The Death of Popular Music
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- Опубліковано 28 тра 2024
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Mistakes: Simon Cowell did not produce Dead or Alive's 'You Spin Me Right Round'. That was Stock Aitkin and Waterman. He was behind "So Macho" by Sinitta.
Some of Cowell's early success however did came through Stock Aitken Waterman, who produced a number of hits in the 1980s
Andy is a drummer, producer and educator. He has toured the world with rock legend Robert Plant and played on classic prog albums by Frost and IQ.
As a drum clinician he has played with Terry Bozzio, Kenny Aronoff, Thomas Lang, Marco Minneman and Mike Portnoy.
He also teaches drums privately and at Kidderminster College
What’s funny is that I know a lot of younger people who listen to music from the 60s-90s. I think that it’s because of the skill and talent, but even more so because of the soul and humanity in the music. It actually makes them feel something real, which I think is missing from a lot of contemporary pop music. I listen to jazz and rhythm and blues from the 40s and 50s, and I’d imagine that 100 years from now people who love music will still be listening to popular music from the 60s-90s.
Another thing that changed the attitude of record companies were The Spice Girls. Suddenly in the mid 90s this manufactured phenomenon happened and the British record companies decided to stop spending time and money developing bands and concentrate on instant global chart hits. So instead of investing in an artist who may achieve great success with their 2nd album, they would drop anyone who didn't instantly have a hit single.
Also around the same time the record companies started buying each other until there were just 3 enormous global labels dominating the industry. The age when independents could have unusual and uncompromising hit singles was over.
Top of The Pops was axed and Simon Cowell turned music television into banal entertainment.
Because of this lack of investment in building long term music careers in Britain, festivals are struggling to find contemporary headline acts. This year its Pulp, Chemical Brothers, Blur, Artic Monkeys and Elton John.
Surveys show music is more popular than ever now, but far less important. It provides a soundtrack to people's lives in gyms, cafes and shops. Before 1995, music was people's lives.
Absolutely. The big drop-off in musical quality had begun in the mid-Nineties with manufactured pop (Spice Girls, Take That, S Club 7). The U.S. had their own mediocrity with Backstreet Boys, Hanson and New Kids on the Block, etc. Unlike previous decades, there wasn't any great bands of the magnitude of Led Zep, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Queen, etc, to offset the middle-of-the-road throwaway pop. Now everything is instantly disposable.
Every fucking hit is 1 - 6 - 4 - 5 chord progression! - Thank you, Max Martin
vi - IV- I - V. Progression needs to be outlawed at this point.
You make a great argument Andy. I too have thought for a while that music as a cultural phenomenon has greatly diminished. Except as a consumerist exercise, today's pop music has no meaning, no purpose and no vision. Thank god I still have my crew of aging punks, rockers, jazzbo's and recovering hipsters with which to still play music.
The soundtracks to Legend of Zelda series and Final Fantasy means more to me than most if not all of the popular music of my childhood.
Have you checked out 8 Bit Big Band?
@@ornettebreaker check out Distant Worlds where the FF music is done by Orchestras live
As long as I have my cd’s,vinyl and my guitar my music will never die.All those losers walking around with ‘beats in their buds’ can have it ,their loss.I listen to classical,jazz,blues,country thru to heavy metal played on real instrument written by real songwriters.
Back in the 70s, pop stars would include 10cc, XTC, Wings, Bowie,Queen etc. What’s happened?
Punk wasn't quite as wonderful as it pretended to be?
Once the idea emerged that it didn't really matter if you couldn't play, it sowed a nasty cancerous little seed. As pop music got shittier in the 80s, it didn't help that the "cool" John Peel type music was about as much fun as sticking a poker up your backside. The Fall? The Gang of Four? The rot was really starting to set in.
@@legrandmaitre7112 you named 2 of the greatest groups ever
Back in 1990, Todd Rundgreen said the same thing in an interview: People were just using music to achieve fame. In the 1950s, the music industry learned the power of fame to sell a record when they had Ricky Nelson sing a cover of "I'm Walkin'" in an episode of "The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet." Everything old is new, and so on...
I remember it slightly different. Pop/rock music died because it lost its soul in the same way an animal does. It dumbed down and became so base and simplified it lost its basic function - that is to evoke emotion. The nightclubs lost proper DJ's to digital databases. raw bands disappeared before graphic imagery and licenciousness.
In my opinion the last album of the old era was the Marshall Mathers LP and Dr Dre 2001. I am not a rap fan but still those albums were constructed very well. Also Gen X were getting tired. The party was over. They wanted to buy a house and a dog and have an early night for a change.... The millenials were left to carry the baton but they were too in love with their iPhones. Its why all the pubs are closing no one wants a pint anymore.
Popular music is dead, Lon live the mustache!
Hip Hop died around 2005 (from the Golden Age of the mid-90s when there was passion and heart to the shallow vapid wasteland of trash that it is now), Heavy Metal died long before (around 1992 when Hip Hop took over MTV and video girls who used to be Hard Rock videos migrated Rap videos), Reggae morphed into something ungodly with DanceHall by 1992, Hard Rock got repackaged into a multitude of "alternative" subgenres, Latin Music has lost all of its soul recently, and Pop is now 90% excrement. Africa and Asia is the future of music. Afrobeat has more passion than anything coming out of the Americas and the UK.
In my opinion The Eminem Show was Eminem's greatest album.
@@juniorjames7076 good one. Music coming out of Africa and Asia is just as crappy today as anything coming out of the Americas or Europe.
@@kzustang Well, I spent 2019 stuck in Istanbul, Turkey during the globsl Covid pandemic, and the nightclubs were pulsating with Afrobeat, Turkish Hip Hop (joint produced by Turks & Africans living Turkey), and fusions of Afro/Arab/Asian pop/rock/metal groups. The scene was amazing! Iranian Metal bands?!? Yes, the WEST sucks! But it's an exciting time to be in the developing world because struggle creates art with heart!! Thoughts?
So the Buggles were correct, Video Killed the Radio Star. btw, Ron Jeremy called he wants his mustache back.
MTV doesn't get enough credit for killing rock music and bringing us Reality TV. At least Beavis and Butthead was solid
Really thought-provoking essay with compelling ideas and delivered simply and directly. As someone who plays in a Pink Floyd tribute we are finding more and more young people attending audiences and singing along enthusiastically. When new artists on UA-cam want to show off their talents it is from the wellspring of classic rock they draw their material.
That tells you its dead . When music was alive and breathing the idea of a tribute band was anathema . Too much was always happening to want to watch a tribute to Pink Floyd or whoever
Some music indeed has no soul nowadays, like you say at the end almost. Voices don t sound like human voices sometimes, I hate that.
