I hope so. Top 40 lists are constructed not observed. They seem to have no relationship to what music is favored by listeners, just what is being pushed on pop radio. A self satisfying loop.
But that's beside the point here. My biggest peeve is that there are plenty of "Top 40" "artists" that can barely hold a note. And it's been that way since the 90s, thanks to the magic of Auto-Tune. Anyone with a marketing budget and access to an industry insider who can make the right moves can just start dropping albums and buying hit slots.
What's changed is that now, anyone with a YouTube or Twitch channel can just start publishing music. Create a Soundcloud and you can get rotation in any one of a dozen DJs podcasts. TuneCore will put your stuff in the Music Stores. Spotify and Pandora are a little harder to break into, but not much. Setup a Twitter account and talk directly to your fans without needing a publicist.
A whole industry's worth of Kingmakers have been turned into online services, and that's really changing the landscape of the industry.
Or maybe you just meant to say you don’t like pop?
The obvious end point will be AI-generated muzak which tweaks all the right receptors but is devoid of any disturbingly non-optimal fleshy surprise.
I sincerely doubt if that's how it works even nowadays. You need to be discovered by a well-connected and well-heeled patron who thinks what you do can be marketed with just a few tweaks. Very seldom does the artist become the patron of their own work is my guess. Banksy might be one of the few exceptions that prove the rule.
A few hundred years ago, by contrast, artists tended to get into it via, essentially, apprenticeship to another artist, and attempt to get a patron that way. Some artists ended up being technically proficient, but stylistic innovation was very, very slow and minor by comparison to the late 19th century on.
You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability. GTAV comes with an animation toolkit for making films.
Most people create art for fun or their own pleasure. Tiktok is full of "modern art" in the form of short videos.
I'd argue that that's still talent, if the product is any good. You don't need technical expertise, but you still need creativity.
She switched out of painting when the someone in class used pain straight from the tube (no mixing) and just made a vagina that was smoking a cigarette but then had some real good fluff backing it up.
She deeply respected the impressionists so it was rough for her. She's happy in her new medium tho.
source: sister with a masters in fine art from a very prestigious university.
Art is always about the message and the emotions it impresses on people, not raw technique. Or do you think that literature is the art of typesetting?
You're still talking about this smoking vagina, how many other pieces from this class do you mention in casual conversation? Clearly if it was meant to be a provoking piece, it worked to a certain extent.
And then someone invented the wireless and the record player. According to the myth, it quickly reached its optimum time when some fashionable person was in their youth. And it has been degrading ever since.
Now, as for me, I would think all commercial music is worse than all traditional music. If you can talk, you can sing. But here someone in this thread has suggested that perhaps as little as 1% of the population can sing well enough to be autotuned! (This is insane. The proportion of the population who can sing well enough to be autotuned is much closer to 100% than to 90%.)
Someone else might say that commercial music has done quite well, and it keeps doing better. Certainly there's more and more detail added to it.
But the fashionable story is that at some point, probably in the 1960s, music became brilliant, and then all these grubby gen-xers and millennials got their grubby hands on it and turned it all into the most dreary computer driven sounds imaginable.
Even before that, you had music halls as popular entertainment (and music hall music was indeed very formulaic, arguably more so than modern pop music).
Pop as we know it started as a social psychology experiment in the 1960s or earlier. It has now reached the phase where the experiment is over and the results have been published. That is why pop sounds so boring and samey now: the record execs know precisely what works, and all songs must contain certain elements if they are to chart, all while swapping superficial details around to sound "fresh".
The last time there was experimentation going on in pop music was probably the 80s. That's why Michael Jackson's chart-topper "Thriller" sounds so much more layered, complex, and interesting than nearly anything shat out by the chart toppers of today.
This is a paradox, though. You’re saying that one of the most popular types of music “lacks musicality”. The only way that can be true is if you start with a narrow and arbitrary definition of what “musicality” is.
If you examine the history of ideas of what is “real” or “authentic” or “objectively good” in music, who has been a proponent of those ideas through history, and why, you will find is that a lot of it is rooted in white supremacy. The idea is that a certain style of white European music is the only true music, and that other music is only valuable to the extent that it happens to fit within the theoretical frameworks developed around those styles.
I guess what I’m saying is, please watch this excellent video, “Music Theory is Racist” by Adam Neely: https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA
I think saying western Top40 lacks musicality within the context of western music is a totally fine thing to do though, because it's not that it's something different and good. It's trying to be western music, but it's derivative and shallow interpretations of it. Western music being a broad brush, including many of the subcultures of music contained within somewhere like America.
