"Identification/emotional investment in relation to the enjoyment of pop songs with vocals"

to hstencil

I guess Opera would ride the formalist/investment divide really fluidly- like I know opera queens who swoon with passion for a diva's favorite aria (emotional investment), but they can also be ridiculously tough and picky about microscopic details of phrasing/performance (formalist analysis). Maybe opera cranks up the stakes of both sides of this divide- so it's a good example . . .

You could make the argument that there's no big instrumental pop hits anymore in the US because there's no real focus on melody anymore, and that's precisely because music now is highly modernist/post-modernist. So it's all texture and rhythm and like that, and the vocal style you see now reflects that--highly layered and detailed and all like that, and it's great. But the only big pop song I can think of offhand that would make a good instrumental track is "Beautiful" but even then the vocal version's loads better because of all the little ornamentations Xtina puts on it. I think it's less an issue of pyschological association or formalist appreciation than it is that vocals are better suited to pop's method of conveying texture, i.e. since a piano playing cluster-chords over an out-of-time sax solo isn't really going to hit it big in the clubs, better to get all dense with the vocals in a nonmelodic way. Maybe when you like an ARTIST there's an issue of identification going on, but when you like a SONG you like the WHOOMPH of that sound, which is caused by the multiplicity of vocals rather than a unitary depiction of a personality.

I have no idea. just throwing it out there.

that makes sense within the context of electronic dance music/raves/whatnot tho. i am an individual because i'm in this mass of people.

"My model of manhood is greater than your model of manhood!"

"You obviouly fail to realize that I think all American models of manhood are vastly superior to all northern european socialist fops!"

So on and so forth...

By the way I think Eppy nailed it on the first shot at saying that melody is the missing ingredient for contemporary instrumental hits. Attention span also probably has a lot to do with it as well.

lied:- http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/intro.html

http://www.thismodernworld.org/inaug.html

large x-post from hell but its sometimes important to know what is going on in the world

seriously, what is the point of this thread? it seems to be fraying.

I don't hear current pop vocals as more detailed than past pop vocals at all. That seems completely crazy to me. If anything I hear less detail in them than in earlier pop vocal styles (or more traditional vocal styles in general).

*

I also wonder, do people think melody is somehow less ecstatic than texture and rhythm?

I disagree for a bunch of reasons, but the main one is that those vocal styles were more interested in harmony. Now it's texture for the sake of texture. (c.f. crunk) I mean if you see hip-hop vocals as somehow a devolution from "real singin'" then we're going to disagree, but I think there's a clear difference.

Then again, if Daft Punk's "Robot Rock" can chart in Europe in the near future, then that pretty much answers my question.

As for commercials and stores, yeah, there has been a movement back to pop songs with vocals in commercials than before, but in a very background sense, I think they still exist. (then again, I haven't watched TV or had cable TV in years, so I really shouldn't be projecting here.. but i still do hear instrumental stuff in both whenever i do get the exposure.. but it's meant to be very background, which is a digression of the thread theme.. so never mind once again.)

I'm wondering if it's just an innate/escapist reaction to yearn for those times, even if it's as recent as the 90s, as opposed to today, which -- for around half the country -- is really fucking depressing.

I hear more attention to vocal detail in a lot of hip-hop than I do in, say, Britney Spears or even Aaliyah.

(I probably will drop out of this discussion pretty quickly anyway, since I don't listen to enough pop to discuss it in an informed way. Maybe.)

I'm actually OK with what you might call "almostrumentals"--songs by and large devoid of singing except for maybe a line or two thrown in somewhere. There's definitely less of a chance of my liking them, but I'm at least receptive. Love Tractor's "Christ Among the Children" is one almostrumental that I'm particularly fond of.

I'm not entirely sure why I'm programmed this way, but I think, at least in part, that I require at some inkling of human connectivity in my music. I want to know that I'm listening to was created by someone as opposed to something. And while I'm intrinsically aware that this is the case, I still need bona-fide proof. Call me silly, call me schizo, call me Ishmael, but that's what I want. And it's got to be an honest-to-goodness human voice--the way I see it, "Fitter, Happier" is just a dressed-up instrumental.

Also, I prefer it when I can't make out everything that the singer's actually saying*. Some discernible words would be nice, so that there's something to work with. That way, when I sing along, I can replace the indecipherable stuff with whatever similar-sounding words I see fit. It's sorta like musical Mad Libs.

