Why is modern pop music so terrible?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

See wh'am sayin!

[Shooshie]

I am a flute player since 3rd grade, and last summer picked it up again, learning "oldies" from the last 200 years to play for my mom's senior center and such just for fun. The melodies are distinct (about 180 of them in my repertoire now) - one can play them on the flute with no accompaniment and everyone knows exactly what tune I am playing and can hum or sing along.

Nowadays, from the last thirty years or so, the complexity of the melody has become more and more minimal, whereas it may consist primarily of 2 or 3 notes that are merely repeated against a different chord backdrop. (Bm, G, D, A or thereabouts?) I've often wondered how copyright manages to differentiate such melodies! (Maybe it can't, leading to another "safety net" protecting against copyright infringement lawsuits!)

So, I've become a bit prejudiced in my judgement of pop music, considering the question - "Can it be played on a flute?" If not, then what is this thing, really? An arrangement?

Terry

Same here, Terry. I am a saxophonist, but when anyone wants me to get out the instrument and play along, I get out the flute (reason: no reeds! Reeds take a good 14 to 20 hours a week for me to maintain). I'm a pretty good flutist, having played the flute book in a lot of musicals, sometimes doubling, and sometimes just flute. So, when someone wants to hear a song, I just play it. I don't generally have to think too much about it; just play the song. It almost like singing, except for sometimes flamming a note, creatively to cover for my fingers going to the wrong place. But my repertoire ends in the 1980s, mainly because of disco. How do you play disco on a solo flute? Prior to that, there were lush and wonderful John Denver songs, Paul Simon, McCartney and Lennon, and the list goes on and on and on and on. But BeeGees? Forget it. Play three notes, two beats each, descending chromatically, then dance around for a bar or two and do it again. You can vamp creatively in between if you want, but it still doesn't make a lot of difference.

Get up into the recent past, and you can sort of play "Oops, I Did it Again" but most of Britney's output works only when there's a full stage of real musicians providing the noise. While I like Lady Gaga, the person, and I love her voice and vocal abilities and consider her a consummate musician, I'm not a big fan of her stage show or album material. She impressed me with her singing before she was Lady Gaga, and her recording with Tony Bennett. She's a singer who knows what she wants to do and has the range to do it. But that doesn't sell arenas, so she leads two lives. One, the pop diva, pays the bills. The other is the actual musician that she is. I don't know if she sees it that way, but I do.

I'm excited about a project I'm working on right now — and should be mixing instead of writing this — in which I believe the singer/songwriter has found a balance between pop, folk, and something entirely her own that restores depth to guitar/vocal solo work. Beautiful stuff. Time will tell. It's encouraging that local musicians often stop to hear her before/after their gigs. I've seen them stand up near the stage and look back at friends and mouth "WOW!" I hope the magic gets past my mixing, which feels rusty these days, but I keep eliminating plugins and dialing down the settings, and it just gets better.

I don't think pop music is over. I think we've just been down a single path for far too long, and that people are looking for a Pied Piper to lead them another direction. When Janis Ian wrote "At 17" she proved that a successful pop singer did not have to be the prettiest girl at the prom, and "Stars" cemented the idea that sentimentality did not have to be cloying or vapid. Joni Mitchel made autobiographical ramblings rumble like a freight train of wonderful and jazzy sounds, with great musicians along for the ride. Fantastic stuff, not reproducible by anyone else, but it shows what genius can look like. It's been a while since we've had a Joni or Janis, but Madonna showed what business acumen can do for an act, even if the material itself is not great. It's show business, and expensive at that. She appealed to the zeitgeist of an age of unabashed narcissism. After that, the trail goes cold to me, until Gaga. Maybe because I was too busy raising a family while working in Las Vegas, creating live shows, to know what was going on out there. But when I go trying to catch up, I'm almost broken hearted at the vapidity of it all. It's just about pointing the camera at them. That seems to be most of it, in a nutshell. And whether or not I can play it on the flute doesn't even matter. Why would I want to?

