Lifting sections of the music from other artists and adding your own lyrics is a questionable way to define a musician.
Rap is much more rhythmic poetry than music, as are its practitioners.
We don’t tend to remember the reall rubbish from the past, but there was plenty of it.
Hell, people even enjoy so-called “artists” whose work is all samples, and who don’t even write new lyrics (e.g.: DJ Shadow, Girl Talk). What’s wrong with them? Don’t they realize it isn’t music?
Or, you could say it’s
[QUOTE=Rupert Giles]
Aggressively cheerful music sung by people chosen for their ability to dance.
[/QUOTE]
Second verse, same as the first!
Seriously, this complain has been around as long as there have been pop stars. It would actually be a more interesting assertion to hear someone make the opposite argument.
Yes, yes, music today is crap. Back when I was young it was awesome! No, it’s not and it wasn’t. You’re just older and out of touch.
And for those who say in the 90s it was real? Or Milli Vanilli? There was Duran Duran, Frankie Valli. Dion and the Belmonts, and so on and so forth back through time. Pop stars have always been chosen for their looks as much as their musical skills. And that’s not a bad thing in a music-way because what the hell, right?
Looking at this week’s Hot 100 chart, I see in the top 40 a soul singer accompanied by solo piano (Adele - Someone Like You), a disco number by the same artist (Rolling in the Deep), and an indie rock piece performed entirely by one person with bass guitar as the lead instrument (Foster the People - Pumped Up Kicks). Further down the chart there’s piano-driven Christian rock (The Fray - Heartbeat), indie power pop (The Black Keys - Lonely Boy), and Irish alt-rock (Snow Patrol - Called Out in the Dark).
On the 2011 year-end Hot 100 chart, there’s tongue-in-cheek Motown soul (Cee Lo Green - Fuck You), a song about death featuring a saxophone solo by a man who died shortly after recording it (Lady Gaga - The Edge of Glory), and a surprising amount of country music in various styles including breakup songs and drinking songs.
I’ll grant that the charts are dominated by hip-hop and synth-pop, but to say “all individuality has been squeezed out” and there’s no room for innovation is to be dismissive of the fact that there are still artists out there doing unusual things and getting critical success for it.
And lest we believe that “all that’s in the top 40 is pop” is a new phenomenon, here’s the top 10 from this week in 1967 (a year I picked at random);
10: The Four Seasons - Tell It to the Rain
9: The Lovin’ Spoonful - Nashville Cats
8: Nancy Sinatra - Sugar Town
7: The Seekers - Georgy Girl
6: The Four Tops - Standing in the Shadows of Love
5: The Mamas and the Papas - Words of Love
4: Paul Revere & the Raiders - Good Thing
3: Aaron Neville - Tell It Like It Is
2: The Royal Guardsmen - Snoopy vs. the Red Baron
1: The Monkees - I’m a Believer
Pretty much all the “prefab pop” of the day - and this was the month the Doors’ first album was out, that the Spencer Davis Group had “Gimme Some Lovin’” in circulation, that “For What It’s Worth” and “Ruby Tuesday” were released as singles, and that Cream’s first album was on the shelves.
Age definitely clouds the judgment.
I do think it’s true that visuals play a big role. I’m not thinking a Bob Dylan would be able to make it big today because he wouldn’t fit in with the rest of the scenery. HOWEVER, he did fit the gestalt of his time. He had the big jewfro thing going on (Jimi Hendrix adopted his look from him). Similarly, Elvis was certainly talented-- and yet if he had been a short Chinese guy or (heaven forbid) a black guy, he would have been a nobody.
The whipper-snappers of today make me think they’re talentless because I’m turned off by their “look” before I can listen to them. I’m still living in the 90s, when raggedy, grungy, relaxed, and hippie was in. The artists that I used to look up to didn’t seem so young, because they were always older than I was. So that meant they knew what the hell they were singing about, from my perspective. And now I’m in the position of looking at the current offerings but not being able to identify with their styles (skinny jeans? on guys? and what’s up with Bieber’s hair? and why can’t Beyounce put on some damn clothes?"). They’re younger than me, so whatever they’re singing about is automatically stupid.