A lot of reaction videos are amazed how good older music is. It is because of this. The best music is, when the singers have put their soul into the song and the music is real.
Exactly.
Most all those reaction video poeple are phony pandering to appeal to the artists fanbase, lots of money to be made that they would not make if they were honest in not liking it and making neg comments, no one wants to see their fav band reacted to in the negative, that reactor would have a very unpoplar channel no views no money
@@RocknJazzer that happens sometimes, but i do also see emotions /crying when music they discover is really good
@@thepuma2012 I have seen lots of that too but consider most of it good acting, crying for views/money. Yeah I would like to think otherwise, but there is lots of money at stake, reaction chans will do anything for their monthly yt earnings, and have learned that boomers are one of the biggest fanbase so cater to them, I seriously think few if any like or ever listen to any of what they feign such appreciation for, but the boomers love it being as this video says the largest group where music was such a big part of their lives, then and still now, while the reactors go back to listening to their hiphop or other modern dreck whatever it may be, never to listen to the group they shed tears for. Sorry to be a pessimist and yeah I was taken with such reaction vids when they first became a thing some years ago, but if you google you will see others make the case that most are phony pandering for the views/adrev bux. Every serious YT chan does to some extent, even andy here, it is money after all and if one is serious in their niche they can do well. Nice to be genuine tho like Andy, moreso than most reactors. Again I would love to believe otherwise but there are too many who play the same reaction games and it is not for love of old music no matter what they say, its a job for many for real
I think you're absolutely right but, maybe because you're so close to the industry, you don't realise how deep and far back it goes. Growing up in the '80s, while we were certainly aware of chart music, the most popular musicians among my circle of friends were the likes of Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Tim Follin, Jeroen Tel, and Chris Huelsbeck (look 'em up if you've never heard of them). By the time I was 20, I could count the number of records I owned on my fingers.
That changed - a lot - as I grew older, but the point is that young people today have alternatives, a phenomenon which started with us videogame nerds in the '80s. We were quite conscious of the fact that where our parents' generation had pop music, we had games. That was “our culture”, our “thing”. And these days there are a multitude of things kids can take as their own other than music.
Which isn't to say that you're wrong. I think the Cowell TV effect was real, and the desertion of talent is an aspect I hadn't considered before, but it was the final nail in the coffin of "pop music" as a thing in and of itself, not the initial blow. The seeds of its demise were already there at what appeared to be its height.
"The seeds of its demise were already there at what appeared to be its height."
In the 1980s.
Pop is dead but the Stache abides ...
The hack vi - IV - I - V chord progression needs to be outlawed by the Music Interpol at this point.
It's all about branding. Q: Are we not musicians? A: We are brands!
Interesting video and yes you are correct. I was reminded of a conversation I had with a guy in the nineties who was part of the Dundee music scene (Deacon Blue, Danny Wilson) who had knocked back a contract with Sony music in the eighties to concentrate on video game development. His reasoning was that the music industry has passed its peak with CDs retailing at £10 whereas games retailed for £50 and were a growing market. He went on to be very successful and a leading light in the business making a lot of money. In the age of the internet, UA-cam, games, social media, influencers and watching TV on catch-up, it is a very different cultural landscape with music often merely the soundtrack..
Luv u uncle David lol
An excellent assessment of what has happened to music over the last 15 years or so. Simon Cowell has a lot to answer for lol. I am from the States but have always been an anglophile musically speaking. For me one of the defining moments of the sea change was in 2015 when the formerly great NME was sold and immediately started putting these crappy pop stars on the cover of a weekly which prior to that had featured (usually) quality indie oriented artists. The saddest part of all of this is that many millennial and gen z people have no idea what good music even sounds like anymore and they will defend their mediocre to terrible favorites to the last man.
You are certainly right about the death of pop music. Even those of today's young generation who do take an interest in music don't tend to focus on any particular genre; they just let Spotify choose what they hear and they probably don't even know what it is they're listening to most of the time. It's all just become background noise; wallpaper. But along with the death of music has come the death of youth culture. Quite suddenly, punk, goth, metal, emo and all the rest have vanished from the scene, and young people who follow anything but the bland, generic, corporate style of today are very few and far between. I didn't see this coming, and as one whose passion for music originated with The Sweet, Slade and Status Quo in 1973, then progressed through punk, metal and grunge, I feel that the world has moved on and left me behind. I realised quite recently too that the void left by the disappearance of youth culture as a mode of expression for idealistic and rebellious youth has been occupied by all this identity politics and gender mumbo-jumbo. I've seen several other commentators making the same link recently.
It wasn't just the strength of Soldier Soldier that propelled Robson and Jerome's 'Unchained Melody' to Number 1 there was also the calculated tie-in with the 50th anniversary of VE Day as they recorded 'White Cliffs of Dover' to make it a double A-side.
We are in a pop music dominant era not unlike that which happened right before the Beatles showed up in the early 60s. Problem is nothing has really changed since about 2005.
I listened to this without visuals. The power of the brummie accent was far more compelling than any face furniture.
Got to love a Brummie accent!
It's far too early to say that popular music is dead, but it has certainly reached a fairly old age and therefore it's inevitable that youngsters and oldsters will want to delve into its history and enjoy listening to earlier artists and genres. But, yes, today's youngster has many other activities to fill their leisure time - myriad TV streaming services, video games, texting, sexting, scrolling, vaping, etc. But there will always be somebody who wants to create pop music, even if that involves asking a computer to do it for them...
it's more eyes than ears
The general distress caused by a goatee is only surpassed by that of a moustache. It’s either a moderately trimmed beard or smooth as a baby’s bottom.
That was fantashtic! ... I think video games had a lot to do with the loss of music's cultural significance ... it captured generations of teenagers in the way music caught their predecessors. It wasn't video that killed the radio star, it was Call of Duty.
Video games and animation are a part of it. Although, a part of that is the fact that the soundtracks often presented music that radio didn't play. Such as how Call of Duty's Zombie DLC would include metal songs like 115 and Beauty of Annihilation. Certainly more enjoyable than the cookie monsters of radio.
I find this to be true as well
Agreed. I'd go so far as to argue that when boys moved their attention from playing guitar in a rock band to leveling up in some video game, this left girls as the main consumers of pop music. And the industry has responded in kind.
As a millennial, I got into learning music because of music from the Zelda series in the late 90's early 00's. Those soundtracks are where the talent went, not pop music (hell, its where the talented classical composers went too). Granted, I also was raised by Beatles fans and had that vision of musicking in my head. But definitely true that people simply don't look to popular music for their art fix these days they look to other media like games, UA-cam, etc
Entertainment is not art. They are Yin Yang and both part of life, but Entertainers devouring Art has left us shallow and out of balance.