Shoosh

[stubbsonic]

In my years as a band teacher, the main source of performance material for high school classes was song suggestions from band members. I would do custom arrangements of songs that students suggested and the subsequently agreed on.

To reach agreement about the songs we chose, we voted on songs democratically as we listened together as a group. However, we also had a "no disgruntled minority" policy which meant that anyone could "NO-VOTE" a song, if working on it would make them miserable. I used this process for 18 years. Worked like a charm.

As we listened to songs that students were sharing with their peers, students learned to separate the goal of wanting to share the music they love, with wanting to find songs that would work for the group. They would learn to listen for more substantial melodies, chords and grooves. They also used their imaginations to strip away the original instrumentation and hear the essential elements of the song played by whatever instrumentation we had (and over the years the instrumentation was ALL OVER THE MAP-- but it always worked.)

This gave rise to students kind of trying to dig through their music to find more interesting songs, things that would be fun to rehearse for weeks and weeks. We did songs by Dave Brubeck, Radiohead, Bjork, Fiona Apple, Ben Folds, Garbage, Rage Against the Machine, Tool, Beatles, Shostakovich, Eminem, Queen, Zeppelin, Imogen Heap, Rubblebucket, Escavel, Tom Waits, Imagine Dragons, 21 Pilots, Jobim, John Zorn's Circle Maker, Erik Satie, Buena Vista Social Club, Greenday, etc. etc. etc.

It wasn't entirely democratic. If a kid brought in a song and I hated it, I wouldn't say, "This song sucks." I would just say, "For my tastes, this song would be too boring to have to listen to it over and over to arrange it and rehearse it. I'm older, and my tastes have changed. It's fine that YOU like it, it's just not scratching any itches for me." After they heard the wide range of things that were being brought in, they'd keep trying. Sometimes they'd hit the mark. And even if it was music from a video game (like one of the Halo themes) we'd find something we could sink our proverbial teeth into.

We also did some boring pop music, and had fun playing it. I never knew which of those songs would "work for me", but some of them just did.

[Phil O]

I had a very similar policy for the ensembles I taught at a music school. The simple repetitive stuff was great for the young ensembles (kids just learning to play), but the older students usually did a better job of sifting through the (now) vast pop offerings of mediocrity and finding something interesting. I agree that the majority of pop is crap nowadays, but there's still some good stuff if you look hard enough.

Phil

[cuttime]

How do you play disco on a solo flute?

https://youtu.be/wj23_nDFSfE?t=34s

[mhschmieder]

The first thing that struck me was the apples vs. oranges comparison in the video, but I can't remember if I stated that or not as I was also disturbed at the "man vs. woman" comparisons and didn't want to stir up a hornet's nest with that.

With more reflection though, I realized that the main problem was simply with the non-pop vs. pop comparisons, which I got into a bit by saying how much I ALSO detest most of the pop music from the 50's through 80's.

It is unfortunate that the "good" music from each era rarely survives -- at least, not initially.

This problem is not new; Bach was largely forgotten until a desperate young prodigy needed some "new" music quickly for a church service he was performing at. Thank you, Felix!

[James Steele]

Bach was largely forgotten until a desperate young prodigy needed some "new" music quickly for a church service he was performing at. Thank you, Felix!

No kidding. Can't even comprehend Bach being forgotten. I really loved his fugues and a great deal of Baroque music.

[FMiguelez]

Bach was largely forgotten until a desperate young prodigy needed some "new" music quickly for a church service he was performing at. Thank you, Felix!

No kidding. Can't even comprehend Bach being forgotten. I really loved his fugues and a great deal of Baroque music.

Gorgeous music!

I'm not sure that story is entirely true, though. Some of it might be, but IIRC, young Mozart and Beethoven used to practice their Bach (WTC) a lot. And Bach's children, who didn't have a fraction of their dad's talent, wouldn't have allowed it. They were accomplished keyboardists and used their dad's music to teach.

I think there were also other composers prior to Mendelssohn who were already familiar and fond of Bach's amazing legacy. I'd have to look it up.