With some exceptions, the “new” performing artists that I like are the ones I have never seen before. I have no idea what Adele looks like. All I know is she has pipes.
I shoot School of Rock concerts, and I can assure you there is no shortage of talented kids. I see kids at nearly every show that I could easily put on stage with any band.
Corporate pop pablum is not due to a lack of talented performers.
I’m pretty sure Eminem, Jay-Z, Kanye West and many others are considered talented musician.
The reason pop music appears to suck these days is that 90% of what you hear on the radio or see on TV is highly commercialized, highly processed “lifestyle music”. Contrast to the songwriters of yesteryear like Lennon and Dylan or Cobain, today’s music is mostly vapid, shallow party music designed to make people want to emulate other people who look like they are having a good time.
Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, and Katy Perry put out some really catchy tunes. But they aren’t great works of art or anything.
But the musicians of today also SEEM younger than older musics were at the same age decades ago. Musicians from the 60s, 70s and 80s had more of an air of living a hard life and scraping by in an all or nothing bid for success. Now we don’t even pretend that musicians aren’t “discovered” by a corporate celebrity factory. Heck, half of the top artists these days won their fame on a gameshow!
Now that does seem true. There are only a few artists out today that I can imagine having interesting “Behind the Music” stories.
Who exactly are these singing stars of yore who were dog ugly but successful thanks to their great voices? I’m having a hard time thinking of examples, at least not from the world of popular music and not opera. There are a few well-known recording artists who became famous more for their songwriting skills than their good looks or good voices (e.g. Bob Dylan), there have been others who I wouldn’t call conventionally attractive but who were widely considered to be sexy (e.g. Mick Jagger), and quite a few famous singers who I’d say were pretty average in the looks department. But the only 20th century singer of popular music I can think of who was actually considered ugly but succeeded thanks to her voice is Cass Elliot (Mama Cass)…and she became most famous while in a group that also featured the very pretty Michelle Phillips.
I think people are judging “attractiveness” by the wrong standards.
Take Prince. If Prince was a newcomer now, he’d be booed off the stage. A short man with a good perm, wearing fluffy blouses and stiletto boots, driving around on a purple motorcycle? With a horsy-looking face? Yeah, people would be telling him to sit down with all that if he attempted to do that today. But the androgynous look was cool in the early 80s, as well as the over-the-top showmanship.
Going back some more, to the 70s: Hall and Oates. Can you imagine Hall and Oates making it big now? No way! But it wasn’t really the faces that made them “cool” back then, but the overall gestalt of two buddies jamming together that was common during that period. During that time, you had CHiPs, Cheech and Chong, Starksy and Hutch, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, and even the Duke Brothers from the Dukes of Hazard. So the two of them made sense. They aren’t especially handsome (especially poor Oates), but they still fit an image. Maybe alone, the two wouldn’t have been able to get away with it.
Sammy Davis Jr. is more enigmatic. Maybe he was able to make up for his weird look by having a winsome personality.
The three biggest acts of 2011 (Adele, Mumford and Sons, The Decemberists) all refute this theory.
Adele is, let’s be generous here, a very rubenesque woman. Mumford and Sons take the stage in old-timey clothes that are meant to make them look like hillfolk. And the lead singer of The Decemberists looks like the baby you’d get from an unholy union of Drew Carey and Dilbert.
In fact, I’d say the opposite is true. What a band looks like hasn’t been less important in decades.
I think you’re confusing the importance of looks with the importance of conventional good looks. For teenagers, looking unconventional is part of being cool. In the 50’s, it was leather jackets; today, it goes a lot farther.
And of course it’s not either-or. Good looking singers have always had an advantage. But they have a lot bigger advantage in the video era than in the radio era.
Heh. Colin Meloy was one of the first names that sprang to mind when people were advancing the theory that you have to be attractive/sexy to be successful in pop music.
