While my intro post talks about some attitudes toward music, it doesn't really say much about what I plan to do with this blog. Here's a brief post about some of the projects I am planning
-A journey through pop: I'm planning to spend some quality listening time with many of the pop artists of today: Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Kanye, Taylor Swift, etc, and see what I notice about their music. I'm not so much aiming to praise or criticize the music on abstract merit. I'm planning to see what I find interesting, where I find value in the music and what I think some of the appeals are, as well as my general like/dislike of the material and why. My goal is to try and listen to the music for content, both musical and lyrical. I am going to refrain from consulting other analyses or reviews, in an effort to make this primarily a listening journal. I will allow myself resources like wikipedia for general information about the groups, and lyrics transcriptions. This will be the first time in years that I will have really payed attention to modern popular music, and hopefully the musical skills I have acquired combined with my lack of too many prior experience and entrenched opinions on the subject will lead to interesting insights.
-general ideas: When you spend a lot of time with music, you often come up with some ideas of a more general nature concerning music. I plan to post about some of the ones I think are interesting.
-classical music in Cleveland: While I'm a poor grad student who doesn't have money to blow on the excellent Cleveland Orchestra every week, I will be performing in or attending various concerts of amateur, student, and professional natures. I'm definitely planning some posts on these experiences.
And of course, anything else that strikes my fancy might end up on this blog. You can expect to see occasional material about the Cleveland Cavaliers, especially come playoff time. The blog will primarily remain musically oriented, but expect a few posts on other topics now and then,
-Matt W
Showing posts with label general. Show all posts
Showing posts with label general. Show all posts
Friday, August 14, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Don't Let Me Get Me(Why does pop music hate itself?)
"L.A. told me/You'll be a pop star/All you have to change/is everything you are."
-Pink, "Don't Let Me Get Me"
Pop music has often been, as a concept, disliked and criticized for a perceived lack of authenticity, conformist nature, and derivative content. You'd think the pop musicians would want to defend their art, or else just laugh all the way to the bank, but in reality, pop musicians are among the most frequent critics of pop music. In addition to the line from Pink above, here are a couple more examples.
"I'm in my room it's a typical Tuesday night/I'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like . . . But she wears short skirts I wear T-shirts/She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers"
-Taylor Swift, "You Belong With Me"
Joe Jonas, in the Disney Channel movie, "Camp Rock," plays a pop singer who decries his own "cookie cutter pop music" in favor of . . . yet more pop music.
There is certainly something to be said for the content of the criticisms in general. A lot of pop music is very similar, and many of the stars do serve as fronts for songwriters and handlers who create the content and image. Still, it's not like derivative music or handling is a new thing. Stax Records, back in its glory days, was literally a factory that churned out hits and stars. Even Led Zeppelin, a band almost universally considered great today, debuted on an album that was famously(and in my opinion accurately) described in Rolling Stone Magazine as yet another generic blues rock LP.
The trend of pop criticizing itself seems to be fairly new though. Expression and individuality are old themes, but in the 60s, 70s, and 80s eras of pop music, I have not encountered many examples of these themes being expressed through the lens of pop music criticizing itself as a genre(though I am certainly not an expert). If anyone knows of some prominent instances, let me know in the comments.
So why do artists such as Taylor Swift and Pink feel a need to criticize the genre of music to which they belong? One possibility I am sure that someone must have suggested is the rise of the music video. Combining the music with visuals makes a marketable image more important, or so the argument goes. YouTube only makes music videos more accessible. The official video for Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" has over 11 million views.
Still, I am hesitant to buy into this theory too much. Fans in older eras of popular music still talk about how they identified with the music and used music tastes as a way of expressing themselves. Also, it's easy to find artists for whom image became an important aspect of their musical identity: Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, et. al. Even if image has become more important, I think it is still only tangentially related to the main question.
Another theory, and one I personally think gets more to the heart of the question, is the idea that anti-pop ideas were ushered into the mainstream by the rise of music that originally was not a part of pop. If you are going to compete with established mainstream bands who already have millions of entrenched listeners, you have to use every angle at your disposal. So, a natural choice is the powerful nonconformity angle combined with the idea of one's choice of music as an aspect of personal identity, which leads very quickly to using pop's status of popularity against it. "How can you be a nonconformist if you are listening to the same music as everyone else? Come listen to us and you'll really be different from everyone. Look how few fans we have."
Eventually, groups using these ideas found their way into the mainstream. More radio stations, cheaper recording technology, and very recently the internet, made it easier for lesser known bands to gain exposure. After all, how many top 40 stations does one city need? In order to compete, music offerings branched out. The ultimate result is that some of the anti-pop groups became pop, and their ideas became a part of the mainstream.
