The Point Of Collapse

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This question for people who think that pop music currently is not as good as pop music at some time in the past - the 60s/70s/80s/whatever. The question is - when did this decline start, and what caused it, and is it irreversible?

This isn't some kind of lets-flush-out-the-rockists thread either, by the way: it was prompted by other Tom's comment on the Meltzer thread that we should at least be open to the idea that music now is worse than music 'then' (whenever then is). I agree.

― Tom (Groke), Monday, 20 January 2003 10:52 (twenty-three years ago)

I blame it on MTV. I am still hearing incredible music being created present day, but nothing like before 1981.

― Hayden (Hayden), Monday, 20 January 2003 10:59 (twenty-three years ago)

The definitive word still lies with Danny Baker: "Something terrible always happens to music when you're 26."

― Marcello Carlin, Monday, 20 January 2003 11:00 (twenty-three years ago)

we should be open to the idea that pop music gets worse if we are open to the idea that humans are in some way getting worse. i don't believe this is the case.

― Alan (Alan), Monday, 20 January 2003 11:38 (twenty-three years ago)

I don't think that follows Alan - specific modes of cultural production can rise and decline even if humans don't decline, or to put it another way, what was the last great masque you saw?

― Tom (Groke), Monday, 20 January 2003 11:43 (twenty-three years ago)

sure, but i think pop is a different entity which MAKES it true. a masque is a specific type of party. pop is more like parties in general. it's something people do, and they do it the way they like. fashions of personal expressions change, so the types of party, the types of music, will shift.

― Alan (Alan), Monday, 20 January 2003 11:59 (twenty-three years ago)

(in other words, my definition of pop is sufficienty loose/facile/degenerate/uninteresting enough to make it true.)

― Alan (Alan), Monday, 20 January 2003 12:02 (twenty-three years ago)

Yeah but even so from the point of view of an observer pop can get worse even if the unmeasurable absolute that is 'pop' can't. That's what I'm interested in.

― Tom (Groke), Monday, 20 January 2003 12:03 (twenty-three years ago)

ah right. i'll leave you to it.

― Alan (Alan), Monday, 20 January 2003 12:04 (twenty-three years ago)

Two factors - 'pop' = interface of the Bloat Generation with apex of Western economic supremacy, latter necessary as Anglo/US identity seen as 'norm' thus 'pop'-as-entity unselfconscious, then Shit-Generation-who-should-die-now become guilty abt everything, invent 'identity' meme, pop becomes taxonomic classification with given rules expectations, impulses that gave rise to it's 'great' moments now proscribed by accelerating senescence and timidity of aging Bloaters ('sex''drugs'>'pedophilia''smoking' tho that's more a 'rock' thing), now that western imperialists are now aware of identity as same nothing more will ever be possible except 'folk music', sincerity responsibility glob-con shite (not that I mind 'folk music' per se, some of the gtr playing is fantastic)

― dave q, Monday, 20 January 2003 12:25 (twenty-three years ago)

the main things i see worse about pop today are:

there's more of it produced/more of it available to you so the quality/quantity ratio is inevitably worse

the scope for 'happy accidents' including surprise hits and true unpredictability in the charts has all but evaporated thanks to ultra-cynical marketing tactics and superior promotional knowhow, also based on the idea that the industry want to take less risks now because punters are cagier with their cash and believe they KNOW what they like better than they did in the past...the 'if it aint broke dont fix it' method applies here too

99.9% of pop subject matter has been done to death and is beyond cliched...no matter how good the production is, if its the same old song does it really count?

but none of those things mean there isn't a few good pop songs around, and there almost certainly always will be

― stevem (blueski), Monday, 20 January 2003 13:19 (twenty-three years ago)

IF I could have remained 16 forever I might be able to answer the question fairly.

― Dr. C (Dr. C), Monday, 20 January 2003 13:28 (twenty-three years ago)

There's a Phil Spector quote - which I can't find right now, it may be in Nik Cohn's 'Awopbopaloobop' - where says something like "People are always saying the words are banal and why doesn’t anybody write lyrics like Cole Porter anymore, but we don’t have presidents like Abe Lincoln anymore, either."

I think you could put forward a pretty plausible case that modern democracies are in some ways worse than those of the past - because of the media-military-industrial complex or what have you constricting debate - (of course in some ways they are better, ie women and poor people can vote, voters have potentially more information!) and I think you could make an analagous point about modern pop. There's a centralisation of media conglomerates, promotion costs are huge, there's a general rationalisation of product.

[My personal whimsical answer, for British pop = everything went bad when art students realised they could make more money as YBAs than as pop stars]

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 20 January 2003 13:53 (twenty-three years ago)

How can people say pop is declining when the mighty Busted are around?

― Lynskey (Lynskey), Monday, 20 January 2003 13:58 (twenty-three years ago)

Stop it Lynskey!

This looks like an interesting thread, but I haven't time to look at it properly right now.

