Detroit you gonna get shot, m-----f-----!!!" *BEEP* "This is your momma, you best be at church this Sunday!" *BEEP* and *THEN* the song comes on.
Infuriating. So you make one song and then people just download that one song.
Come back to us Axl. Save us.
So, pop acts will not be able to make millions (for themselves and their label) with a CD and stadium tour every few years. They will have to play 4-5 nights a week, give lessons, and live a middle-class lifestyle... like folk and classical musicians.
"One part of getting older is hating the currently popular music."
While some of that happens, I don't think it is all there is to it. I remember despairing at the pop music when I was a teen-ager, preferring the stuff from the late 60s & early 70s. Then, late 70s and early 80s, I liked what was currently popular. Then, I didn't like it in the mid 80s, but liked it again a few years later.
I think it is perfectly feasible that there can be prolonged periods of poor creativity in pop music. I don't know that you'll find any good metric for measuring it - too many other things change over time.
I think the bands today really are rubbish. No doubt all the bands I hear on the muzak at my gym are making a mint, piracy be damned, but they still make me want to stab my ears out. (I'm 32.)
Bands that can play their instruments and perform will do OK. Look at the Dead, Phish, etc. You can *give your music away* for years on end and still get paid handsomely.
*I know there are lots of good bands that never make it. This is more a result of the vagaries of the music marketplace than loss of revenue from piracy. Such bands don't make it as far as even being a victim of piracy.
Pop music is a racket, for the labels.
A recording contract is like robbery with violence and perhaps worse. The artist gets a signing bonus, and commits to a number of albums (often seven) with the label. The signing bonus is an advance on royalties. If the recording "earns out", or makes back the cost of studio time, session musicians, engineering, manufacture, distribution, and marketing the artist might see more royalties. Often it takes an audit to pry any money loose.
In the meantime the artists live by performing and their day jobs.
The labels claim that they have to have big hits to pay for all the recordings that don't pay for themselves.
Recordings are effectively sold on consignment. If they don't sell the store can return them for credit.
Books used to work the same way. Bookstores can still return books that don't sell.
One part of getting older is hating the currently popular music.
I'm in my early twenties, but virtually all the music I like was written between 1965 and 1998. The other day, for comparison, I decided to play the top billboard hits from 2007, 1997, and 1987. I liked some of the songs I'd never heard of from 1987 better than the best song I could find from 2007.
There's simply no equivalent to Clapton, GNR, or 1980's U2 around today. Heck, there's not really an equivalent to the Gin Blossoms or the Chili Peppers. I've even tried hunting down these mysterious indie bands to see if they are any good. I've yet to find one that I really like.
The only question in my mind is whether it was Napster or whether rock & roll just burned itself out as a genre. The Gin Blossoms aren't really different than the Beatles. Maybe there were only so many ways to do a three chord guitar rock song with a pop hook.
I dunno -- I think there are more good acts out there than I have time to discover and appreciate. I put on Pandora for a while and usually I hear quite a lot of stuff I like by bands I've never heard of.
As a thirty one year old I am having a hard time agreeing that pop music is worse right now than when I was a teenager. The mid to late 90s was a terrible period for commercial radio and with very few alternatives available you really had to work at it if you wanted to find the good stuff.
The internet really has made it easier on both the production and distribution side to have better stuff. Can anyone really say that we would have the Girl Talk's new record in as wide a circulation in 1998 as we do currently?
Just as was done during the renaissance where a book was dedicated to a patron. In the future music and books will go back to that model.
Maybe music, but books? Books require a bit of overhead to print copies, while copying a CD to the point that it's functionally indistinguishable is cheap and easy.
If IP law sustains a revision, or is simply unenforced (instead of haphazardly enforced as a revenue generator) against end-users, books and software have a good future.
After all, who wants to bring an electronic reader into the bathroom?