Top40 is often the crap versions of the good stuff that's out there, cheap versions of the culture that dwells beneath. My main point is that it's popularity is not because of musical excellence regardless of what that excellence is for the given genre/culture, it's manufactured popularity through repetition and distribution. Sometimes they pick good songs to pedal, so I'm not saying Top40 contains zero good music. It's just not a good representation of the state of music culture by any means.
It's hard to talk about music without seeing it through your own experience, because it is a language you share with those who know it. Adam Neely about his Jazz Ambassador tour, said he felt he could connect only tangentially with the Mongolian performers. There was some crossover and they could speak some of the same musical terms, but there was much of their musical language that wasn't immediately compatible. Sort of like a French language speaker sometimes interjecting English words, you can hear them but you can't intuitively know the context, and unless you knew both you couldn't really comment on how well the sentence was executed. But of the genres that end up in Top40, I typically know good music in those genres, so I feel I am able to comment on their quality.
Ok, why don’t you prove it by writing a hit pop song? Come back to this thread when you have your gold record, I’ll wait
For some unknown reason I’ve been geeking out on Miley Cyrus lately. Her studio releases have that glossy, overproduced sound of too many cooks in the kitchen. Her live performances on the other hand rely on the power of her vocals and a really tight band that has been together for a stretch now.
Just compare the studio release of Slide Away [1] with what they did on the BBC Live Lounge [2]. Lyrically the song is what it is, but there’s so much more energy and feel (to me anyway) in the latter.
[1] https://youtu.be/rrvFv6j3-sM
[2] https://youtu.be/liRu4mhUF7I
Then of course her Backyard Sessions have been a treat for a while now, but would never grace the airwaves:
As for knowing the same songs, I made friends through genre-related social groups - the goth/industrial nightclubs, and the Eurovision fanclubs / events. It's nice that generally everyone knows the same Max Martin songs, but there's deeper friendships to be had at clubs where everyone knows your obscure niche - whether it's arguing that Euphoria is still better than Heroes, even if Mans & Petra are the best hosts. Or if it's goths bitching over the shared experience of falling down the stairs trying to get onto the goth club dancefloor before Dero from Oomph yells "Gott Ist Ein Popstar" or "Augen Auf, ich komme"....
E.D. Hirsch, Jr. wrote "Cultural Literacy" in 1987, with an update in 2002 as "The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy". It's a huge collection of thousands of words/phrases/concepts/devices/people/places/etc, across multiple categories, that most Americans will already know the majority of their meanings, or at least find them somewhat familiar. I personally like randomly looking at the proverbs and idioms and sometimes finding parallels in other languages. It'd be interesting to go through it at random with a 7th grader and see what they've picked up -- like who says "there's more than one way to skin a cat" these days, but also who grew up in the US and doesn't understand its meaning? The book contends that about 80% of the knowledge shared by the literate has not changed for over a hundred years. Meanwhile for the 20% that changes (or is brand new) Asimov once wrote a chapter (9 in http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/asimov-on-numbers...) on how so much once-common knowledge has been happily forgotten -- who needs to know about compound addition?
For the professional context, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a219064.pdf et al. claim you need to know 70k plus or minus 20k things in your field to be an effective expert. I think it's also why it can be easily rewarding to chat about work with colleagues, you both have a lot in common just on the basis of the shared profession.
In short, I wouldn't worry about running out of shared knowledge, nor even shared preferences and tastes, for yourself or for the world.
So I wouldn't say I've explicitly made many if any friends over shared interests in music, but then once I had friends for whatever other reasons, we shared a lot of music with each other. Hardly any of them weren't "in" to music, and indeed some of them quite the opposite; they ended up in a band together (and I would occasionally incompetently noodle along with them on vocals/bass/guitar, but I wasn't remotely good enough to play out like they were).
In practice, though, I'm sure there's quite a bit of sharing musical tastes between friend and interest groups; it wouldn't be literally everyone listening to different things.
I would wonder does increasing consumer choice ultimately erode generational identity a bit, though. So much of the "what is a boomer/gen X/millenial" is founded in what popular culture everyone was consuming in a given decade.
However, since streaming, that equation has totally changed.
Streaming services have killed the album, so the top 40 really has no calling.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/
Looks like piracy did it in.
I've heard artists mention how albums don't really make them much money. Things like touring and merch sales account for the bulk of their income. I'd guess with streaming, podcasts, social networks, etc. artists have found ways outside of releasing a traditional album to stay relevant to the listener.