― Nick Southall (Nick Southall), Monday, 20 January 2003 17:06 (twenty-three years ago)

see i think jerry's "rationalisation" actually enforces more extreme condensation down to the intuitive un-articulate level of mass music, rather than enforcing more minimalised brutalism (partly bcz the content is forced OUT of the words — monotheistic principle, vision-driven — and is therefore driven to reside in the music — pantheistic, audio-collated)

ps the idea that the heads of media conglomerates are pre-testing the BURIED long-term content (intuitive, actual musical) as well as the easyread short-term content of pop (= words of chorus, shape of hook, hottness of girl on LP cover) is i think manifestly absurd, unless we basically ALSO accept that heads of media conglomerates are as a class the greatest musicologists of all time, able to decode and translate levels of meaning and affect the rest of us are entirely deaf to...

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 20 January 2003 17:24 (twenty-three years ago)

I know this is generally considered an anti-pop stance (which incidentally is a claim I REJECT UTTERLY) but I do think that the songs on the charts are less interesting than they were as recently as '94 (I know that's actually not "recent" but it's more recent than, um, more distant times) and I'd attribute it to Pro Tools (which despite its defenders' repeated claims that "it's just another tool, no more capable of influencing the final product than the choice of what hammer you use to drive in the nail" does tend to gently prod its users toward certain choices) and to simulated musicians a la "Livin' La Vida Loca." Great pop tunes always have a very "here's-us-to-you" feel and that's harder to do when there's no "us." For evidence of this I'd cite the Carpenters.

― J0hn Darn13ll3 (J0hn Darn13ll3), Monday, 20 January 2003 17:35 (twenty-three years ago)

what kinds of choices do you mean? I have to say I don't know a lot of chart music, but I do know Pro Tools (though I probably don't use it like it's used in industry), so I'll follow you the best I can if you elaborate.

― tom (other one), Monday, 20 January 2003 17:43 (twenty-three years ago)

I think my objection would be that all creative tools tend to gently prod most of their users towards certain choices.

― Tom (Groke), Monday, 20 January 2003 17:50 (twenty-three years ago)

Of course I'm not positing any 12ftlizard conspiracy. It just feels fairly intuitive - maybe overly so - to say that, for example, most mainstream Hollywood movies suck because they are made by two or three corporations who have a much more cynical idea of their audiences and that audience's expectations. The disneyfication of culture, which it extends to pop too: through the gatekeepers who, for example, define radio playlists.

I don't see this as an inevitable tragic decline: I just see pop as a cultural faultline caused by the friction between the tectonic plates of democracy/marketing/art: at certain times, in certain places, one or other factor overwhelms the other. To say that pop never gets/can never get worse seems to me to be taking an overly sentimental (romantic) view of things - a kneejerk reaction to uncle Adorno.

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 20 January 2003 17:50 (twenty-three years ago)

is this an argument that what is popular is becoming less what the masses like, and more what the media companies want us to buy? i've never bought that. i used to read stuff like that in the letters pages of NME.

― Alan (Alan), Monday, 20 January 2003 18:13 (twenty-three years ago)

It think were times when there was a higher concentration of high quality pop, but the form has developed and good examples are still prevelant. Overall though, i'd say the mid-Sixties were the apex for "singles". ¥

― christoff (christoff), Monday, 20 January 2003 18:20 (twenty-three years ago)

but its very easy for the media and the industry to exaggerate what is popular...even with sales figures, the 99p CD single tactics and everything - then again i find it hard to believe that there are people who only bought the Will Young single cos it was 99p!

― stevem (blueski), Monday, 20 January 2003 18:23 (twenty-three years ago)

The Will Young single wasn't 99p was it?

― Tom (Groke), Monday, 20 January 2003 18:35 (twenty-three years ago)

Re: 'rationalisation,' let's compare a few eras in pop music, because I get distracted with all this abstraction. The 80's seems as if it had a broader overall spectrum of possibilities, what with new wave, (later, on the radio) hip-hop, and even freaky glam/hair-rock bands (and the equalizing power of their ballads as outlined in Da Capo 2002). Even if only around for a single or two, you had identities playing with gender roles, cross-dressing, overt sexuality, etc. No less a constructed pop product, but slightly more diverse in a light, 'cultural' sense.

The 90's saw this isolated and commodified as a handful of marketing trends in the heydey of grunge/alternative (c.f. Jill Sobule - "I Kissed A Girl"). Now, it's difficult as a U.S. listener to pick out much of anything aberrant in even a fluff sense on modern rock, soul or country stations. There are a few exceptions, my favorite from last year being Tweet's "Oops." It just seems like television and the radio have become much more conservative venues for the expression of very strict, bankable social relations. So that could be an angle for an argument that today's pop has declined a bit in diversity. Alternately, if supply/demand occupy some portion of your pop model, you could argue that this is exactly what the public wants and thus the market is being served. But judging from the very recent decline in record co. profits, I'm not sure this would be a strong argument.