Think of Interpol's "NYC"--Is he saying "New York kiss"? "New York kids?" "New York is?" "New York Mets?" Probably not so much the last one, but you get my drift -- he's saying whichever word you want him to be saying. At least I think that's what he's doing.

So, for me, that's the appeal of having a real-life, preferably incoherent crooner in whatever music I listen to. I'm actually a really open-minded person, except in this regard.

Sorry this turned out to be a friggin' essay.

*You'd think that Sigur Ros would be up my alley because of this fact--but no--I like to take comfort in the fact that deep down, the singer actually is saying *something*, even if I have no idea what.

RR: No. I never made beats to make beats; I only made them when there was a record to make them for. That's one of the things that has changed in hip-hop that's made me like it less. It feels much more like it's a producer-driven medium, where there are all these tracks that are completely interchangeable. A Neptunes track could have Usher on it, or Jay-Z on it, or any one of these different people, but the track is still the same. Albums are now composed of a string, a compilation of these tracks. It doesn't sound like an artist-based medium any more, and I like things that feel like they stem from the artist. Even as a producer, and even when I was making all the music for LL Cool J or for the Beastie Boys, those don't sound like the same albums. I tried to make music that suited the artist and reflected the signature of that artist, and was very representative of who they were. It seems like hip-hop has gone away from that, and it's more like pop records, where it's all interchangeable and anyone can do it. I just don't like that so much. But there are songs that come along that blow my mind. I mentioned Lil Jon. He sounds like a unique artist with a unique point of view, and his album sounds like his album. It doesn't sound like it's off a production line.

The fact is, America has lots of dance clubs, and when people dance they don't care that much about the persona of the singer, they care about the beat and the sound. Whoever pointed it out on the Simon Reynolds thread was OTM -- America HAS dance music. It's called hip-hop (or dance-punk, or electroclash, or whatever).

-- miccio

They definitely wrote it (per the credits).

Hurting, what you're calling an obvious fact is, I think, a bit more open to question. When Junior Mafia sang "Bitches, rub your tittes if you love hip hop", it made parties bounce, but it did so not just because of the beat and the sound- it did a specific thing, it made a specific assertion to every female in the room, and they could choose to rub their breasts or not of their own free will, but the fact of it operating as discourse, and of the incredibly complicated and pervasive ramifications of how we identify through our consumption of music as men women white black gay straight etc. is not something you drop off at coat check on your way to the dancefloor. Sorry to be a tedious identity politics fixated academic, but I am what I am. If a DJ plays 50 Cent's "In the Club" straight people can blow off the line "you that faggot ass nigger tryna hold me back"; I can't. I have to do a little internal "rise above, whatever" flip-flop in order to keep dancing and enjoying myself. The idea that psychological identification is ALL that's happening when we enjoy music is reductive and lame, but the idea that it's NOT happening at all seems equally dubious. Furthermore, this thread is explicitly about discussing what is going on when identification *is* taking place.

I think at some point I was just able to let sound do that on its own. Strangely Pink Floyd probably had more to do with this than anything those long instumental passages just kind of led me along to a place where I didnt need the vocals anymore.

Me and m'lady argue all the time over whether lyrics matter very much--I say they don't too much, she says they absolutely do, and if I wasn't such a music geek I'd see that. She says that lyrics are very important to the vast majority of music listeners. She has me fairly well convinced at this point.

I don't think it's a big deal that the identified personality is a construction--I mean, we're talking about pop here.

Okay,this makes me flash on my personal distinction between dancing to hip hop, dancehall, rock et al and dancing to "dance".

When I dance to hip hop, I definitely take on a persona. I want to identify with the music. In embarassing white boy fashion, I want to look and seem more macho, more swaggering, more "black" (as some dubious cultural construct). And I don't think I'm alone in this - everybody in hip hop clubs is dancing in a "hip hop style" - there's a way you're supposed to move and act. So you could summarise: dancing to hip hop is about being either somebody else, or bringing an aspect of yourself to the fore.

Whereas dancing to techno, I definitely feel I want to LOSE myself. I want to be NOBODY. To use a cliche I want the music to "take control". The self is subsumed in the group.

And I think when in the other thread ppl were referring to "dahnce" culture, this is partly what they mean.

