I stopped listening to radio many years ago, because how predictable and simplistic i thought the songs were. Literally couplet, refrain, couplet refrain, a little variation of 10 seconds, refrain
It is insultingly dumb.
A happy enjoyer of Be'lakor here (EDIT: and old Infected Mushroom:)
I've learned to love constraints in part perhaps because of a part of my brain wants something familiar. A familiar voice seems to be why I seem to enjoy an otherwise second-tier song if it is by an artist I like. Familiarity seems to be why I pretty exclusively listen to songs with Western tonality.
But creativity too seems to come from constraints. And we appreciate the artists/poets that do something original within those boundaries. To be sure of course, anyone can string together 5-7-5 syllables (and perhaps too 3 chords of refrain/chorus/refrain/chorus/bridge/chorus) but we know the good stuff when we hear it.
Oh, today the formula is basically "couplet, refrain, refrain, refrain". Writing a whole second couplet? Who has time for that when you can polish your refrain for more ear-worminess.
A team of European researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020.
Yes, the Trio song was a bit of a special case. Remmler was attempting to deconstruct and critique the genre, and was well aware of how the mindlessly repetitive and simplistic and musically boring the core was once all the frills were stripped away. That was actually the whole point, as can be seen in the video they did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqTBlft8gQA
Notice how bored everyone looks. The sheer lack of energy. The guy pausing to light a cigarette and mount it on his guitar. The repetitive wave of the "audience" that holds awful, amateurish drawings of their faces (i.e. any moron with a synth could produce this crap).
It's a bit like looking at Picasso's bull in a grotesquely comical way...
Today’s youth hasn’t been what it used to be for at least 2000 years. We must have been on a steady decline for millennia. Just imagine how smart and noble our distant ancestors must have been!
One afternoon, ca 440 BC, Leucippus and Democritus were sitting on their tripods doing bong rips (Leucippus had scored it from his Scythian dealer), when Democritus said:
Democritus: Dude, like sweet is just whatever people say is sweet, and the same goes for bitter, and we get taught which is hot and which is cold and which colours are which, but have you ever thought about ... like ... it could be that that's all in our heads, man ... y'know in reality, there's like nothing but atoms; atoms and void between them.
1. People around you will notice you listening to fancy high-brow music and they'll conclude you must be a very smart person.
2. It's actually really good (whether or not point 1 holds in your case).
"insultingly dumb, i listen to metal"
"check this out, this top 100 musician isn't mainstream so you probably haven't heard of them"
this thread's turning into a decent example of why i hate talking to people about music. no matter how polite or reasonable someone is otherwise, there's like a 90% chance they have all these weird value judgements tied up in what people are listening to. it's incredibly tedious.
Some people use pop culture trivia as the basis for their identity, get preoccupied by trying to prove they’re a ‘real fan’ to other people just like them and forget to enjoy any of it.
I strongly believe we live in a golden age of music. Did you know 40%+ of Spotify payouts go to independent, non-agency artists? There's SO much good new music coming out in every genre. And you can access 95% of it for like $15 a month.
To be fair, there are both positives and negatives. The positive is that the barrier of entry is almost negligible. For less than 20 bucks, anyone can get their song onto the largest platform in the world, accessible to anyone on it, in days. Compared to handing out CDs or cassettes, this is a universe of difference. You no longer have to pander to major record labels to get your music out there.
The downside, of course, is monetization. Even if you get a million streams, which is extremely difficult, you'll only make $4-7k.
My 91-year-old grandmother used to use Audacity to record audio from such services on her PC. She would the edit the .mp3 metadata and put them on an old-school iPod. I told her that I would kick her out of the house and send her to a nursing home unless she started entering into license agreements and mailing royalty checks to the appropriate parties, and she hasn't done this since, so a win for morality I guess.
There are still many places to get downloadable DRM-free music. One of which is, ironically, Appple's iTunes Music Store (but not the newer Apple Music!). Then there's Amazon Music and Bandcamp. And that's before we get into the numerous regional providers. It's easy to buy CDs for most stuff, as well.
So I would argue the contrary: this is the golden age of personally owned digital music collections. If you do want such a thing, it's very easy to amass a collection well into into hundreds of gigabytes through legally available and conveniently accessible ways. It's just that the majority seems to prefer subscription model for most of their music (although many still purchase their favorites).
I wish things were as good for videos as they are for music. There, the trend seems to be the opposite, with platforms increasingly locking down high-quality downloads and pivoting towards pure streaming. You can still buy DVD or BluRay, but prices on those are increasingly insane (like $100+ for 4K).