Today, the whole sentiment seems to have reached an absurd level. If you think about it, who really believes that Avril Lavigne isn't a pop artist? We're either in denial, or we have just accepted the whole anti-pop attitude of pop music as a quirk of the culture. To me, it's kind of like when politicians promise to fund every program, cut taxes, and balance the budget. Just not going to happen.
At some point the pendulum is going to swing back, and I think there is already some evidence that this is starting to happen. I'm hearing more of Lady Gaga's burlesque embrace of the star culture, and less of Avril Lavigne's teenage rebellion on the radio these days. The state of contemporary hip-hop/rap shows similar signs. This is a topic I plan to revisit once my personal listening journey through contemporary pop music gets started in earnest.
-Matt W
-Pink, "Don't Let Me Get Me"
Pop music has often been, as a concept, disliked and criticized for a perceived lack of authenticity, conformist nature, and derivative content. You'd think the pop musicians would want to defend their art, or else just laugh all the way to the bank, but in reality, pop musicians are among the most frequent critics of pop music. In addition to the line from Pink above, here are a couple more examples.
"I'm in my room it's a typical Tuesday night/I'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like . . . But she wears short skirts I wear T-shirts/She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers"
-Taylor Swift, "You Belong With Me"
Joe Jonas, in the Disney Channel movie, "Camp Rock," plays a pop singer who decries his own "cookie cutter pop music" in favor of . . . yet more pop music.
There is certainly something to be said for the content of the criticisms in general. A lot of pop music is very similar, and many of the stars do serve as fronts for songwriters and handlers who create the content and image. Still, it's not like derivative music or handling is a new thing. Stax Records, back in its glory days, was literally a factory that churned out hits and stars. Even Led Zeppelin, a band almost universally considered great today, debuted on an album that was famously(and in my opinion accurately) described in Rolling Stone Magazine as yet another generic blues rock LP.
The trend of pop criticizing itself seems to be fairly new though. Expression and individuality are old themes, but in the 60s, 70s, and 80s eras of pop music, I have not encountered many examples of these themes being expressed through the lens of pop music criticizing itself as a genre(though I am certainly not an expert). If anyone knows of some prominent instances, let me know in the comments.
So why do artists such as Taylor Swift and Pink feel a need to criticize the genre of music to which they belong? One possibility I am sure that someone must have suggested is the rise of the music video. Combining the music with visuals makes a marketable image more important, or so the argument goes. YouTube only makes music videos more accessible. The official video for Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" has over 11 million views.
Still, I am hesitant to buy into this theory too much. Fans in older eras of popular music still talk about how they identified with the music and used music tastes as a way of expressing themselves. Also, it's easy to find artists for whom image became an important aspect of their musical identity: Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, et. al. Even if image has become more important, I think it is still only tangentially related to the main question.
Another theory, and one I personally think gets more to the heart of the question, is the idea that anti-pop ideas were ushered into the mainstream by the rise of music that originally was not a part of pop. If you are going to compete with established mainstream bands who already have millions of entrenched listeners, you have to use every angle at your disposal. So, a natural choice is the powerful nonconformity angle combined with the idea of one's choice of music as an aspect of personal identity, which leads very quickly to using pop's status of popularity against it. "How can you be a nonconformist if you are listening to the same music as everyone else? Come listen to us and you'll really be different from everyone. Look how few fans we have."
Eventually, groups using these ideas found their way into the mainstream. More radio stations, cheaper recording technology, and very recently the internet, made it easier for lesser known bands to gain exposure. After all, how many top 40 stations does one city need? In order to compete, music offerings branched out. The ultimate result is that some of the anti-pop groups became pop, and their ideas became a part of the mainstream.
Today, the whole sentiment seems to have reached an absurd level. If you think about it, who really believes that Avril Lavigne isn't a pop artist? We're either in denial, or we have just accepted the whole anti-pop attitude of pop music as a quirk of the culture. To me, it's kind of like when politicians promise to fund every program, cut taxes, and balance the budget. Just not going to happen.
At some point the pendulum is going to swing back, and I think there is already some evidence that this is starting to happen. I'm hearing more of Lady Gaga's burlesque embrace of the star culture, and less of Avril Lavigne's teenage rebellion on the radio these days. The state of contemporary hip-hop/rap shows similar signs. This is a topic I plan to revisit once my personal listening journey through contemporary pop music gets started in earnest.
-Matt W
Monday, August 10, 2009
Come Sail Away With Me
Music is a part of everyone's life. We all live in an environment filled with it, a great many of us at least find something we like and take enjoyment in it, some latch on to a specific subset and culture and establish part of an identity through it, and a minority devote themselves heavily to formal training in creating, performing, and understanding some type of music. As someone who studied music in college for four years, I belong to that last category.