Then I wondered if it’s worth making a distinction between singers (i.e. solo artists, billed by the name of the person) and band or groups. It sometimes seems to me that they are, and always have been, two separate categories representing two different types of appeal (with, admittedly, numerous exceptions). The individual pop star’s success is based on good looks, charisma, sex appeal, and the ability to “perform” (sing, dance, put on a show). The group’s appeal is based on musicianship, songwriting, having a “sound” of their own that appeals to people, and the image or personality of the band as a whole.
Actually, those are exactly the artists I was thinking of when I was ranting about the saturation of talentless Rap and Hip-Hop influences in today’s pop scene. They might be semi-talented rappers or mixers or producers, but they are not talented musicians or even talented "crafters"of music. Their “jumbles” just don’t cut it for talent… not a musical bone in their body.
Technology and mass media are the culprits of today. First and foremost the performer has to be good looking. This is absolutely true for females. Pretty, and able to sing reasonably well. Or actually, with modern studio sound tech, just slightly better than an average person can sing. That’s it. They don’t have to be able to play an instrument, or write music, or read music, or write lyrics or have any real musical training or ability! More emphasis is put on being able to fucking dance in the videos and performances than having any real creative talent. If your face and tits and ass can sell product everything else will be done for you. This certainly has always existed in the music industry, it’s just that now it’s become the rule not the exception. And because pop music was and is the most ‘shallow’ form of music it’s most likely gonna stay this way.
As far as rap, if you enjoy it fine. But it isn’t music. The non-vocal part of the track is 100% computer generated. There aren’t even faceless ‘studio’ musicians playing on it, just an engineer who pushes some buttons. And more importantly, this is also true when rap artists perform quote unquote, "live". The non-vocal tracks might as well just be prerecorded playback (usually they are!). And even the vocal track is not singing. It’s not really even sing-talking. It’s a sort of a rhythmic poetic performance art. So that’s, one, no musical instruments and, two, no singing which, three, equals not music. That doesn’t deny the fact that it’s a legitimate form of entertainment that’s sold & performed thru the same venues as musicians are.
But I don’t feel guilty in looking down my nose at it for being less than what real musicians do. It makes sense that rap is right next to pop in being made for people who are ‘satisfied with less’. But like it or not rap (same as pop) isn’t, for lack of a better word, as substantial as real music like rock & roll or R&B or Jazz is. Want proof? There is no such thing as ‘classic rap’. Rap is here & gone, much like pop music. Less so even, because the really big pop songs do get remembered and replayed occasionally.
this is hilariously ignorant and wrong. regardless of the source of the sound, it still takes a person with some measure of talent to figure out what sounds he/she wants and arrange them so they sound pleasing when played together.
Why do threads always degenerate into rap-bashing sessions?
Try this one:
Rap is music because it is accepted as such by most people, including people with expertise in the subject.
If you don’t like that argument, try this one:
“Music” is a completely value-neutral term, just like “art” is. A person clapping their hands to the rhythm of B-I-N-G-O is performing music. A person uttering lyrics to an intentional, repeatable rhythm is also performing music, especially since there is usually an instrumental accompaniment. Saying it is music is not giving it special status among all other artforms. It’s simply applying the most appropriate label that exists in our language.
It’s strange how both rap-haters and lovers view it as music, but the “not music” crowd is always staunchly in the “hate” camp. That alone makes their position suspect.
But we should probably stop hijacking the thread.
Jesus fucking Christ. You don’t hear so much about “classic” (i.e., if we’re to take the rock definition, 60s and 70s) rap because the genre hasn’t been around that long. People certainly do continue to listen to older rap/hip-hop, though; it’s not just here and gone, as you say. If it doesn’t get as much radio play as classic rock, well, that’s just because the fucking navel-gazing Baby Boomers didn’t grow up with it.
I might just as well say you never hear about classical rock or R&B or jazz, the way we have so much classical Baroque and Classical Era and Romantic music (the real stuff); therefore, those genres aren’t really music. But I wouldn’t say that, because I strive not to be a moron.
So? I don’t quite see your logic here.