A music epiphany...or Musipiphany if you will

[BluTakDuck]

Pop music is not written by musicians or songwriters.

Now, that being the main gist of the piece, i feel i need to clarify a few points before you go all dissapproving on me.

Pop music or Popular Music to use it's old timey name, was a genre named and created as a catchall term for music that was easy to enjoy. The sort of unassuming, non-threatening, mild mannered material that can be played anywhere at any time and offend only a minority of people. Anything that gets into the top 40 can be classified as pop music. Yes, Limp Bizkit, and now Rage against the Machine are Pop music, as is Eminem, Marilyn Manson, The Offspring. Anyone sufficiently popular to be counted on the Pop chart, becomes pop music.

Pop music is a pigeon holey sort of a term, that can encompass many many different things, whilst being nothing at all in fact. Ask someone to define a pop music record and you will get hundreds of different responses, most of them drawing attention to style, structure and lyrical content. Rap became Pop when people realised you could make money from it. Rap Metal became pop once people realised you could make money from it. Any genre you care to mention, if people have discovered that there is significant money to be made from it, and produces it to fit a certain style, becomes pop. Groups like REM and Maroon 5, though at completely opposite ends of the blandness scale, are essentially the same genre. Inoffensive songs about being in love with someone, the world being difficult, things getting you down, looking at the good things. Pop music.

Musicians and song writers are artists essentially. There is a great deal of difference between a song writer and a singer. A song writer has spent possibly years of their life working on their craft, building and composing music that they will be able to market to people. (Because it is a business once you get to the stage of selling it). Singers however, have (possibly) a good voice, some sort of saleable appearance...and that's it. They go through vocal training and learn to use their voice "correctly" and are brought on board a musical project in the same way a spokesperson is brought on board an advertising campaign. They are essentially the salespeople for the song. The song is the commodity, and they are selling it to you.

When i say that they learn to use their voice correctly i am of course being "sarcastic". It occurs to me that you could turn on any radio station anywhere in the country and hear the same song, the same vocal style, the same musical arrangement, but a completely different artist. The commodification of music has sucked all the soul out of it. Because it has become a business, they have streamlined and commercialised it. So there is no room for experimentation in Pop. No time for long instrumental pieces. They are selling you a product, and the way they can do that most easily is with "singers" preferably these days, singers that ordinary people can relate to. One of the most important rules in sales is that of relating to your customer.

Because they have "streamlined" and "downsized" their business, there is only room for standardised products. There can be no factory seconds, and so any stench of difference is cleansed to within an inch of its life, lest it affect sales. Standardisation is the name of the game now. And with standardisation comes mediocrity, banality, lack of thought or imagination and a deadening of the product, so much so that the industry itself blames its own demise on the consumers for not consuming enough. Never mind the fact that the songs are all sounding vaguely exactly the same now, or that you could swing a cat in a tv studio and hit someone who has released an album or a single. It's obviously the audience that are doing it wrong. The method cannot possibly fail. It's obviously the case that the people who the music is made for are wrong.

They say that the internet is killing the music industry. That people aren't spending enough money on albums. It couldn't possibly be that the music being played on the radio and on the tv is by someone with no discernible talent of their own (save for the fact that they can hold a note or two), and that these ten a penny "singers" are springing up in literal droves on the internet, some even better than those that do make songs that get into the charts. In my opinion the internet is saving music, and reviving the ghost of what was once a great industry, before the big companies came in and removed any trace of creativity or originality. It's just that now the big companies can't hack it in the competitive market, they're crying out that the new way isn't fair. That they hadn't planned for it, and that they didn't know it could go this way. Well tough. You should have thought of that before you ruined music.

As Jello Biafra says in "MTV Get off the air" Could it be that you made one too many lousy records?

Pop music (not music that becomes defined as pop. Music that is written specifically under the heading "pop music") is written by scientists. IF you listen to any pop song on the radio now, you will find that they follow a certain formula. Every sub genre has it's own trademarks and signatures, but by and large you can basically predict how these songs go. Try it out for yourself. Find a pop song you have not heard before and see if you can tell when the chorus is coming up, when the bridge is coming up, when the solo/middle eight section is coming up and when the surging key change is coming up. These are the standard elements of the pop song, and they are ever present.

A writer of pop songs knows exactly what to put where. Popular music is popular because, like anything popular, it is safe and predictable. For some reason people really like predictability. Predictability becomes a hallmark of skill and talent. These people are basically taking the equation for a song, fitting the melody, the tempo, the key around this skeletal structure, finding a singer that suits the style and putting out the songs. They are not creating anything artistic, anymore than i am performing mathematical calculations by writing the numbers one to fifty in ascending order.

[LMNO]

I disagree with the OP, due to the existence of the massive wave changes we have seen in pop music. 

If there is a formula in pop music, it is basically "rising Niche Genre + $1,000,000".

If you look at the musical trends, what you'll see is a decade-long burbling of some kind of low-level music that only a minority of people listen to, which is then chosen by an A&R man and thrown into a studio with a million bucks to play with.

Jazz, Soul, Rock, Country, Punk, Goth, Hip Hop, Electronica... You can find this example everywhere.

But what I find interesting is that you think the masses aren't playing along anymore.  But pop music sales are still killing every other kind of music out there.  I'm sure that you don't like the way it sounds, but take a look at the top albums from the last three years:

Best Selling Album 2007
Noel / Josh Groban ~ 3,699,000

Best Selling Albums 200
Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends / Coldplay ~ 2,144,000

Best Selling Albums 200
Fearless / Taylor Swift ~ 3,217,000

Seems to be pop music, doesn't it? 