While I am deeply troubled by the lack of a solid model to support musical revenues in the file-sharing era, I am also flabbergasted that the majority of Americans seem unable to recognize that the music being produced now is much, much, much better than the music that was produced in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The stuff that blew my mind back then today sounds to me washed-out, unoriginal, simplistic, and sloppily executed. I can imagine people who were really into sampling-based hip-hop pining for the era before legal decisions relegated sampling to the underground. But for white indie rock? I'm sorry, almost nothing in the early '90s was anywhere near as good as the consensus best 100 indie artists today. (As I understand it the way to figure out that list is to take the 50 artists Pitchfork likes the most and the 50 artists Pitchfork claims to hate the most.)
I think it is more of an socio-economic thing than anything else. At least during the past 50 years, during "good" times the music has generally been light, sweet and poppy. During the "bad" times, the music has been darker, more personal, and more experimental.
Zepplin, Clapton, the Stones, the Beatles, and all the other great British groups came out of a "bad" time for Britain. In the US probably the best most experimental music of the last 50 years has come out the Vietnam War and the late 70's malaise/urban decay.
The mid/late 90's through today has generally been characterized by good economic times and with the exception of 9/11 calm social times for most people. Wait till we hit a recession. The next Kurt Cobain will be along in 15 minutes.
The Gin Blossoms aren't really different than the Beatles. Maybe there were only so many ways to do a three chord guitar rock song with a pop hook.
????
Name a Beatles song with only 3 chords.
I wouldn't read too much into the quality of music. And if your talking about popular acts, well thats futile. For every Red Hot Chili peppers there has been a Chumbawumba or a Fastball. And on the Indie scene Clutch has been under the radar for years. The greatest guitarists of the modern era (satriani, vai, malmstein or however you spell it) don't play in popular bands (unlike Page, Clapton, Eddie Van Halen). You still have a man named Buddy Guy to contend with as well for sheer ability. It seems to me that part of it is now if you want to find a rock band that uses a little rap or blues in their music. Its much easier to find. In short Music is becoming more like books, we all know the classics (hopefully we do read them, Twain was right on that particular quote), the newer stuff is harder to find. Harry Potter didn't come out and take off in one week, it was quite a build up before the sorcerer's stone and many people didn't go to hogwarts until book three. The five people you meet in heaven was a slow gainer. See any similarity with artists and albums? Led Zeppelin 3, Back in Black, Revolver will all appear on the charts every now and then with little or no publicity.
For instance our hostess has arrived in a similar way through similar indie appeal. She started out blogging in a much smaller venue, gaining popularity because, whether people want to admit it or not, we liked (valued) her opinion. We showed the page to people, its popularity grew. Now while she isn't the drudge report her blog has a robust bit of readers. And should she continue to add readers well it will be interesting.
"So, pop acts will not be able to make millions (for themselves and their label) with a CD and stadium tour every few years. They will have to play 4-5 nights a week, give lessons, and live a middle-class lifestyle... like folk and classical musicians."
My thoughts exactly Pierre. So the song files become a promotional tool for the live shows. Success in the music business for most becomes more about making a decent living doing something you love rather than making bucket loads of money - which is probably the case the for vast majority of bands today anyway. I don't see it as being necessarily a negative trend for the average consumer.
Jay bird
Don't even joke like that. Chinese Democracy will never ever come out. Axl Rose seems to have smoked and drank his vocals to garbage. And that takes a lot.
Name a Beatles song with only 3 chords.
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Helter Skelter, Twist And Shout, back in the ussr, ob-la-di
Three chord rock doesn't mean there is only three chords in the entire song (although sometimes it is). It means the main verse or chorus is built off a I-IV-V pattern ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-chord_song , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_progression)
Ben, Chinese Democracy will come out this fall.
And it will be glorious.
Popular music is something that imprints on you. I will basically always and forever hold new music that I encounter up to the standards of Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, etc. Are these good standards? Probably not. But there are what was on MTV in 1994 when I discovered music, and are thus irrevocably burned into my brain.
From where I stood, late 90's nu-metal sucked because it wasn't grunge. This Coldplay shit people are cranking out these days sucks because it isn't grunge. Indie sucks because it isn't grunge.