And good riddance to it. The broadcast model is inherently hostile towards anything that deviates from "the norm", however defined. It is precisely because music consumption is so individual and customized these days that very niche genres can be viable.
It seems a lot of vocal older folks will use this as evidence of an inferior future. I believe instead that this is probably moreso evidence that the systems in power that spread music have only grown more efficient both in creating profit as well putting out homogeneous simple music.
Interesting to think of this as an analog to refinement culture, where instead of endless elaboration and adding complexity, they are stripping away all unnecessary elements to discover the platonic ideal of marketable music.
I'd not heard of refinement culture until now. I Googled it and it appears to be to do with how sports strategies and advertisements are finely tuned to squeeze out the maximum probability of success. Which sounds like "heavily optimizing for a certain metric" is a better description than "high quality", and applies also to pop music.
As I understand it, refinement culture has nothing to do with quality per se, rather it's about the elaboration of tropes and other recognizable patterns. Think ornamentation rather than architecture.
> according to an analysis of more than 350,000 top 40 hits
Wow, that's a lot of "top 40 hits". More than 134 new "hits" per week for the last 50 years! Are these really all "popular" songs? Because that number seems like the analysis must cut well into the long tail too.
The method in the paper seems different than what was reported. They used a last.fm dataset of two billion listens across 50 million songs. They enriched the data and restricted the study to 1990-2020 to create a balanced dataset of the 350k songs for training their stat tools. Then they analyzed 2,400 songs per genre with that, 12,000 total. I didn't see "top 40" mentioned in the paper.
Top 40 is a descriptor, not a list. Every genre can have their own Top 40, though it is most commonly associated with pop music (again, a term that doesn't specifically mean what it says). And there's not a unique Top 40 for any given time period - for example, in the US we had both American Top 40 with Casey Kasem and Rick Dees and the Weekly Top 40s, so that's a potential 80 right there (despite there was usually overlap).
I'm not totally sure why what plays on the radio plays on the radio, but I feel like there's a mix of what's actually popular and what was selected to become popular by industry insiders.
Did you mean to respond to someone else? Listening to Top 40 is basically the definition of “not giving the art world a chance.” It’s not like it’s a secret that almost all of it follows a very simplistic formula.
What do you think is harder to make, a song which 1000 people like (avant-garde art, your favorite underground band...) or one which has 800 mil views on YouTube.
> a very simplistic formula.
Go ahead, make one, get 100 million views, make a cool few $ with little work.
The medium (or in this case the distribution) is the message.
This isn’t artist’s fault, or ‘this generations’s’ fault. This is an industry being pushed by a few algorithms that control the diffusion of new music to people which are optimising for this kind of thing.
It's also the case that song structures have shifted as recording and songwriting has become more often sampling and copy/paste than capturing an entire live performance. A lot of top 40 songs now couldn't even exist without the digital tools that enabled them. The use of sampled repeated vocals as background lines might skew the results a bit.
Music creation is always closely tied to technological progress though. At any point in a music's history you can find plenty of works that would have been impossible to create even a decade or two earlier.
This is true even of relatively conservative genres like what we now call classical. It has often taken advantage of at-the-time state of the art developments in metalworking and acoustics to create new sounds.
The tools being digital does change the dynamics of this process, but that sort of change is still a familiar part of the musical tradition.
A pretty information free article. I would note that looking at the first singles from the Beatles, they were simple repetitive songs (three chords? too complex, let’s do two instead!) Add in that their baseline of the 70s also would be the apex of the popularity of progressive rock.
But the 70s don’t have a monopoly on complexity. Swing bands, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway show tunes, etc. were the pre-rock popular music genres with notable complexity.
Swing bands as complexity? I played a shit load of swing music on scholarship during college. It's super SUPER repetitive. It's good. Don't get me wrong. But it's very repetitive.
Sure, it’s dance music so it can’t be too wild. But Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie. These guys had varied songs that included (limited but real) improvisation, differing tempos, etc.
But really the OP article is about lyrics and I think it’s safe to say that the songs sung by Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole were more complex than top 40 pop today mostly is.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadIt is insultingly dumb.
A happy enjoyer of Be'lakor here (EDIT: and old Infected Mushroom:)
Sometimes repetition/simplicity is not so bad, and apparently I'm not the only one who is fine with it.
Of course I'm being snarky.
