These days, it seems shuffle is all the rage. Driving in our cars, out jogging, at work, whatever the situation, it seems a great many of us provide music for the occasion by simply putting our media players on shuffle. Some people use it less, while others I know rarely listen to music in any other way. But either way, it's here and we use it.
Shuffle is a pretty new thing. It appeared in significant fashion only once large libraries of music became easily accessible and portable, essentially developing alongside the popularization of spacious computer hard drives and especially portable media players, most notably the now ubiquitous iPod.
As recent as 10-15 years ago, if you wanted to listen to music, you popped a CD into your CD player and hit the play button. Sure, computer media players existed, but hard drives were quite small compared to the amount of space music files occupied. Computers were mainly used for downloading music and burning it to CD or burning replica or mix CDs. If you wanted to shuffle music, the options available were scant: shuffle a single CD(or maybe several if you had a big expensive multi-CD machine), take the time to make a specific mix CD, or constantly rifle through your collection and switch CDs all the time. Go back to the pre-compact disc era and even shuffling a single album becomes difficult. You had to manually find tracks with a record needle or on magnetic tape. Now, anyone can walk around with 80 gigabytes of music in their pocket and randomize all or any subset of it on demand.
This seemingly simple development is huge and has clear ramifications on the manner in which music is experienced and even created. Pre-shuffle, if someone bought a CD, the most likely and obvious manner in which they would listen to it was in order, maybe all the way through if it was good. Now, some people don't even listen to their new music until it comes up in a general shuffle of a much larger playlist.
As a creator of music, knowing the likely way in which the audience will listen to a set of discrete tracks allows one to structure them in an intentional manner. The most obvious example of this would be programmatic albums, but even aside from this, there are a myriad of albums for which it seems pretty clear the order of the tracks was carefully chosen. Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" is a great example in my mind. The tracks aren't expressing an explicit sequence, but the album creates lulls, contrasts, thematicism, and intrigue with the track ordering. The frenetic and tense nature of "On the Run" gives way to the ominous quiet and ticking of clocks in "Time," creating a very noticeable atmosphere, for example. Listening to the two tracks out of context or order creates a vastly different experience of them.
Shuffle changes this dynamic from both the sides of the composer and the audience. The composer no longer has any reason to use album organization as part of the artistic idea of an album if listeners cannot reasonable be expected to listen to albums in a manner that keeps album ordering reasonably intact. On the other hand, listeners will listen to albums that do place importance on track order(most albums don't explicitly claim the importance of listening to them in order, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there) out of order and change that part of the experience from the artist's original intent.
From personal experience, I have actually had people tell me about listening to excerpts from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" on shuffle, and that this is an explicitly programmatic work is no secret. Musically, the tracks were not designed as singles and possess an incredible amount of interrelation. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest draws of the album: its intricacy. Regardless of whether one considers it positive or negative, it's a huge part of the experience. Listening to "The Wall" in fragmented and disordered form is what led an acquaintance of mine to describe the album to me as "'Comfortably Numb' and a bunch of bad songs."
That's the power of shuffle.
Showing posts with label general ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label general ideas. Show all posts
Friday, September 4, 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
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