There are, of course, exceptions. I love undeniable classics like The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Black Sabbath. I like various electronic stuff, and a few indie-ish acts like Minus the Bear. But ultimately because grunge rock is what I grew up with nothing will ever sound as good. So it's not that music sucks more today than it did 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, it's that we don't like the music that's new today as much as we liked the music that was new yesterday, because it's not *ours*. There's also the tendency to forget a lot of the bad acts that cluttered the airwaves and music store shelves and only remember the hits.
Jay
WIth buckethead on guitar? Maybe if Axl has KFC and Les Claypool on the same song I'll listen to it.
I think over time you can just get bored with things. It seems like there's an economic concept about that, diminishing returns or something.
So the pop music now could be about the same in quality as the stuff you grew up with, but just not be as interesting to you. (I mean "you" in a non-specific way) The older stuff at least has the advantage of being associated to various significant memories. I think much of the time when people say they "hate" some pop musician what they mean is they find them uninteresting or silly. They don't necessarily mean listening to them is really such a hateful experience.
Ideally what would happen than is that as you grow older your tastes evolve or become more mature. You should still be able to like new stuff, but it might be stuff less poppish or more complex than what you liked as a teen.
Then again from about the age of 14 my musical tastes were odd. I listened to stuff ranging from They Might be Giants to Clannad to Glenn Miller as a teen. By college I had several Celtic CDs and some African music.
It's just market capture by the people who buy the most music- teenagers. It was only a matter of time before music performed by and for teenage girls crowded out everything else.
Fortunately, we have alternatives. Cheaper music and easier access mean that I can find things I like even though I'm old and grouchy. If things had stayed the way they were, where we had to shell out $15 for a CD that was mostly filler, while listening to crap on the radio, I might have been even grouchier.
I think the music today is just as good as in the past, with more variety, but sometimes it's harder to find without looking. You cannot rely on radio to turn up the good stuff.
I would disagree with the idea that kids listen to music to rebel against parents. When I was actually a kid, we were banned from listening to any sort of "secular" music.
So we had to sneak to listen to the radio, but whether my parents approved or not had nothing to do with it. At that time, standard music was much better than the contemporary Christian music available at the time and I wanted to hear the stuff I heard everyplace else (at school and outside the home).
In fact some of the music my parents listened to I liked and one my favorite albums was my dad's Barry McGuire album with his now Christian version of Eve of Destruction. Another great "father approved" band was Liberation Suite.
I think most kids don't choose music to rebel. They choose what excites their ears and don't really care if the parent likes it or not.
As someone who works in an office where people are usually playing Top-40 radio, it's not that the music is worse (though to be honest it's not to my taste); it's that the entire genre has shifted. Teenagers - yes, that includes white teenagers - are listening to R&B and hip-hop and vocals-driven pop more than anything else. This was happening during the early-to-mid 90s with Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men - of course, Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers were getting a lot of airplay, but they didn't get up as high in the charts and the top-40 stations played them less and less. And what we have now is the logical progression of that.
People have buried guitar rock so many times now and its reanimated corpse always seems to come back, but - like in the heydays of disco or Michael Jackson - it's not the dominant genre now. To equate that with "music got worse" seems very strange.
I think music has gotten worse, but that its MTV's fault.
Used to be an artist could be fairly ugly. I see videos from the 70s of some of these guys and puke a little in my mouth. No way would they have careers today. Just too much like normal people.
Now to be a top end pop star you have to be hot.
Hot, good voice, & a good composer... not many people can pull that off.
So MTV has made looks too much of a factor and musical and vocal talent is less important than being hot and having a good producer (since he can fake the other two for you).
Grandpa Simpson circa 1970-something, in response to a charge by teenage Homer that he didn't understand pop music because he wasn't "with it":
"I used to be With It. But then they changed what It was. Now what I'm With isn't It, and what's It seems scary and weird. It'll happen to yoouuu."
Well, rap today is a whole lot worse than it was even ten years ago. I don't listen enough to other sorts of music to speak on that.