OOOOF, you started talking about artists becoming big because of their stunts and I immediately thought of who you immediately said after. It was like the video read my mind.
You nailed it, thank for crystallizing the last 25 years of the music biz. Actually I like the moustache.
The song's in the bag, and the bag's in the river.
Fair points well made. For me in broad terms popular music started to die when the bean counters took over from the aficionados. Example? Can you imagine Mike Oldfield getting funding to record ‘Tubular Bells’ in today’s music industry? The often, possibly rightly, maligned Richard Branson funded it way back when at a time when he could maybe least afford it, not because he knew it would be mega, but because he liked the demos and thought it should be made and heard. There’s good music out there, lots of it, but an old fuddy-duddy like myself won’t find it in the popular music charts by and large. It takes a little work. That’s an old fuddy-duddy without a moustache, incidentally!
11:50 (ish) "We're going to have Robbie Williams perform her single" - Do you know something we don't Andy?
Thank God we still have King Gizz
From a British point of view or any other, I find myself unable to credit very much "pop music" after 1973. There are a few bands--America, for example, or Roxy Music--and a very few solo artists--e.g. Brian Eno, Lyle Lovett--but otherwise largely 1 and 2-hit wonders from any critical point of view. From a "hit records" perspective there'll always be as many "popular" artists as there are charts for charting them, but the quality AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, ORIGINALITY of music after 1973 is appalling when compared to the period beginning sometime around the mid/early Fifties (or with Sister Rosetta Tharp) and ending, as I say, in 1973. Unfortunately, after THAT it's countless bands with MAYBE a song or two worth remembering as much as a few weeks after release but all of it 100% derivative of the previous nearly two decades' artists.
I tend to think that music genres are born, they blossom and then they eventually die. This is quite natural if you think about it. However, we now have a massive industry that is working flat out to keep something alive which is actually well past its "golden age".
This isn't really apparent or obvious unless you explore beyond "our music", the whole western rock and pop thing. Once you understand that other genres of music also live and die, then you can look back at our music and see there's some truth in what I'm saying. I am aware that these genres often cross over, that one can slowly become another - nevertheless it's a way of thinking about music that is still worthy of consideration.
Here are some approximate golden eras / classic periods of various genres of music:
Ragtime 1900-1920
Jazz 1923-1950 (real jazz, music for dancing, laughing and making out - not guys noodle farting )
Rembetika 1928-1955
Soukous 1960-1990
Bollywood playback 1945-1970
Calypso 1925-1950
R&B and rock'n'roll 1945-1965
Doowop and soul music 1955-1975
Latin music 1930-1960 (this is difficult because there are so many Latin music forms)
Rock music, USA and UK 1960-1985?
Note that each has roughly a 20-30 year lifespan during which the music blossoms into something really wonderful, vital and alive. You also find that within these 20-30 year cycles you invariably find the greatest artists. The greatest, or rather not the band or singer think is the greatest just because they're "cool" this week! This should cause a few arguments!
Seriously, it's obviously very difficult to estimate exact dates, but I am talking about the GOLDEN AGE of each musical genre. I am aware that there were rock records made after 1985, that there were calypso records still being made in the 90s!
For me UK / USA rock music began to wither when some of the new acts of the late 70s and early 80s were massively over promoted - hyped. By the time we got to the late 90s, it was possible for truly awful bands to make it big - Oasis being a good example. I share John Peel's opinion, they were "not very good". Now, another 25 years on, we still haven't had another explosion of great new music! We just have plop - endless dumbed down dreary homages, rip offs, pastiches, appropriations etc etc.
Next time I'll bore on about the development of the recording industry itself.
One form that as several forms within it, services quite happily on the edges, always with people saying 'it's dieing' but it never does, that nobody mentions.
Classical music, here forever and always will be, why? Because it's far better than anything else.
@@stuartraybould6433 It has all been downhill since Bach. Went from large orchestra 3 day opera's to big bands to 4 piece electric to DJ, to hacks in their bedrooms making 'beats' and stems to A1's eternal night.
Well, all that may be so from a British perspective. But here in America, the first blow to pop music was the advent of the 80's. In 1979 I heard a famous music producer on the radio, being asked about the future of popular music. He said pop music would become shorter, more electronic, more standardized, and he absolutely did not want to hear the word "Art" in connection with pop music ever again.
So, along comes the 80's, and by 1982, even on a Jethro Tull album, you pull out the vinyl, all the songs are so close in length and volume that the vinyl has an inorganic symmetry about it. And the music, also, is so electric you wonder how anyone could have the nerve to slap the name Jethro Tull on it.
But all the albums, with very few exceptions, were like that by the time MTV came along. And that was blow number two, because now people were not buying music because of what it sounded like, but because of what the artists looked like.
This led to hair metal, which was glam without the musicality. And soul music took a big hit as well because it didn't matter if Mariah Carry was hitting the right notes with her five octave voice, as long as she was looking good while missing them.
Then came the 90's, and Nirvana hit, making grunge the next big thing. But grunge was worst than hair metal. It was horrible, horrible music being sold as some great artistic achievement. And, yes, I took my ears elsewhere, to Japan, in fact, because J-Pop still had everything America had flushed down the toilet.
By the time I brought my ears back in the late 90's, Cher was introducing Autotune, but grunge was waning, and pop music was sounding pretty good for a couple years at the turn of the millennium. But then it just fell off the rails again, because certain anti-trust laws had been done away with, allowing 3 or 4 corporations to buy up all the radio stations, and all the record companies. This immediately reduced top 40 stations to top 20 stations, at best. And they only played what the record companies wanted you to buy, so even what you liked no longer was a factor in pop music. Pop music was basically being written by a handful of songwriters taking their cue from a computer that analyzed pop songs and told them what hooks to use over and over in every song.
By the time downloading became an issue pop music wasn't even worth paying for. It was already effectively dead, sustained only by the life support of corporate radio stations that folks were having less and less interest in.
Soon computers rendered CD's redundant, and paying money for downloads that you couldn't even say you owned was not an idea long for this world either. So pop music fans went back to vinyl. And I rightly don't know where they hear the pop music they buy on vinyl. It's not on any of the radio stations in my car.
I go into a record store and there are just rows and rows of new vinyl by people I've never heard of, a whole new pop scene I've no access to. Except for the specialty bands like Abney Park, The Cog Is Dead, and The Living Trombone. Generally great stuff. Very artsy in some cases, but you're never going to hear it on prog radio.
I expect they've developed their own underground music communities on the internet where they share playlists and such. But none the less there is a thriving pop music fandom out there for modern music that is not easily accessible like it used to be.
It's a bit like it was back in the day with prog rock. You had to stay up late to hear your local university's all night prog rock show. Or you spent the night with Alyson Steel, or Jim Ladd. You could get it, but you needed to know where to tune in.