There are other points to make, but I'll get to them later.

[BluTakDuck]

I see that pop is still outselling every other kind or music. But that's why it's pop. It's popular. It appeals to the widest demographic.

The internet, aside from killing the music industry, has allowed people to find exactly the kind of music that they want to listen to, thereby seperating out the audience base for music in general. Before the internet, if you wanted to hear Jazz, there was maybe one radio station, once a week that had a jazz hour or two. Now if you want Jazz, not only can you click on a dedicated Jazz station, you can find a station dedicated to any one of the numerous versions of Jazz that exist. In the same way that pornography, and perhaps fetish in general, has spread wider because people can find exactly what they want, and in many cases request exactly what they want, radio stations have found that there is an audience for smaller, more niche markets. This is where the musical auteurs live and work. Where they can have complete control over what they create, and how it turns out.

It seems that the more freedom people get creatively, the smaller the "pop" genre becomes. As it encompasses the new up and coming noise, it incorporates them into itself and just continues onwards. There is almost a narrative line to the changes in pop music, you can see what it came from, and the steps to where it is now. It is so formulaic that you can predict trends and tastes. Anything that may potentially make money, gets appropriated and then diluted to fit the basic style and structure that already exists. In this way it can appeal to the biggest audience. That was mainly the point i was making.

[LMNO]

It is so formulaic that you can predict trends and tastes.

Oh yeah?  Then let me know what the next million-selling sound will be, and I'll cut you in for 10% of what I make when I cash in.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I define "pop" as any music that has nothing to say, and says it every 10 minutes on the radio.

[LMNO]

I LOVE YOU AND I'M SAD AND I WONDER HOW MUCH THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT BEING SAD AND IN LOVE.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I LOVE YOU AND I'M SAD AND I WONDER HOW MUCH THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT BEING SAD AND IN LOVE.

I will never forgive you for exposing myself to "Tear Drops on My Guitar".

Pray that you out-live me, because if you don't, I will desecrate your grave and laugh all the way to prison.

[LMNO]

As your Designated Music Playlist Programmer™, your satisfaction is not my concern.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

As your Designated Music Playlist Programmer™, your satisfaction is not my concern.

Okay, that's it.  The entire East coast will pay for your impiety.

[LMNO]

Wooo!  Nor'Easter!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Wooo!  Nor'Easter!

"Rain" can include things other than water, sir.

Oh, yes.

[LMNO]

Right about now is when I would WOMP a picture entitled "Shit Surfing".



If I had access to photobucket, that is.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Right about now is when I would WOMP a picture entitled "Shit Surfing".



If I had access to photobucket, that is.

I was thinking "shit blizzard", but that will do nicely.

Also, how come I can see stuff from TGG's photobucket, and not my own?

[Cramulus]

I liked the OP. You seem to be highlighting a familiar tension between the mainstream and the avant garde. What you are describing is a very old dance.


People are attracted to novelty. Hearing the same sound every year is boring. So in order to retain its power, the Mainstream has to continually find new inputs, new modes, new products.

The Avant Garde is bored by the mainstream--everything revolutionary, everything countercultural, everything experimental, everything that isn't the mainstream gets its power from being different from the mainstream. The existence of a "norm" gives "indie music" its power.

The Mainstream recognizes that power-outside-itself and aims to capture it. It distills the essence of that media and commodifies it, turns it into a product, something that it can sell. Over the years, the mainstream has gotten very efficient at doing this.


This isn't just limited to music! Every single avant-garde movement experiences this cycle. Skateboarders were lazy stoners from CA who sucked at their job (cleaning giant swimming pools) and started throwing parties whenever some rich guy went on vacation while he got his pool cleaned. People got into skateboarding because they saw images of these cool cultural drop outs, and they wanted some of that power, so they bought a skateboard too. Being a skateboarder was cool for the same reason that punk was cool, for the same reason that grunge was cool, for the same reason that any underground music is cool, it's a rejection of the status quo.

Fast Forward 20 years --- the only reason my little brother knows who the Ramones are is because they're the soundtrack for some Tony Hawk game.  Whatever revolution those things once stood for has been totally sublimated by the Machine^TM.

The counterculture provides the input for the next iteration of culture.

The mainstream seizes this power and markets it.

The counterculture reacts to this by inventing something which is dangerously outside of the current boundaries.

The mainstream reacts to this by re-packaging it in a safe form. Repetition is encouraged. As soon as a band comes up with a vaguely new sound (like maybe MGMT), it paves the way for 10 bands with the same sound to profit from it (ie Passion Pit).


You can't sweat this. It's natural. On a long enough timeline, every ounce of cool will disappear or be corrupted. This just opens the door for new ways to be cool.


"pop music" is the result of the music market being really fucking big. It's not trying to be the best music, it's just the music with the broadest appeal. As you said, it is inoffensive doggerel by design. It gets stuck in your head because they have it down to a science.

One of the troubles in wall-smashing, though, is that many of us knock down a wall, then use those same bricks to build a new and different wall.  One can liken this to a common experience: Many guitarists admire Jimi Hendrix for being innovative, so they try to diligently copy everything he had already done, thinking they are somehow better for it.  It's as if Hendrix had smashed a wall, and these guitarists, by emulating and imitating him, were very meticulously picking up the bricks and building a new wall.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Cram, Nenlso said something along those lines:  "By the time you've heard of it, it's a shrink-wrapped Conspiracy™ product."