On rap, I think individual genres can go through declines. They can also go through renaissances or revivals. I'm not sure if this will happen with rap. It seems possible though as some rap musicians seem willing to react against the popular image of rap. (In fairness I never liked much rap, but "Arrested Development" was okay and I liked some of the more R&B/Poppish rap like LL Cool J or Queen Latifah)
Granted I was seeming to imply that "Pop" doesn't precisely decline, but I don't think "pop" is that precise a term for a genre. Singers from Connie Francis to Britney Spears were "pop", to some degree, for their respective eras. If I understand it right it just means "mainstream" music that's trying for a generalized, often youthful, audience. I do like some modern pop, but I think the pop I like is the quirkier variants.
"Concert revenue does not actually seem like a very good substitute for CD sales--people only have so many nights a week to stand around in bars."
Very, very few musicians ever made any real money from recording sales. Not that many musicians make a living solely from performing, either - but historically, live performance has supported far more musicians, far more reliably, than has electronic media in any form.
Sturgeon’s Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap."
Dispersion and fragmentation is leading to more good music, but the increase of crappy music is an order of magnitude greater.
Although my formative music years were in the 80's, I'm still finding good new songs on iTunes. However, I have to listen to a lot of bad clips before I find a song I want to keep on my iPod.
(Back in my top 100 radio days, the labels and stations would filter crap for me--of course, who knows what I missed by not doing it myself.)
Even when I find a song like Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" which I love, it usually turns out that I don't want to get any of the other songs off the album. But that's nothing new: 90% of albums have always been crap because they only have one song you really want.
Recent college grad here. I would say while the number of good musicians out there rises, the noise-to-gold ratio is getting worse, in part because the primary cultural chokepoints - radio and MTV - become more homogenized with each passing year. Instead of being on the edge, they've become more and more risk-adverse, especially as Clear Channel has bought up radio stations. I haven't learned of a new artist I like through listening to the radio (except for once in a while listening to Brown University's student-run station) in years, yet I still keep on finding new artists to listen to and discover established acts I didn't know existed. On the other hand, it is unlikely that great artists like MIA would have had a path towards finding an American audience under the old paradigm.
I wouldn't say rap is that bad today. While OutKast has peeked and Idlewild was disappointing, a lot of the stuff Def Jux puts out is good. Atmosphere's latest album is also great. It's just that so much popular rap, such as 50 Cent, are now basically sub-genres of pop. They're what suburban white girls listen to to rebel at their parents and grind to at their first frat party.
Another problem is that as established acts get older, they get tamer with age or can't find a way to improve on their sound. This has happened to some extent with the latest albums the past few years by Air, U2, Bjork, Marylin Manson, PJ Harvey, Garbage and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Also, if there is a genre that has basically plummeted in quality since Napster, it has to be metal. Too much new metal since Lars went on his rampage seems to be a retread of crappy suburban whiners like Staind and Disturbed. Maybe my tastes have just matured with age, but a lot of older stuff like old Metallica, the Melvins, Black Sabbath, etc. sound so much better and ballsier than anything you hear on self-described metal stations these days.
A few writers have also mentioned how my generation and younger are also much more likely to listen to older artists than previous generations (think Juno). A lot of people I know, including myself, own albums by the likes of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Muddy Waters, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Public Enemy, NWA, David Bowie, Bad Brains, Iggy Pop, Jimi Hendrix, Queen, the Doors, etc. Meanwhile, the Boomers weren't going to come home from Woodstock and stock up on Andrews Sisters records. This means that when we go out to buy music, we're a lot more likely to buy CD's from a band that long ago broke up or by a singer who has been dead for a generation. That money goes to the singer's estate, family, etc., instead of the singer and they can't turn around and use that money to make more music. That does change the financial incentives record labels have faced over time.
"Meanwhile, the Boomers weren't going to come home from Woodstock and stock up on Andrews Sisters records."
TR: That is true, although they might have been an outlier on that. I think people who listened to the Andrews sisters at least liked covers of old Tin Pan Alley songs.