Is the modern underground pop music any good? Well, some I've heard is ok, others suffer from the knowledge of how to make good music having been lost. But there are some bands out there, like Muse (who sound a bit like Queen in places) and Jack White (who sounds like Todd Rundgren.) They make a pretty decent showing of themselves.
So, I don't think pop music is dead. I just think it's going to take it a long while to recover from all the tasteless things that have been done to it.
@@RocknJazzer Hey, I care. It's just been a long time since I had Spotify. And when I did have it I wasn't that good at using it. But, hey, if you'd like to drop a list of bands we should check out under this, I'm sure we'd both be greatly grateful.
While I agree with a fair amount of your commentary, I have to say that your assertion that grunge was worse than hair metal is way off the mark. Just…..no. At least not the early nineties original grunge. What it became in the later half of the nineties, perhaps but even then there is not much that is worse than hair metal. Personally, I preferred the Britpop scene over in England as to where much of the best music was being made.
@@jayhpaq In a way I think it's a matter of taste. But I still gotta put it out there, they called it Grunge for a reason. And then they convinced you to like it. I think it really was the first music biz test of just how much toxic sludge they could feed you and still have you begging to spend more money on it. But time will tell how audiences of the future react to it without the hype.
@@Perri-Prinz It is a matter if taste, but you have missed the mark completely. Bands like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam made some of the best music of the 90’s. Nobody convinced me to like it. I am a collector of thousands of albums so I know by now what is good and what isn’t, even if you don’t.
@@RocknJazzer Well, I have the same problem, my taste is all over the place. I like classic sounding symphonic prog, of course. Meaning the stuff with real orchestras and/or actual classical content.
I like music that tells stories, concept albums and such. But I prefer upbeat stuff. Pink Floyd inspired depressive content drags me down. I like Mike Oldfield, Alan Parsons, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and of course ELP, Genesis, Jethro Tull, Yes and that lot. Especially the keyboardist like Rick Wakeman and Patrick Moraz.
I also like swing and classic jazz, modern swing, western swing, boogie woogie, rock n roll, all 70's pop genres, some 80's, ska. Not so much the heavy improvisational jazz or rock.
Emotional music that hits you in the feels, without being depressing. Love moog, synth dominated rock, video game music, j-pop, international rhythms, anything bouncy but not too repetitive.
What I'm most anxious to find is music with a 70's grasp of production, but not stuck with 70's instruments and styles. Best of the old, but building on it with the new. Basically, anything you throw at me will fly if it's of good quality. Aside from grunge, metal, and Floydian prog there are very few styles of music I don't like. And any band that mixes a lot of styles will probably be an easy sell.
this is my take, Ive been in the music business for 30 years, sold a lot of records, toured the world,,,its all over,,everything comes to an end. Recorded music is only about 100 years old, when it first came out it was like magic The feeling that music can take you to other lands is just an illusion, but like magic you need to buy into the trick to get the full effect, much like magic tricks people have got a bit bored with the trick. Magic was massive up until fairly recently, it seems to have totally disappeared,,history is littered with things that was a mass craze then totally died away,,some crazes last longer than others but they all die eventually. The fact that it is so easy to make music these days with next to no skill, and that billions of people are doing it adds to the magic being lost.. Also, every combination of notes and sounds has been done millions of times, I dont think we are ever going to hear a "new" sound again, the electric guitar was a new sound, synthesisers were a new sound, hearing voices being played backwards was a new thing, turntable scratching was a new sound never heard before, and the digital manipulation of sounds has explored everything that is possible to do with sound,,,,everything has been done. I guess a bit like magic tricks, once you have run out of things to make disappear, and youve made the Statue of Liberty disappear in front of people what next,,people knew all along it wasnt real, it was just a trick,,much like music, and have moved on to something else. before recorded music most people heard music by singing along in church, or singing along with the piano player in the pub, or singing at football matches,,it was only a few rich people who paid to go and see an orchestra,,I think the mass singalong thing will continue, and you will have the odd new song that everyone will be humming in the streets and in school playgrounds, like "how much is that doggy", or "Hitler has only got one ball" sort of song, the days of mass interest in new music or even paying for music is over, why would you pay for it if it is all free. My dad was a printer, when he was doing his training in the 50s he wouldnt have imagined in a million years that his industry would have almost totally disappeared today,,a few hundred years before that the weavers thought their industry was safe, nothing is guaranteed, things change. Personally Im not going to cry about the loss of the music industry, its a shit job
Wunderbar Video Andy.
The mustache is not the only thing that makes you different.
I mean that in a good way.
Music videos started the 'media personality' trend. Musicians also migrated to gaming themes. Individual musicians now come up individually in various internet media. It is back to something like 'movie singles. for them.
absolutely British vision of the demise. In the USA hip hop has become the dominant chart factor.
I miss the old record shops. The one at the local shopping centre, (before the giant malls took over), just around the corner. Where you'd go in and waste a few hours looking through the racks and maybe finding something amazing. These days I'm buying vinyl LPS; (because I love having a hard copy); from niche companies who may only run off a few hundred or a few thousand copies of a title for the sake of the music; not for making lots of cash.
Digital killed it. Digital music production sacrificed quality for convenience, and digital distribution killed importance. It's alright tho - we'll soon have AI-produced music that'll completely wipe out the meaning of human endeavour.
Long time follower of popular music (US: pop-rock, country, soul).... I haven't heard anything really original in decades.... My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult was the last music that didn't remind me of 80 other things I'd already heard...
I mostly listen to stuff from south(eastern) Europe and Latin America now....
I agree. The same applies with the evolution of American R&B. When I compare R&B from the 70s til the 2000 I like it. R&B sucks now. My impression that R&B split into what is called Neosoul and some version of 2010-til now R&B. Likewise with albums. Comapre Steve Wonder's "Songs in the Key of life" with any album from 2020-2023. There's nothing comparable. The muscianship in Songs in the key of Life is inexistant as you say. Today, music is producer sequencer driven. In the songs of today there is little to no difference between the verse and chorus. That died too. I rarely listen to new music.
Fair play to Simon Cowell for spotting an opportunity. It's a shame he didn't apply it to decent music.
But that was the point, wasn't it?
Everything is already written and with much of the marketing done, all they then need is some desperate hopeful that they can screw over by signing the rights to their merch, appearance fees and even their very name away and rush them through the studio production line before the attention fades.
Minimum effort for maximum profit.
Did you ever consider that you might be an old guy completely out of the loop?
Take the artist formerly known as 'The Weekend' for example. I only know one of his songs but I read in the papers the other day that he is the biggest streaming artist in the world with something like 111 million monthly subs.