On one hand, it is kind of nice to think of myself as a trained expert in the field, but on the other, the vast majority of my training focused on studying and preparing me to deal with music written a long time ago by people in Europe and the United States, a small sampling when compared to the totality of music. It is definitely an amazing collection, filled with many great works of completely divergent styles, but still a tiny sliver of what music as a whole offers us.
More to the point though, it isn't such narrow training that really makes anyone a musician or musical expert. Understanding music is first and foremost about listening to it. It is a medium that is meant to be heard. And one doesn't need any training or expertise at all. Anyone can understand music. All it takes is the willingness to pay attention and listen. Instead of making music a backdrop against which we live our lives, we have to bring it to the forefront, give it careful attention. Then, we begin to notice things. We hear things we didn't notice before. And we can begin to ask ourselves: what makes the music we listen to what it is?
Formal training is by no means useless. It provides ways to quantify and normalize, exposes us to ideas that we probably wouldn't come up with in a vacuum. It gives us a context in which to understand how the music we listen to in a sort of abstract did or would have been expected to fit into the world around it.
Still, everyone's understanding and valuation of music is ultimately going to be a bit different. Of course, that is what makes music, as well as the rest of the world, so diverse and interesting.
So, this is where the idea of "The Three Musics" comes in. The concept dates back to the medieval ages and is associated with a philosopher, mathematician, and musician named Boethius. He specified three branches of music. Musica Universalis was the music of the spheres. It was a theoretical music created by the perfect proportions formed by the various heavenly bodies(at this time a very conveniently proportioned geocentric universe was very much the belief). Musica Humana was the music of humans. It referred to the music of the human body. Finally, Musica Instrumentalis was music as we think of it: the sounds produced by singers and musical instruments.
This model seems bizarre to us today, but at the core is an interesting concept: music existing in relation to the world around it. This isn't quite how medievalists would have looked at it, but it is how I plan to approach this blog. Primarily, I'm going to be exploring music and musical topics, but I know I will get into other things as well. I have a few listening projects for myself that I plan to write about in the near future.
I hope the experience is enjoyable and enriching for both myself and those of you who decide to read on. I'll always be interested and appreciative of feedback, ideas, and suggestions, so if you have something to say, post a comment.
-Matt
On one hand, it is kind of nice to think of myself as a trained expert in the field, but on the other, the vast majority of my training focused on studying and preparing me to deal with music written a long time ago by people in Europe and the United States, a small sampling when compared to the totality of music. It is definitely an amazing collection, filled with many great works of completely divergent styles, but still a tiny sliver of what music as a whole offers us.
More to the point though, it isn't such narrow training that really makes anyone a musician or musical expert. Understanding music is first and foremost about listening to it. It is a medium that is meant to be heard. And one doesn't need any training or expertise at all. Anyone can understand music. All it takes is the willingness to pay attention and listen. Instead of making music a backdrop against which we live our lives, we have to bring it to the forefront, give it careful attention. Then, we begin to notice things. We hear things we didn't notice before. And we can begin to ask ourselves: what makes the music we listen to what it is?
Formal training is by no means useless. It provides ways to quantify and normalize, exposes us to ideas that we probably wouldn't come up with in a vacuum. It gives us a context in which to understand how the music we listen to in a sort of abstract did or would have been expected to fit into the world around it.
Still, everyone's understanding and valuation of music is ultimately going to be a bit different. Of course, that is what makes music, as well as the rest of the world, so diverse and interesting.
So, this is where the idea of "The Three Musics" comes in. The concept dates back to the medieval ages and is associated with a philosopher, mathematician, and musician named Boethius. He specified three branches of music. Musica Universalis was the music of the spheres. It was a theoretical music created by the perfect proportions formed by the various heavenly bodies(at this time a very conveniently proportioned geocentric universe was very much the belief). Musica Humana was the music of humans. It referred to the music of the human body. Finally, Musica Instrumentalis was music as we think of it: the sounds produced by singers and musical instruments.
This model seems bizarre to us today, but at the core is an interesting concept: music existing in relation to the world around it. This isn't quite how medievalists would have looked at it, but it is how I plan to approach this blog. Primarily, I'm going to be exploring music and musical topics, but I know I will get into other things as well. I have a few listening projects for myself that I plan to write about in the near future.
I hope the experience is enjoyable and enriching for both myself and those of you who decide to read on. I'll always be interested and appreciative of feedback, ideas, and suggestions, so if you have something to say, post a comment.
-Matt
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