[bayswater]

Beethoven et al are not the typical music consumers of their age. You'd expect them to remember. I hear the story about Bach at concerts all the time and read it on the Internet. So it must be true.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

OTOH, some of those old wigs were quite popular and wrote scores of dances, theatricals, operas (some of which were never produced or failed, but the overtures and suites, et al, survive.

They were essentially journeymen after Mozart, who rebelled against being a kept man by the aristocracy. Eff the Duke, there's another Duke down the road who'll pay me in cash for the same thing and can buy my own damn food... LOL I'm proud to continue the composer as journeyman tradition.

[mhschmieder]

Not entirely far from the mark of the intent of this topic, it is worth pointing out that many of the composers we currently associate mostly with symphonies, chamber music (including solo piano works and the like), and concerti, were in their time primarily known for operas and oratorios.

Examples include: Mozart; Haydn; Vivaldi; even Bach.

The point being that visual entertainment (i.e. stage works) and music that serves a specific functional purpose (e.g. religious ceremonies) has for many centuries been the main mode of consumption for most listeners.

Does that add some perspective to today's musical consumer habits and preferences?

[Shooshie]

How do you play disco on a solo flute?

https://youtu.be/wj23_nDFSfE?t=34s

Hahaha! Yeah, I'd forgotten that one. I played Do the Hustle a number of times.

[Shooshie]

Bach was largely forgotten until a desperate young prodigy needed some "new" music quickly for a church service he was performing at. Thank you, Felix!

No kidding. Can't even comprehend Bach being forgotten. I really loved his fugues and a great deal of Baroque music.

"Forgotten" may be overstated. Keyboardists had not forgotten him. The Well-Tempered Klavier was still in all pianists' repertoire, but considered more as Bach intended them: exercises. His orchestral stuff, however, was not well known at all.

Mozart was surprised to find manuscripts by Bach when he was touring Leipzig or someplace where there was a local stash of them. He copied some and studied others and wrote home to say that this Bach fellow seemed to know what he was doing, and had a lot to teach us all. So, even in Mozart's time, and he was born only 6 years after Bach died, Bach was not widely known in his own land. But it's true that the real Bach renaissance didn't start until Mendelssohn began digging up manuscripts and helping to found a Bach society to catalog them, and that was nearly a century after he had died.

[cuttime]

How do you play disco on a solo flute?

https://youtu.be/wj23_nDFSfE?t=34s

Hahaha! Yeah, I'd forgotten that one. I played Do the Hustle a number of times.

And you know, Moroder provided some relief. I think this number covers the last 40 years or so. The way the last note devolves into a click track is absolutely brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhl-Cs1-sG4

[Shooshie]

And you know, Moroder provided some relief. I think this number covers the last 40 years or so. The way the last note devolves into a click track is absolutely brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhl-Cs1-sG4

I don't know. I listened to it twice. The 2nd time I read the comments, and people were talking about their minds being blown and moments of genius. I don't hear it. I really tried, but I just don't. I think it's the lack of a human connection in the instruments. If others can feel it, that's great. I guess I just grew up with a different idea of music. Mine isn't better; just older. Want to blow the mind? Music for 18 Instruments by Steve Reich. It's hard to commit to music like that, because it takes an hour out of your life, hut if you're receptive it gives you back way more than just an hour of time. Or Shaker Loops by John Adams. These date me; I've heard more recent things, but don't have them memorized. Philip Glass wrote some cool stuff in the early days. Then he became a phenotype. I could go over to Pat Metheny, Stanley Jordan, or go back to Art Tatum, Art Rubinstein, or various string quartets, operas, and come full circle to virtuosic pop artists. The thing they all have in common is that they channel an audience's desires into a live performance and give them something that cannot be done without amazing talent and hard work. And it happens live.

I'm sure it's there in this, too. No question that he worked hard, and has amazing talent. But I just don't get it. I don't know why. My apologies. I'm not even equipped to talk about it! Maybe someday I'll finally get my mind blown by it. The ending, as you said, was indeed a brilliant idea. That much I got!

Shooshie