Your dad wouldn't have known who the Smiths were in the 80s and wouldn't have paid any heed even if he had seen them on top of the pops. Knowing who is hip at any given time is the business of younger people and people of our vintage are not really a target for record companies.
I also can't see that anything much changed in 1995 due to Robinson and Jerome. Benny Hill had a number one in the 1970s along with the cast of 'It aint half hot mum' and various other TV shows in the UK promoted novelty singels. Opportunity knocks gave us the beloved Peters and lee for gods sake.
THanks, Andy. These videos are spot on. It's not about old vs. new, old vs young. It's truly about a shift in culture, business,etc.
As a dude in his mid-sixties i agree most music today is not as good as the period you mentioned 62 to 95 but I will say this that there is some really good music out ther being made today but it is much harder to find or hear about because that lack of interest from the music industry which does not exist today. It is so hard for young creative bands to stand out in a world where peoples interests are fractured by internet services like You tube Net Flix Spotify etc...
Ed Sheeran could only be such a success in these days of mediocrity.
I cannot for the life of me fathom his popularity.
Pop music effectively ended when, on May 14th 1992, the last pop band ever, the KLF announced their immediate retirement from the music industry: End of story.
With machines guns, naturally!!!
Very interesting....I always hated the world of Simon Cowell from day one. Just shallow TV and music....can anybody really remember or name the artists who where successful at the time? Did they produce anything of lasting value? - No!!
Music has lost it's roots and sense of history and development....and basically it all sounds the same. Just watch how Rick Beato tries to be positive about his top ten Spotify rundowns...he tries, beause he is a nice person!!
At the end of the day, older people like me don't have to listen to new stuff. There is so much music from the past to still discover.....
Simon Cowell had a creepy stache back in the 80s or so
Great video, Andy! I like that you point out the mustache, as I was distracted by it for most of the 20 minutes.....which makes true your argument of the mustache's significance! While I do agree with you on the major changes to the music industry in the last decade, specifically the point about talent and lack thereof, I think the idea of what we call "Popular" music is actually eternal. I guess we all interpret the word a bit differently, but looking at an artist like Miles Davis who described some of his music as "Pop," it becomes clear that Pop just refers to whatever is literally popular with the public at any given time. Ed Sheeran is 'Pop' in the way that Paul McCartney is, not because they both happen to be English musicians or have similar sounding music (they don't), but because their music exists in a realm of substantial visibility and likability. "Pop" is an umbrella term. Anyway, I'm just "thinking out loud." Please don't sue me.
Dead or Alive as pete waterman not Simon Cowell. That was a great record. X factor actually was a copy of a big show called pop stars which featured nasty Nigel and a band called Hearsay. The X factor was build entirely on that model which came out about a year or 2 before. In terms of conformity marketing I think Tik Tok still does that in a big way. Lots of kids seem to like songs that are big on Tik Tok but before they were big on there they didnt even like the song. Its quite funny.
Love the essay! I just want to draw out one point you touched on, which is the dominance of music production (and teams of producers) in contrast to the shrinking of the artist. I think that started to happen in the 90s with the likes of Max Martin. But a lot of those songs were actually good. More recently, (non) singers are all autotuned, and songs are condensed to two minute memes. At least there are still a few real artists, like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and Taylor Swift.
Yep...I have talked a lot elsewhere about the effect of digital technologies. But technology gets utilised within the contemporary cultural context. And I have tried to discuss that with a specific practical example. And yes, Max Martin did create great pop songs!
Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift (on the fence about Billie Ellish) are “real” artists? They sound pretty calculated to me.
@@AndyEdwardsDrummer Technology has its place in the death of popular music but essentially the truth is that the well eventually ran dry . All the great songs / guitar riffs etc have already been written . I was born in 62 . When i was ten i couldnt have immagined there would be a day when Top of the pops didnt exist . Latterly you could add the Ogwt and the entirety of the British music press ! All gone and the charts so diluted and pathetic that they are rendered meaningless ? Whats Number 1 ? Nobody either knows or cares ! Teens do not buy music they listen for free . via youtube or their parents spotify . All thats left are oldies like me who buy the ancient artifact / archeological dig of music The Box Set . Like Uncle Monty all i have are fine wines and memories . All the youth have are computer games and tik tok . We were blessed and we thought it was normal that great singles got released every week and to get to Number 1 you pretty much had to sell a million . Its gone , its long gone and it aint coming back . Why else are legacy musicians selling their back catalogues ? RIP Popular Music 1955 - ( approx ) 1985 imo ...
2009...that was about the point in time when KPop (Korean pop music) began to rise just as western pop was starting to fall apart and be criticized.
New fan here. I’m a jazz musician in the states. Dig your takes my man
As an old pro on the session scene late80s to about 2000 totally agree. I've made more money from themes and ads than songs and records. Just went that way for me. The last great pop record I think was 'Toxic' (written by Cathy Dennis someone I used to engineer for). Once the money went out, the talent left and the studios shut - the whole session scene basically went away. If the entire top40 walked down your street you wouldnt even know them.Killing TOTP in 2006 didnt help. The teens in my family are now listening to 70s/80s/90s and we are talking about The Clash, The Stanglers, Nirvana, Led Zep et al. The whole thing is in decline. It's terribly sad for us, the pros, who inhabited this wonderful world but it's gone. I just say I was glad I was there. It was my world. Now I do remastering but mainly run a computer business. Such is life.
Thanks for this. my observation about the talent going elsewhere comes from inside sources. As does the specific way talent shows developed. It's more than just digital technology or the fact the industry was always like this as stated in many comments here.
@@AndyEdwardsDrummer The big motivation for the talent was that you could make a hit record and get rich and I"ve known a fair few that have done that. When the mp3's came in that began to change. The mavericks and geniuses became a bit demotivated. About the same time the talent shows turned up. There was no need for them, we had a perfect mechanism for detecting emerging talent and getting them out there if necessary already. I was tangentially involved with the HearSay record and thought it was a naff move where it was going but they had a strong promo vehicle for it and it got to #1. The biggest star by far to emerge from those shows in the end was Cowell himself. No real stars were created at all.
Digital technology (which is really how I got in, not many good musos with great technical skills out there at the time) shaped the movement of the scene in the 90s, but by early 2000s old analogue rooms going for 500-1000 a day were looking silly. The record companies were fat in the 90s, the money wasted could be huge, as they were remastering old faves (already bought and paid for a zillion times) onto CD and making out like bandits. That is what drove the BritPop scene - even I ended up with a 65k advance - never put a record out from that deal!! I now have a computer system with excellent emulations of every piece of audio hardware of note from the 50s on. What I've got would be half a million in the 80s, now it's about 10 grand. Some of the fun was always the cutting edge gear - that's gone now, commodified.