I've learned to love constraints in part perhaps because of a part of my brain wants something familiar. A familiar voice seems to be why I seem to enjoy an otherwise second-tier song if it is by an artist I like. Familiarity seems to be why I pretty exclusively listen to songs with Western tonality.
But creativity too seems to come from constraints. And we appreciate the artists/poets that do something original within those boundaries. To be sure of course, anyone can string together 5-7-5 syllables (and perhaps too 3 chords of refrain/chorus/refrain/chorus/bridge/chorus) but we know the good stuff when we hear it.
Regardless, it's hard to deny that PhD's today have been dumbed to a three minute music video level ( /s ):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoSYO3fApEc
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-proves-pop...
https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/
https://www.mic.com/articles/107896/scientists-finally-prove...
Honestly thank god for J pop and K pop at least I can't understand a word of it.
Well that's not the case. They use a lot of English. It's Easter. Have some chocolate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIKqgE4BwAY
The peaks of genre/subculture popularity are not, necessarily, mainstream.
"Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby, Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe"
Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNYcviXK4rg
Words are hard to find
They're only cheques I've left unsigned
From the banks of chaos in my mind
And when their eloquence escapes me
Their logic ties me up and rapes me
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
Is all I want to say to you
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
Their innocence will pull me through
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
Is all I want to say to you
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
They're meaningless and all that's true
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5CrU-r55Yo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Da_Da
The fact that it became a chart hit only proved his point - kinda like the cow clicker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
And just in case that didn't hammer it home, the remastered video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm97VG_QIXI
Notice how bored everyone looks. The sheer lack of energy. The guy pausing to light a cigarette and mount it on his guitar. The repetitive wave of the "audience" that holds awful, amateurish drawings of their faces (i.e. any moron with a synth could produce this crap).
It's a bit like looking at Picasso's bull in a grotesquely comical way...
Democritus: Dude, like sweet is just whatever people say is sweet, and the same goes for bitter, and we get taught which is hot and which is cold and which colours are which, but have you ever thought about ... like ... it could be that that's all in our heads, man ... y'know in reality, there's like nothing but atoms; atoms and void between them.
Leucippus: Woah
I think my kids would prefer your approach to teaching history than the stuff they currently get.
That and the musical Six :-)
- Guided by Angels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z--D1flPLnk
- Hertz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb5Ja6V4OeY
Listening to this has two benefits:
this thread's turning into a decent example of why i hate talking to people about music. no matter how polite or reasonable someone is otherwise, there's like a 90% chance they have all these weird value judgements tied up in what people are listening to. it's incredibly tedious.
Tedious is the perfect word for it.
Really illustrates the point.
The downside, of course, is monetization. Even if you get a million streams, which is extremely difficult, you'll only make $4-7k.
So I would argue the contrary: this is the golden age of personally owned digital music collections. If you do want such a thing, it's very easy to amass a collection well into into hundreds of gigabytes through legally available and conveniently accessible ways. It's just that the majority seems to prefer subscription model for most of their music (although many still purchase their favorites).
I wish things were as good for videos as they are for music. There, the trend seems to be the opposite, with platforms increasingly locking down high-quality downloads and pivoting towards pure streaming. You can still buy DVD or BluRay, but prices on those are increasingly insane (like $100+ for 4K).
What I think is a major difference now vs then is we don't get any major non-English language hits. Globalization?
https://happyhollyproject.com/2014/04/27/flowcharts-and-song...
Wow, that's a lot of "top 40 hits". More than 134 new "hits" per week for the last 50 years! Are these really all "popular" songs? Because that number seems like the analysis must cut well into the long tail too.
I'm not totally sure why what plays on the radio plays on the radio, but I feel like there's a mix of what's actually popular and what was selected to become popular by industry insiders.
The music industry is so much more competitive today, in the past very few could afford to make music, now anybody can do it.
There is so much supply now that bad songs die much more quickly and only the fittest survive.
> a very simplistic formula.
Go ahead, make one, get 100 million views, make a cool few $ with little work.
This isn’t artist’s fault, or ‘this generations’s’ fault. This is an industry being pushed by a few algorithms that control the diffusion of new music to people which are optimising for this kind of thing.
This is true even of relatively conservative genres like what we now call classical. It has often taken advantage of at-the-time state of the art developments in metalworking and acoustics to create new sounds.
The tools being digital does change the dynamics of this process, but that sort of change is still a familiar part of the musical tradition.
But really the OP article is about lyrics and I think it’s safe to say that the songs sung by Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole were more complex than top 40 pop today mostly is.