― Dare, Monday, 20 January 2003 18:43 (twenty-three years ago)

Artistic genres just tend to have finite lives. They exhaust their own possibilities. There came a point where it was no longer possible to create great art using the realistic novel, or blank verse drama, or classical music in the European tradition, or bebop or whatever. The main mechanisms and triggers that give the genre its power have been identified and overused and the artist has the choice of recycling them or avoiding them. The firstl eads to derivative (if sometimes popular) work; the second to quirkiness, alienation of the mainstream audience (and sometimes to elitist critical approval).

― ArfArf, Monday, 20 January 2003 18:47 (twenty-three years ago)

jerry i am setting the deep-buried ("sedimented"/"immanent") reading of old uncle adorno against the disneyfied-rationalised hott-chick-on-the-cover anti-pop reading so popular in cult-stud lecture notes

also i wasn't accusing you of the 12-lizards position, i just wanted to lay down a supah-vigorous marker for anyone venturing off in that direction, of stuff they logically also have to declare for

ArfArf is quite right, that techniques and forms-as-technique get used up: I don't know if this has any bearing on the question as it refers to "pop", though. R.Meltzer's answer, as per Horance Mann's quote on that other thread, is that dealing with "pop as a whole" is part of the problem rather than part of the solution (as we who actually remember the 60s like to put it).

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 20 January 2003 19:07 (twenty-three years ago)

The thing is, the only music we remember from past times is either that which is stunningly good or that which is stunning bad. There is always both.
Though I must say that there seems to be quite a bit of celebrating the mediocre in the 80s Nostalgia, perhaps only because audiences got so fragmented that consensus disappeared.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Monday, 20 January 2003 19:17 (twenty-three years ago)

That's a very thorough misreading of what I wrote, Alan.

My point is simply that the (culture of the) marketplace fluctuates. Certain ways of creating, selling and broadcasting pop culture have worked better - at generating fun/novelty/the sublime/timeless works of art - than others. To pretend otherwise seems like either a very radical form of market fundamentalism or sentimental populism.

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 20 January 2003 19:57 (twenty-three years ago)

''This question for people who think that pop music currently is not as good as pop music at some time in the past - the 60s/70s/80s/whatever. The question is - when did this decline start, and what caused it, and is it irreversible?''

I think there is always 'good' and 'bad'. but most ppl, when they get older, do tend to not be so receptive to things (especially if they don't watch what's going on in pop).

how can you say that music in the 90s was better than in the 60s when, as many ppl here have said, so much has changed.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Monday, 20 January 2003 20:24 (twenty-three years ago)

The gd/bad ratio in chartpop music remains pretty constant, I'd say - if anything, I think over the last few years there's been more gd pop recs than ever before, certainly compared to the 1960s or the 1980s. As an inducted member of the gray panther club, I find that it's the 'alternatives' where the 'decline' has happened - ie modern post-Nirvana 'rock' is rub compared to US hardcore between, oh, 1980-1984, and I haven't heard any dance music that, for me, matches the thrill of discovering the whole 1990s Basic Channel/Chain Reaction thing, or those early Oval recs.

― Andrew L (Andrew L), Monday, 20 January 2003 23:42 (twenty-three years ago)

I actually agree with sinkah on sedimentation here -- yesterdays new left review or partisan review muckrakahs are today's entertainment weekly fules or even wouldbe popstars or otherwise drawn into the cultural edifice -- yesterdays stokley carmichaels and bobby huttons are todays dmx and source journalists. Also perhaps sublimation is a better word and one i use lots about this type of thing -- without EXPLICIT cultural calls for upheaval those impulses burrow into explosive contradictions. The deconcrew tries to take comfort in this, but I find it rather depressing in one sense, though great for crit-insight spectacularism in another (i.e. saying "The Jefferson Airplane were all about social change" is like well, duh while making the same claim for a Sum 41 [even though they're actually quite upfront about it if you listen to the lyrics] in a much more interesting and fun proposition if no more or less true).

ps the idea that the heads of media conglomerates are pre-testing the BURIED long-term content (intuitive, actual musical) as well as the
easyread short-term content of pop (= words of chorus, shape of hook, hottness of girl on LP cover) is i think manifestly absurd, unless
we basically ALSO accept that heads of media conglomerates are as a class the greatest musicologists of all time, able to decode and
translate levels of meaning and affect the rest of us are entirely deaf to...

But in some ways I think some guys at music labels do possess this, imperfectly and not fully-consciously but on the level of intuition, intouchness, and sensitivity to cultural epipherma this is really the point of lots of the creative exec types.

Keep in mind that "house labels" of the big recordcos have brand name exec. producer types -- LA Reids and even Timbalands and Irv Gottis and Trent Reznors etc -- people that many on ILM are willing to impute vision to. Also keep in mind that if some ways we can agree that their aim is to "give the public what they want" then it hardly matters the exact degree of their knowledge of the mass-psyche as compared to the sheer sway of market forces coz the result is the same.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Tuesday, 21 January 2003 05:33 (twenty-three years ago)

That's a very thorough misreading of what I wrote, Alan.

My point is simply that...

OK, sorry i misread you. I think i did, cos yr point is irrelevant to the original question as i read it.

― Alan (Alan), Tuesday, 21 January 2003 10:36 (twenty-three years ago)

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