A big part of the electronic club music experience is about this loss of sense of self, so to a certain extent the music DOES have to be voiceless, or at least the voice has to be abstracted, either by being modulated to sound less human, or by repetition, or even by the use of the emotion-free imperative voice (like the great "dance.. or... die..." samples on the '86 lil louis record "war games") or the spoken narrative (cf "Sweat (on the walls)" et al) as opposed to the empathetic nature of singing (as found in RnB and Diva House where the singer's skill is in getting you to identify with hir).

I dunno, I sort of dance "hip hop style" to everything until I reach a certain level of inebriation--it's just a lot easier than, you know, actually dancing, if you're a guy. I mean, grab a drink, bob your head, sort of duck your shoulders and ocassionally put your hands up, and magically, you're dancing! It's less about looking macho and more about not looking like a dork.

I hear what you're saying, but you're basically making a "white negro" argument, and it's unclear to what degree that's been eclipsed by now. Mainstream notions of cool have incorporated a lot of influences, black and white and gay and straight and Eskimo, and I think given, for instance, the things being discussed in the Reynolds thread about "dance music" being black and from Detroit, no it's white and from England, no it's white kids in the midwest, no it's hip-hop--given that, I think tying it to a specific racial identity is missing a lot of the complexities of pop.

Is this how hip-hop is commonly danced to these days (aside from the option of grinding/freak dancing)?

Get me?

I'm not sure about wanting to become nobody re: instrumental dance music, maybe wanting to become everybody ('the crowd') is more accurate for me. But yes, abandonment of agency and self is very much the key point.

Er, I could be in the dictionary under "wrong person to ask about this." But...yes? Itty?

If we're talking about dancing to music rather than listening to music, I'm out of my league, so I'll respectfully bow out of that debate. Although I would say that losing yourself in a collective is an individual decision and thus just as much an example of self-expression as dancing like Mickey Mouse. But don't listen to me, I'm a capitalist.

As for personalities and dancing, I attribute the European / US rift in popular dance music to musical vocabulary, more than anything. I'm convinced that it's possible to chart dance music here but just not the same music that works in Europe. It's a different experience. You’re not going to find millions of Americans buying up the new Daft Punk cd because well, it sounds French. That's not a slag on France or anything but there are enough cultural differences to keep that cd from finding a home in the US.

There's been plenty of instrumental dance music that's done fine here. Jump Blues instrumentals were plenty popular in the 50's. It comes and goes and really isn't indicative of anything.

It does?

Yes, precisely, I'm describing the avant gardist critique *of* the popular landscape. I'm saying the avant-gardist understands his/her relationship to that popular landscape in these terms. I think we agree that, as predictions about the developmental turns/evolution that a given medium will take, these terms have been shown to be demonstrably false, ie. abstraction didn't actually stop representational painting from continuing (though it did change it), experimental film didn't prevent the mainstream dominance of narrative film, and experimental music hasn't dented the mass love of traditional time-signatures, melody, tuning, dominance of the pop vocal etc. But also notice that the failure of avant-gardist rhetoric at the level of prediction (the "what I dig now, you will ten years later" idea) doesn't necessarily prove/disprove the avant-gardist rhetoric about aesthetic "superiority" (what I like is better than what you like, because it is more demanding, more austere, purer, it foregrounds the medium more completely yadda yadda yadda . . .)

Such a position found in techno and drum and bass and electronic dance music a form which lent itself well to being translated into the vocabulary used to critically laud aesthetic "advances" in other mediums in other decades. As somebody who, despite my misgivings, at least partially feels sympathetic to this kind of rhetoric, I found that I looked at the chart success of SL2 as a sign that the English public had a more flexible set of ears than America and that, by making superfast jungle tunes big hits they demonstrated an ability to get aesthetic pleasure from a more formally tweeked out piece of art than America, and that made English culture somehow "better" (ie. more receptive to art that I already regarded as "more advanced", and yes, it's a rigged and self-certifying position; scratch away at any subcultural form of pride and you will almost always find a sedimented layer of such compensatory snobbery). Anyway, I'm curious about what instrumental dance music (again, in the rarefied, more abstract definition of the genre, NOT in the broadly inclusive "anything you dance to IS dance music" sense) you think will chart in the US? Also, I take the discussion of 1) "identification and emotional investment in the enjoyment of pop vocals" to be a broader discussion in which we'd actually talk about that when it happens, and I see it as pretty much tangential to 2) genre-definition talk about what is or isn't dance music and 3) avant-gardist rhetoric talk about why certain kinds of music get treated as if they are 'advanced'. Yes, this thread combines all three, but maybe to the detriment of really discussing its title topic.