Pop music, n. A symptom of the inevitable degeneration of the art of music that results from the rise of music as a commodity and the fall in the wealth, and thus interest, of musical ideas worth exploring.
“Pop music” is the soap opera of the music world. At the top of the music tree you have the recognised geniuses that were so influential they changed the course of music and allowed it to explore other meaningful areas, resulting in entire ages – the Baroque, the Classical and the Impressionist, for example. Then you get the ones in between – the composers who explore these established areas and enhance the age by imprinting their own slant, or style. Then come the “lesser” composers, those who emulate the greats and write influential and effective but nevertheless watered down and less imaginative and innovative works, such as modern “classical” and film music.
Then, at the bottom of the pile, you get pop artists – people who know little about musical forms, but know a lot about what sells to the masses and makes the most money. The vast majority of it is churned out for a few months and then forgotten by those masses. It is throw-away music on demand.
But since when have “the masses” ever been right? Judging something as popular has never been a successful benchmark in determining whether it is good. Just look at EastEnders.
Sure, laud them for tricking an audience that gets what it deserves. But don’t blinker people to the point that they don’t even bother to examine what higher pleasures there are in the more major examples of music as an art. The three main problems here are as follows:
The saturation of the music market with relative crap. Here, people think they have a lot of choice, but in fact they are bombarded with many slightly different examples of the same thing. (Thanks for this point go to Richard Stead, who aptly and succintly describes it as "ridiculous choice.") Pop music, regardless of how many pitiful and petty genres there may be, is just a menial exploration of the massive treasure-trove of ideas that music has to offer.
The destruction of decent music education. At least since as far back as when I was at school, music has been taught in a way that makes it come across as dull, stuffy, old-fashioned and boring. Children are taught the same old dull pieces, and as a result people grow up with the stigma that all “classical” music is the same old dull crap.
The problem is perpetual, because adults who grow up to listen to shallow pop music are not likely to introduce their children to anything better. In fact, most pop fans don’t realise that they’ve yet to live, that there is far more music to the cliché recordings of the more boring works of Mozart and Johann Strauss and the glorified karaoke that is pop music.
Imagine this happening in the visual arts. Imagine that the only contact with paintings that people have is the same old boring, black-and-white, generic-looking prints of bygone painters. Their authors might be brilliant, and their fame justified. But if everyone is exposed to limited works, and no one is taught why their works are important to the art, then you can only expect people to turn away from what those works stand for. For younger people - and now, in a world of ever-increasing vanity, older people too - paintings would become uncool.
But there is money in every art, because it is a medium of expression capable of being desirable to people. So, now imagine that entrepreneurs realise the money potential and produce the sort of pretentious, cheap, shallow, abstract tat on display in the lobbies of hotel chains. People would accept these prints as brilliant in comparison. Their attention would be drawn because they look so much better than the boring prints, which are the only things that they can use as a comparator. Soon, the entrepreneurs move in, clever advertising brainwashes the nation, the tat becomes cool and thus very desirable, the entrepreneurs make their money as the masses blindly buy away.
The reason why the above scenario does not happen to visual art, and why so few are capable of putting pop music in context and realising how trivial it is, is this: People are exposed to many stimulating paintings, statues and monuments. Everywhere you look there are free galleries, buildings of different architectural styles and cheap prints of famous pieces. The “wonders of the world” – which are all visual – are preached constantly through TV programmes. Every time you go on holiday you’re likely to come into contact with visual works of art.
On the other hand, you can’t see proper music, it is rarely advertised to a wide and general audience, and it usually costs a lot to go and see live. You don’t see classical concerts on holiday, and any local music is designed to give a flavour of the culture rather than to show you how good the music is. There is no exposure, either for children or adults.
Of course, nowadays, a good “classical” concert can be cheaper than a pop concert. There are the BBC Proms, and “classical” music is almost always cheaper than pop music in the music store. But it’s all too late: People don’t buy (into) it because they don’t know why they should bother. There are two many barriers, most notably social and educational. They are denied access to a wealth of higher pleasures simply because of the ignorance of the person. On the other hand, pop music is everywhere – on the TV and radio, in the music magazines and on the news (usually because a singer has been arrested). It seems that everyone’s talking about it.