Trevor Horn once said he knew it was all over when he bought a mega SSL console for £400k to install at Sarm West. A famous artist was in the room just using this amazing bit of engineering to do a stereo input from his Macbook! He decided to sell Sarm right then. It's flats now.
When I've done the odd session in the last 10 years I've been appalled by the younger generation's lack of ability, mostly just wanting to 'spit bars' over UA-cam backing beats. Either that or pointless guitar bands that no one really wants to hear anymore.The other thing is auto-tune, that did a lot of damage too. The humanity got lost even further, and now we just have disembodied robot voices sounding sad in a minor key. In some ways a fitting sound for now I feel. Oh well.....
Excellent video! Points well made…..
Mate. This whole moustache thing. I know you think it might just be the move that pushes you over the line creative wise but I'm not sure you understand the unpredictable nature of moustache magic. You might think it will bestow the gravitas and bohemian cool of a Zappa or late career Dylan or even the camp swagger of a peak Freddie Mercury, but with the flutter of a butterfly's wing you could find yourself putting people in mind of the worst of history's megalomaniac tyrants, Jimmy Edwards or 70s 'everyman' porn star Ron Jeremy. As to the video, yea, you might be spot on there. Anyway, keep em coming, I'm off for a shave and some guitar practice. There are no shortcuts up Parnassus.
Do you really think that people will watch your video because of your facial hair? How vain. Having said that, I enjoy your content it wouldn't care if you had a paper bag over your head.
it's not just the death of pop music, it's the death of culture in general. there's a presence that wasn't there before and it's strangling everything
I ignore music charts, what is considered mainstream 'pop' music...
I like, Jazz, Fusion/Prog, Rock/Metal, Blues, Latino/Hispano folk forms, Chanson, Variegated Western amd Eastern Folk musics... Theres so much great music being made every day, and a wealth I'm yet to uncover.
I just don't go to mainstream marketing channels for my choices, like so much of the modern consumerist conditioning I choose to avoid.
Live gigs are great. Jamming with mates is freedom...
But i hadnt thought about any of the why about it. Thanks for your analysis.
And may your moustache bring you fame, joy and pornmusic compositional excellence...😂
You are so right: The world is full of good music, there is a wealth of genres and styles from all over the earth, through the centuries!! Why bother with the fate of pop...?
This proves how right Aldous Huxley was.
Fascinating point of view as always. There's still a vast amount of great music being made on the "pop" scene IMO, but you just have to look into the independent bands and artists to find it. Streaming obviously changed everything, but it's up to everyone to listen to whatever they want to, whether it's the billboard top 100 or the top 40 stuff, or the indie stuff.
As a NYer, I can overlook the 'stache because of the way you pronounce,' mustache. '
The power of the mustache lol -- I'll have to check that video out later!
Look at video game jazz and how its capturing nee audiences whove developed a love of music through video games!
Thanks, Andy. Love the mustache, btw! I stopped paying attention to pop music here in the U.S.A. around the early 90's. I think it was a Grammy awards show where I had no clue who most of the winners were, and I thought "This isn't for me." So this video has been instructional. You're definitely overlapping a bit with some of Rick Beato's videos (his Spotify rants, etc.), but it's cool getting your perspective, especially since I'm pretty clueless about what's been going on in the UK.
If Rick grows a mustache I'm out of business....
First of all - good to hear someone who can string sentences together (how many videos are ruined by the presenter using “like” - I mean “like” in the sense of a “filler word” - as the presenter thinks about what he/she is going to say next). Secondly, I can see a lot of substance in what you say - and the argument you “posit” - the professional song writers starting to see greener fields elsewhere. An allied problem - as I see it - is that there are only “so many variations on a theme” - by the mid-1990s the relatively simple parameters within which popular music must operate (sorry if that sounds “snobbish” but how much “exposition”/“development” - as is evident in classical music - can the average “punter” be expected to appreciate) had been exhausted. Even Burt Bacharach - reflecting on the songwriter’s “art” - some 60 years after he started in the music business - asked for some understanding of the difficulties he faced “in coming up with something new” ! Finally, the moustache passes muster - you look somewhat of a Bernard Cribbins (in his younger years) lookalike !
Has anyone partied with people in their early 20's in the last few decades (lol)? They like the first 20/30 seconds of Taylor Swift and the litany of rando rapper guys with tattoos on their face's tunes. They don't finish the songs, the idea that there's artistry or musicianship that hypothetically should be in the music doesn't really cross their minds. It's interesting on a level. Annoying on another. Oddly enough I think the consumer is the problem when it comes to pop/pop country/pop metal. They'd go to McDonalds over a Steakhouse 10 out of 10 times.
Great analysis as usually Andy. It seems that music (and pretty much every other creative endeavour offered up for public consumption) is becoming less salient and fading in importance over time, as each new potential music lover simply gets sucked into a little niche along the 'mobile device disorder spectrum'. After all, you can like music but music can't 'like' you back...
I have to take exception to your claim that Simon Cowell produced Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round". The record was produced by Stock Aitken and Waterman although a LOT of the work was put into the record by then newish engineer Phil Harding who pulled an all-nighter to "put everything except the kitchen sink" into it for Mike Stock to approve the next morning. In fact if you read Harding's book "PWL From The Factory Floor" you'll read about how much they disliked Cowell and the way he would keep stalking Pete Waterman, even to the point of tail-gating people entering the PWL building, because he was desperate to emulate him. I was lucky enough to work as a remixer with Phil and his partner Ian Curnow (as "Primax" - me - " and the Power Syndicate - Phil and Ian") and having to hide away when Cowell arrived unannounced asking if they'd heard of me (I wrote regularly to Jonathan King's industy "Tip Sheet" bemoaning the state of music and promotion of turgid underground over pop and Cowell was obviously intrigued by who this upstart and pop supporter was) and them desperately trying to get rid of him so we could get on with the record we were remixing.
I also think it's a bit unfair to say Robson and Jerome weren't singers. I DID see "Soldier Soldier" and they sang the song beautifully. The story at the time was that they sang so well that the next morning Cowell received calls from two different Woolworths record store managers saying people were coming in and asking if they could buy the record. You don't get that sort of reaction if you can't sing. What's disgraceful and the reason why, presumably they weren't happy (and disappeared suddenly despite having huge success) is that Cowell wouldn't let them sing on their own records!
