Comment by xgk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xgk | Hacker News Reader

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That is a controversial point and depends on your concept of art. There are conceptions of art where novelty is an integral part of the very definition of artwork.

I agree that pop-music is precisely about creating "feeling and atmosphere", but I would extend it by saying: "easily, quicly and widely accessible shared feeling and atmosphere". And it is precisely this requirement of easy/quick access to the shared feeling and atmosphere that makes it important for pop-music to be conventional, to be repetition of previous pop-music. Surprise is anti-thetical to the purpose of pop-music.

Pop-music is acoustic wall-paper that is intended reliably to create a certain atmosphere.

You can gauge the conventional nature of pop-music from the fact that you can reliably determine the genre (e.g. House/Techno, Rap, Metal, Folk etc) by sub-1-second snippets. All successful genres have signature sounds for enabling quick identification. You can think of this as an aural version of branding. This is very well-known by professional producers, musicians and music marketing.

Easy and instant recognition is often a sign of triviality, accepted. But, like in written poetry, a command of the pop idiom is not enough to create a hit: there's got to be something convincing (and generally hard-to-pin-down) about the music or lyrics. There's an art to that which survives in any genre.

Even your demanding "genius" criterion can arguably be met by techno work like Autechre, in the same way that an exceptional architect might be encountered in any style or idiom of building. So I'm back-pedaling a bit on my previous remark (against genius) to suggest that any genre can be elevated by great practitioners. It's even a common mark of greatness to appreciate or at least not to be a snob about "lower" genres. The social conservatism of pop doesn't stop Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" from being culturally important, any more than the avant-garde chin-stroking of The Wire magazine guarantees artistic significance.

I'm not really pushing any specific notion of genius, but was challenging the claim that B. would be making techno today.

I agree, "there's got to be something convincing", but it's unlikely to be musical. Most musicians who have a hit at all have but one hit, and then fade away. Most of the few musicians who persist (eg Rolling Stones) have a massive and well-capitalised marketing department behind them. To a pretty good approximation no musician without major backing (which is expensive) has ever been widely and/or long-term successful. To understand the nature of hits, you need to understand the music industry.

Coincidentally, the music industry follows the SV VC model: fund 100, expect 99 to fail and the one unicorn who makes it big recoups (more than) the cost of the 99 failures.

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