An orchestra and a musical genius can say more than you ever could with two guitars, a drum, a singer and a group of mates that come together in a garage. It is a fallacy to believe that, if you provide enough opportunities for people to make music, then the art of music will benefit. All that happens is that the music industry gets flooded.
When a culture is stable (without extreme situations like war and mass hardship) for a while, it gets complacent, and with this it devolves. Similarly, when a culture comes out of an extreme situation, it is kick-started into a flurry of creative activities. “There’s nothing like a good war to give culture a kick-start,” said a colleague of mine, Richard Stead.
Well, he’s right. And we’re seeing the polar opposite of this situation now, in music. There hasn’t been hardship of any kind in order to create the tension, anxiety and emotional extremes necessary to produce great works, and so the great works have given rise to shallow tat. The best music of modern times exists as a servant to the film, where musical devices are reused to death almost to the point of cliché to portray musically the major scenes of box-office films. Even here, evidence can be seen of the superiority of “classical” forms of music over pop music: If Pop is so good, why is it not used in films to portray high drama and suspense as much as orchestral music is?
Another reason why music has gone downhill is that the ideas worth exploring have already been explored. It's all been done. The best pop music can do is repackage these ideas in what appears to be new - that is, in new formats. The band that perhaps most closely provides cutting-edge pop music is The Divine Comedy, although Neil Hannon and Joby Talbot can be regarded more as classical composers than Pop-song makers due to their techniques, musical training and use of orchestral insruments.
Consequently, musical ideas within the Pop world are not only thin on the ground, they’re getting thinner. This can be seen in the pop world’s use of gimmicks that are irrelevant to the music they’re put to. Videos, loud drum beats and lyrics serve either to take attention off the shallowness and lack of quality of the music, or to make up for a lack of musical content. All gimmicks do is show Pop music up for what it is. Good music need never have any gimmicks; it will speak for itself on its own. Examples of gimmicks in Pop music are numerous, and here are some of them:
Not that its audience is capable of seeing any of this. If they actually bothered listening – genuinely listening – to a broad range of proper music, then they might actually find that it’s pretty good. It takes time to appreciate good music. They’d sooner ignore and ridicule it instead, and they’re allowed to do so because covertly it’s socially encouraged. They’re as closed-minded as those devout religious nutters who denounce all other faiths, even though they know nothing about those other faiths.
The best music is capable of telling a story with the music itself – in the melody and the structure – without any of the faff that comes with Pop music. That gimmicks are routine is testament to the fact that Pop has nothing relevant to say. Remove the lyrics, the over-the-top, hyper-cool drum beats and rhythms, the videos and the hype, and what you have left is what any given piece of music – if, in some cases, it can be called music – is worth. (In the case of Pop music, the end result is very little. In the case of rap as a definition, there is no music at all - more about this later.) After all, how can a music-maker be a master of his art if he doesn’t even know how to commit something to manuscript, compose in a number of time signatures, deal with more than a couple of simultaneous harmonies or write for more than one or two instruments?
The musical rules of the vast majority of Pop are overly restrictive, and unnecessarily so. But this is deliberate – it’s an excuse to do put in less effort. Why bother enhancing the art of music, when merely broadening it sells well enough? It goes back to what I said earlier, about why providing more opportunities does not necessarily yield better music.
On another point, a problem is pop music’s perpetual popularity and coolness. Why would people, as a mass movement, listen to anything else? The crowd goes with the crowd, and to do so is comfortable, easy and convenient. Pop music sounds nice and thus requires no thought, and it is widely socially acceptable. Why destabilise a comfortable situation?
The answer is that, while Pop might be convenient to its fans, more advanced forms offer much more. They give inspiration. They have the capability of conveying ideas in more depth, are rich in innovation and ideas, and are awe-inspiring to listen to considering the work that goes into them. The best composers can re-represent images in music – Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote, or variation 11 of Rachmaninov’s Paganini rhapsody – and use tricks of sound to convey the most tragic and exhilarating of emotions.
All Pop music does at its best is to use instruments unusual to Pop and apply them to Pop music, to use strong language to gain attention by pathetic means, or to use musical devices that are new to the Pop music world but were old hat centuries ago to composers of finer music. Compared to a half-decent piano concerto, a pop song is a piss in the park. Gone are the decades of training at musical academies, not because they’re no longer conducive to producing the best music but because they’re no longer needed to sell records and they're no longer a priority of the Public. People have been brainwashed into listening to watered-down crap, they like it because they don’t know any other, and neither producer nor consumer thus complains. The consumers are happily blinkered, and the producers are happily lining their pockets. What a wonderful equilibrium.