In the early 1990s I worked for the UK franchise of a small Italian dance label called Media Records. They had a small studio basement in Islington run by my boss, the label owner, Peter Pritchard and his "Sleeping partner" in the studio Lance Ellington. Lance had not really had much success as a soul singer in the UK but had apparently made a ton of money singing on a lot of German adverts and jingles. He's still around today, most often as the featured singer on "Strictly Come Dancing". One day I was in the studio and Peter came down and said "I've known Lance for years and I can't believe he's only just told me that it's him singing on those Robson and Jerome records". It turned out he was hired by Cowell as a session singer and paid about £2000 to sing on the records. There's no power in letting people sing on their own records. There's a lot of power in having control of everything yourself! I had an accountant friend at RCA, Ian Gledhill, whose office was just a door or two down from Cowell's in the record company building. We shared a passion for commercial dance music and we often swapped gossip at a time when Cowell was effectively a contractor working as an A&R man for RCA. Of course I rang Ian immediately to pass on the gossip that Robson and Jerome didn't sing on their records. He was incredulous. "I'm sure if that were true I'd have heard about it. I'll go and ask Simon about it." About half an hour later Peter appeared in the studio again: "Who have you spoken to and what the hell have you said?", he asked. It turned out Lance had just had a phone call from Cowell telling him to keep his big mouth shut and that Cowell would make sure he never worked in the industry again if he couldn't keep his big mouth shut. Oooooops! In fact this had all been hinted at in a TV show "An Audience with Freddie Starr" where Robson Green was in the audience and Starr had dropped big hints about him not having sung on the record and Green looked incredibly embarrassed, but I only got to see that myself some years later. If you watched the Stock Aitken and Waterman documentary last month on Channel 5 you'll have noticed that Robson and Jerome stood out as being glossed over in just a few short seconds. There'll be a reason for that ;-)
As for the moustache. Back in the early 90s I worked as the main floor DJ on Saturdays at the Heaven nightclub in London. I had a moustache and pretty much every single week the manager would phone me to ask me to shave off the moustache because "It's associated with clones and AIDS and we don't want that image for the club." I was so affronted I kept it for the four years I worked there, but I don't have one now for a good reason. Just saying!
Yes, I made a mistake regarding Dead or Alive and amended it in the description. I know directly the people who were involved in the Robson and Jerome signing and I knew already about the the ghost vocals.
I deleted my moustache during Operation Desert Storm because people said I looked too much like Saddam Hussein. If this video proves very popular should I also grow it back? Such a portentious decision!
You’re such an inspiration! You can postulate novel insights from a wealth of knowledge while also being a goon at times.
Hip Hop died around 2005 (from the Golden Age of the mid-90s when there was passion and heart to the shallow vapid wasteland of trash that it is now), Heavy Metal died long before (around 1992 when Hip Hop took over MTV and video girls who used to be Hard Rock videos migrated Rap videos), Reggae morphed into something ungodly with DanceHall by 1992, Hard Rock got repackaged into a multitude of "alternative" subgenres, Latin Music has lost all of its soul recently, and Pop is now 90% excrement. Africa and Asia is the future of music. Afrobeat has more passion than anything coming out of the Americas and the UK.
There’s a fair amount of chaff coming out of Asia and Africa as well. I am afraid cultural atrophy isn’t just limited to the West
@Francisco Canas Well, fair enough. But I spent 2019 stuck in Istanbul, Turkey during the globsl Covid pandemic, and the nightclubs were pulsating with Afrobeat, Turkish Hip Hop (joint produced by Turks & Nigerians living Turkey), and fusions of Afro/Arab/Asian pop/rock/metal groups. The scene was amazing! Iranian Metal bands?!? Yes, the WEST sucks! But it's an exciting time to be in the developing world because struggle creates art with heart!! Thoughts?
Perfect description of what I've been thinking for 20 years.....
I thought I had a hot take when I said music became niche in one of my videos. Popular music being dead. Well, that makes sense. Especially when considering just how niche music has become today.
For me, I've noticed the shift to online for musicians back when Myspace was relevant. Though, I can't trace the date back for when it started there. However, I can point to when such things happened on UA-cam. It seems that it popular music shifting to online started with Vevo back in 2006. I remember when so many people made a big deal when Vevo was new. Now, it's just a normal thing.
Although, I do wonder just how far back did the media begin to shift. Can we say it started in the 90's, with big J Pop names on anime soundtracks and big Rock groups in general having their music in games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater? Though, bits of that have also happened earlier, what with anime companies getting licensing rights to use music from groups like Yes for their soundtracks. Perhaps even the time an anime company got Keith Emerson to work on their soundtrack. Same can be said of the rest of the animation industry, given how often a cartoon associated with Disney would have at least one song that gets popular. Not so much in gaming, seeing how the closest was the compressed vocals on the arcade game, Psycho Soldier. And of course we can't forget movie soundtracks, which seems to have began to drop in quality for at least the past decade. I'm not sure if any of this had any effect. Given how often I hear of people praising a soundtrack more so than a pop song, I'm inclined to believe there may be a connection, there.
I can say more, but I'm sure I will only be speaking of certain niches, including tiktoks, virtual performances, hologram shows, and AI generated media. Hard to say where things are going there. Only thing I can say is that those elements seem to also overshadow the pop music landscape.
Perhaps we can truly say that pop music is dead.
Mixed feelings on the mustache. Impressed by its bushiness, but also repelled by its … bushiness.
See...the dialectic of chaos and order personified
In my youth, some 30 years ago, people were bragging about their stereo systems, were saving up for them, did shitty temp jobs to get the money for it and all. And it was not just an integrated system, if you were serious you had loose components: a separate amplifier, tuner, cd-player, record player, tape deck and all. And speakers of course, the bigger the better. The result was proper sound quality. Of course this is a bit of a boy thing, women typically hate these technical-looking black boxes with knobs on and all the wires connecting them. My wife does, she thinks all that is old-fashioned and ugly.
Nowadays, that is completely gone. My daughter streams music from her phone to a single minuscule sonos speaker. If you go to the Mediamarkt, the audio segment used to be huge, now it is tiny. Most of it is very small speakers with built in amplifier that get their signal through bluetooth and tiny integrated systems. There are barely any loose components anymore. Apparently there is no market for that anymore and that implies that the big majority of the audience doesn't really care about sound quality. And you can't properly enjoy "close to the edge" on a single shitty speaker, streamed from a phone on limited bandwidth. That kind of music needs good audio.
When did this happen? I don't really know. I bought my gear back then and it was not really high end (I don't have high end ears anyway) but decent stuff and it lasts. Recently my cd-player died, probably the laser is worn out, and I suddenly discovered that it is hard to get a decent cd-player for a decent price today. It is shit quality or it is very expensive. I can't really pin down when things changed because I never really bothered to keep up with youth culture, but it is pretty clear that things have changed rather dramatically.
I guess it has to do with the demise of physical media. You don't have coins or banknotes, you pay contactless. You don't have books, but an e-reader (yes very handy when travelling, but not the same thing), you don't have records or cd's, but stream from spotify. You don't own it, you hire it on a per usage basis. You don't have equipment, everything is an app on a phone. Everything is virtual, nothing has real value as a thing. Probably there are many factors, but this is one of them I think.