Plus I think there was actually a bit of an "Andrews Sisters revival" in the 1970s. In 1972 Bette Midler did a cover of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and there was a popular WWII musical in 1974. One of the Andrews Sisters even did some musical revue in 1971. "The Pointer Sisters", at an early point, were a kind of nostalgia group based on acts like the Andrews.
if there's a link between copyright regimes and music quality music ought to improve as copyright regimes get stricter.
I'm 33. Grunge arrived, full force, on the national scene when I was 16, and it changed the rock genre completely - it was utterly unlike anything that went before, and it is almost impossible to convey to those too young to remember it what a break that represented, for it has always been so. But most pop music is crap, and always has been. My touchstone of bad music is my collection of "Billboard Top Hits of X" CDs that I bought in the mid-90s covering every year from 1975-1989. Some of it is brilliant, beautiful music. However, as bad as much of the stuff on top-40 radio may be (and, to be honest, it's generally pretty good even if it's not my taste), it is orders of magnitude better than Martika's "Toy Soldiers". If you want an older example, try Looking Glass's "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)", or Michael Martin Murphy's "Wildfire". There are times that popular music simply sucks, and this is not one of them.
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band isn't even close to a 3-chord I-IV-V song. By the time you get to "So lemme introduce to you" you're on II. "Sit back and let the evening go" also goes to II (if I'm doing this right in my head) and then leads into the repetition of "Sgt Pepper's Lonely" which modulates through several changes that are a bit too complicated for a schlub guitarist like me to figure out in my head.
"Twist and Shout" is not a Beatles song. "Obladi" sneaks in a drop to the relative minor on "rah" but yeah, I'll give you that one. "Back in the USSR" is almost a 3-chorder except for the modulation on "don't know how lucky you are" which takes you up by thirds through a few other chords.
The basic point is that calling the Beatles 3-chord rock is just extremely strange. From the very start of their career, with songs like "If I Fell", they were dramatically more complex than other bands. Bob Dylan talks about driving around in Colorado in the summer of '63 hearing the Beatles on the radio and thinking, "Yeah, they've got the chords."
"I'm 33. Grunge arrived, full force, on the national scene when I was 16 - it was utterly unlike anything that went before"
TR: I'm 31, I remember when grunge came and thinking to myself "what is this horrible stuff?" I guess I have to recognize intellectually that it was great, even if I still personally dislike it a great deal, while the stuff I listened to then was mostly "junk." This is more an intellectual recognition based on critical consensus, not a personal assent.
Or more simply I'd still listen to old Whitney Houston or Boys II Men before I'd listen to Nirvana again.
Then again my taste is weird. I mean "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)", as goofy as it is, has kind of grown on me.
Note: My taste is not that awful though. I just don't go for "hard" music very often. I think "Queen" is about as hard a music as I get. I'm more into jazz, folk, folk-rock, piano-rock, world, soul, classical, instrumental bluegrass, some '80s New Wave... kind of a restrictive palate I guess.
Music's long tail is certainly a recent phenomenon, and to my mind a great one. Sure, it means that the Top 40 stuff is less consistent than it was in the old days, but frankly the directions that music is going now are exciting. As Bjork said, the best music wins.
By the way, I'll take this opportunity to plug my husband's music podcast. He's really all over the place in his musical taste, and has an extensive library. Though many of his podcasts feature hip-hop (it's what his listeners tend to prefer), he's got jazz, country, R&B, electronica, classical, rock, and even some Indian jams. What is significant though is that most people wouldn't recognize the songs he uses when they look at the playlists, but they are great mixes despite (or perhaps because of) that.
http://mookie1510.podomatic.com
Matt Steinglass-
Hmmm, in a rare moment in internet debates, I may have to admit I was wrong about the Beatles.
I hereby revise my initial comment to say:
"The Gin Blossoms aren't really different than the Beatles. Maybe there were only so many ways to do a guitar rock song with a pop hook."
And I don't mean to get in argument about the Gin Blossoms versus the Beatles. I just think that if you played a Gin Blossoms CD to someone from 1969, they wouldn't be surprised by the sound. The would not view it has abnormal for the time period ( it sounds more produced, but the overall style and structure is not that different).