From a technical point of view, Pop music is tat. All composers throughout time have written music in the general form it takes today in Pop – by writing songs, which consists of musical themes with lyrics. But they had the good sense to acknowledge that this was hardly the be-all-and-end-all of music. Instead of restraining themselves to an unnecessarily tedious and restrictive form, they used a wide variety of instruments and themes, produced comprehensive pieces of music that spanned far longer than a pitiful three minutes, and contributed much more to music than Pop ever will. The music of Muse sets the latest Pop precedent, because its song-writers have studied the great musical forms and incorporate them into their own music to give them richness and newness not seen in pop music before. Perhaps pivotally, their melodies are predominantly developed from playing around on a piano, rather than on a guitar. Yet even these innovations were already explored centuries ago. Once again, it might be new for Pop, but it’s old hat to music as a whole. In the case of Muse, it seems that the vast majority of the musical influence comes from the first movement of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2. (Compare the chorus melody of "Space Dementia" on the album Origin of Symmetry, the piano riff in "Butterflies and Hurricanes" on the album Absolution, and parts of the melody in "Rule by Secrecy" on the same album). Most of the other ideas by Muse simply incorporate semitonal key signature shifts, simple tonic triads and arpeggios.
There is a common conception that the definition of music is a pleasant sound. If you ask me, that’s utter crap. Music is a progressive melody, a story written in sounds that augment the story. Anything else – beats and rhythms being notable examples – are merely parts of music, things that augment the story. So, in fact, if you ask me, rap “music” isn’t music at all. I don’t care whether or not rap music is an attempt to convey genuine emotions and ghetto hardships, it still ain’t music. At its core, it’s just some words loosely spoken in time to a beat. Rap is, at its heart, poetry; what it has got to do with music, I have no idea. As far as musical excellence goes, it doesn’t fare too well – in fact, it’s hard to think of anything more primitive. It isn’t that I’m knocking tribal cultures in the Amazon that use drums and words as the only components of their “music”. Such pieces aren’t written to be good, they’re written to serve a specific purpose, such as in religious and shamanic rituals. The tribes themselves would not claim that it is good music in itself, if they understood music in context.
Music demands the most from writers, performers and listeners. Back at the other end of the spectrum, Pop music is formulaic to the point of ridicule. This is why there are so many genres. The more genres there are, the less free the music in each genre is likely to be, because it is more strictly defined. This is a travesty for musical variety. Here are the ingredients of the ultimate pop song:
The method is equally simple: Get the beat and rhythm going throughout. Keep the guitars as simple as possible, repeating the same short sequence endlessly. Alternate the main theme/melody and chorus endlessly, with no variation. Repeat the four base notes endlessly. For the lyrics, choose words that have long vowel sounds. Sing the vowels slowly and in an exaggerated way to make it sound more interesting. Use cool instruments that people accept not because they enhance music but simply because they’re cool and expected.
It really is that formulaic. All you need to do is choose a pop “genre” and exploit it by reusing the devices that that genre offers. It doesn’t matter whether you create something new. (For an excellent case study of formulaic use of chords, listen to anything by Oasis. For lyrics that string together sayings and clichés, listen to Coldplay. For nonsensical lyrics, listen to Muse.) The creation of John Peel Day makes me laugh: How many of the acts he introduced have gone on to revolutionise, redefine or significantly enhance music? Or even, for that matter, Pop music?
All of this brings me, with much evidence, to my main argument: Pop music is by its very nature crap compared to “classical” (orchestral?) music because, while the latter contributes to the enhancement of music itself, the former merely exists to make money, pander to the masses and flatter the egos of the performers. The only ultimate and meaningful goal of any art should be to enhance that art – to give it interesting new directions that redefine what it is and how it is perceived. It is organic. Pop music has, instead, made it stale. Its protagonists staunchly adhere to the philosophy “we’re making money as it is, we’re getting what we want and we’re getting the attention that we crave. Why change it?”
You can tell good music just by closing your eyes and listening. You can tell brilliant music by studying the notes on the manuscript. Both these methods of appreciation give no haven to musical pretense, hype and general crap, and they allow you to see what is truly left behind - if there is anything left at all.