You need to create a logo of your ‘stache’ like Zappa. Great rant Andy.
I don't know ENGLAND... I know this SOUNDS like the OPPOSITE of what I think has happened. CORPORATIONS have found a WAY TO MAKE HUGE MONEY with Talent that Dances when it wants and it wants NO ONE TO SUCCEED on THEIR OWN... Either they SELL IT or you (the artist and the public) won't HAVE IT... it's a control that ZAPPA understood, and I do as well. - m.
I think it's a lot simpler than you mention. We have almost all of history's recorded music available to listen to for free at any time on youtube. Pop artists need to compete with all of history.
Although I share your musical tastes... I haven't heard any pop music I've liked since the mid-90s... I'm actually impressed with today's pop artists for having any success at all... I mean somehow they're having some kind of impact, with people listening to their music, despite the fact that all of history's available music is out there. They must be doing something right.
They are....what they are doing brilliant in terms of media
@@AndyEdwardsDrummer it's mostly turned from a music game to a media game
I'm no different from a farmer or chef, I work to pay rent. If I can't sell music to pay rent, I'll record and perform for friends, not an entitled brat public for free.
Very interesting argument. I read an incredible stat the other day that said only 4% of global music revenues is physical product. 20 years ago it was 100%. Personally I’d say that 50% of my listening is streaming and the half is a physical product. Anyone who has visited HMV recently will see this shift in how their stores are organised with a lot of non music items such as toys, books, figurines and even sweets being pushed to the front and the chart music towards the back or shunted upstairs if the shop has another level. Whilst this doesn’t please me it tells you all you need to know about pop music. There does seem to be a shift to attach ‘stars’ of music and film/TV to ‘causes’ as a way of garnering media coverage when their releases certainly do not get the same media clicks or column inches. Your example of Sam Smith was on the money and it was recently reported that he/it/they/whatever had cancelled a show in Israel due to “logistical problems” but underpinning that had been a social media “backlash” about performing there. Had Smith’s team misread the situation or was it a cynical ploy to book a gig knowing that a pull out would yet garner more favourable kudos with his/it/their/whatever fan base & additional PR?
I don’t see how it’s possible to critique the decline of popular music from only a British perspective when modern English language popular music is universal!
i didn't mean to critique anything
Pretty much, but the idea of the media star goes even further back. Remember Motown trained "triple threats"; the entire Nelson family was the cast for _Ozzie and Harriett_ before Ricky Nelson became a "Travelin' Man." And to go back to the Dead or Alive label, Stock-Aitken-Waterman created Kylie Minogue and Jason Donavan, who had a manufactured storyline both on TV (_the Neighbors_) and on radio ("Especially for You"). Teen idol pop especially was always like this -- no teen had the resources to create his own recorded tracks, thus he had to be groomed by a label.
Like you mention, the Leviathan standing before us is the internet, and it has shattered any shared popular culture between people. It used to be that TVs and radios would curate content, but now that task is given to a computer that will only reinforce what you already want to see. In order for popular music to come back, there will need to be a real cultural shift in the recognition that standards actually *do* exist and artists can't throw that away like Esau only for quick internet fame.
That's an interesting point. Though, I myself do wonder something. What would be classified as "a standard" when so many people want something different from the music they listen to?
@@laughingfurry Well, "Unchained Melody" would be considered a pop standard, for example. Ask any TikToker if they know what song you're talking about when you mention it to them.
Sure, some things are subjective, but there also is an objective difference between high and low art, and many many young ones have never actually experienced anything other than listening to Lil Soundcloud Y with only their left AirPod in. This objectivity lies somewhere in your soul.
We've gone a little too far with pure subjectivity and "Don't Judge", but there is a difference between listening to "Reasons" by Minnie Riperton and "Slut Me Out" by NLE Choppa. There's nothing wrong with low art, Pauline Kael even said there is good schlock and bad schlock, but it seems none of the big pop music stars do not create truly touching material. They're given songs and media campaigns created by 20 MBAs in an office meeting room.
Mass media produces for the masses, and what they're producing is McDonald's. If only the People could eat steak too.
@@rasheedlewis1
Well, that comes to another question. Can such music be widely acknowledged?
I'm not saying it isn't possible. Certainly a song with substance can be a pop song. However, such a song isn't guaranteed to build an audience in today's world. Largely because the majority of music listeners won't use radio or TV. Some of such people don't use Tiktok, either.
I'll grow a tache if you can convince Tim to grow one.
Pop music is no longer an artform it is a product. The "artists" are not artists they are a brand.
Well nuanced story.
Thanks again Andy, love your videos. Another consideration is youth culture, which is related to pop music, and has been a driving force for change and an important part of many people's lives. Is youth culture now a thing of the past? New music doesn't unite young people in the way that it used to? (PS love the tash)
I’ll support you by sending this to some of my fellow musicians. The stash looks good on you.
Thank You
Interesting. Excellent points.
You raise some very interesting moustache points. I for one am a goatee person. For you, might I suggest, a Fu Manchu or a Zappa?
Culture is dead. Splintered by the internet.
OMG!!! The Beatles, Sgt Pepper. I thought it was the music, but it was those undulating tufts of hair on those four upper lips, hypnotizing, hexing, beguiling me. I have finally taken the Red Pill of Pop. The scales have fallen from my eyes. I was blind, but now I see.
Nevermind the moustache, it's nice to hear a west midlands accent.
BUT: what about Radiohead? Pulp, Belle & Sebastian, Coldplay? Muse? Were they the last dying gasps of the British Indie scene?
Yes...thats years ago in pop music terms
The Samoans put moustaches on the fronts of their war canoes and felt that they would then be victorious.
Cool theory. I tell my students all the time that if you want to make money these days as a new band, you should try licensing your stuff to TV shows (e.g., CW teen driven stuff is just pop song after pop song by bands you've never heard of), movies and commercials. No one's buying CDs or albums anymore except for collector culture... Another fascinating question is when did "rock" stop being "pop"? David Bennett Piano has a great breakdown here: ua-cam.com/video/yAm1UWQSriI/v-deo.html
The Death of popular Music as you know it, might be more like it, I think.
I 100% agree, I haven't really heard anything really new since the mid nineties, love the tache btw
Lol, stache took me off guard at first but you pull it off Andy.
In the 20s and the 40s music was a central cultural beacon, and movies sold music, so your thesis that 'media' influence on it starts in the 80s misses a lot. That said, I agree today's youth have so many more cultural levers pulling them music has moved from the centre if their lives to the periphery. Social media has taken music's old place.
Mustache is as dead as popular music™️