The Curious Apparent Durability of 1970s / 1980s Pop

[Jackmannii]

When I was a child, there was plenty of Muzaky background music comprising songs from the big band era, especially in the supermarket. There were endless TV ads (at least through the '60s - early '70s) for album collections of big band favorites, and even claims from devotees that big band music would become popular again.*

I agree that quite a bit of '70s-'80s pop doesn’t sound radically different from recently released quEasy Listening music, so playing this stuff is probably designed to appeal to older folks while not hugely turning off younger people.

*there’s a definite predilection among “fine dining” establishments to have a soundtrack of Sinatra/Tony Bennett-era songs playing in the background, presumably to add “refinement”. And numerous stores play what I assume is modern soft pop/indistinguishable dreck with cooing vocals, much of it so bad that it seems designed to propel customers (like me, anyway) out the door.

[JohnT]

@FlikTheBlue

For what it’s worth, my claim isn’t that today’s music sucks. My claim is that it isn’t substantially different than the music from 10 or 20 years ago. It’s just as good as music from any other era, it just happened to stop changing as frequently as it did in the 20th century.

I vaguely disagree with this notion, but only vaguely as I’m not educated enough to properly refute it. But I refute it thus! < kicks rock >

[digs]

I always feel bad for the “service industry young’uns”, having to listen to Olde Geezer music over the sound system.

But one time, in a coffee joint that had been playing “piano rock of the 70s”, I went up to the counter and said “Y’know, you don’t have to play this music for us fogies. You can play whatever you want, we can handle it.”

Suddenly, all the teen/20-something baristas and busboys came to life:
“This IS what we want!” “Yeah, I’m a huuuge Elton fan!” “I saw the Beach Boys live.” “Me too, and Sting and Van Halen.” “I have every Billy Joel LP!”

I laughed and thanked them for the education. And went back to my table to adjust my prejudices.

[beowulff]

Is Old Music Killing New Music?

[dougrb]

I’m pushing 60 and my parents have a sign “I’m NOT old… your music DOES suck”

[Sam_Stone]

I think there’s a lot of stuff going on here. A big one might be the fragmentation of modern music. There are so many choices, and so many ways to play music that we all find our own niches. I listen to quite a bit of modern music, but none of it is top-40 pop. I couldn’t name a single Rhianna or Beyonce’ song.

But back in 70’s an 80’s, everyone listened to one of a very few types of radio. There was pop AM, Album FM, and country. No spotify, no internet. So songs and artists sunk into the public consciousness in a way that they don’t anymore.

Some artists are monster celebrities, but I think their celebrity is narrow but more global. Very few modern artists are listened to by children as well as their grandparents. But bands like the Beatles, Eagles, CCR, The Stones, the Who… everyone knew who they were and their music was everywhere.

Then there is quality. Every era has great music and bad music, but the monster pop hits today are simplified, repetitive, and written to sound familiar because marketing has found that we engage more when we recognize beats and patterns in music.

What do these songs have in common?

“So What” - P!nk
“Since U Been Gone” - Kelly Clarkson
“It’s My Life” - Bon Jovi
“Blinding Lights” - The Weeknd
“Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” - Backstreet Boys
“Save Your Tears (Remix)” - The Weeknd & Ariana Grande
“Blank Space” - Taylor Swift
“I Want It That Way” - Backstreet Boys
“It’s Gonna Be Me” - NSYNC
“…Baby One More Time” - Britney Spears
“Shake it Off” - Taylor Swift
“Roar” - Katy Perry
“Can’t Stop the Feeling” - Justin Timberlake
“I Don’t Care” - Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber
“California Girls” - Katy Perry
“I Kissed a Girl” - Katy Perry
“Oops I Did it Again” - Britney Spears

The answer is that they were all written by Max Martin, a Swedish professional contract songwriter. And this is just a small sample of his hit songs. He’s now the biggest songwriter since Lennon and McCartney.

None of these artists wrote their songs. Martin has perfected a formula for producing hits. He and a couple other professional songwriters are responsible for the large majority of modern hits. They tend to sound somewhat the same, have simplified lyrics and musical structures, and contain elements that make them sound similar so they reinforce their airplay.

Great art? Nope. Pure calculation. It drives these songs up the charts, but once they are outside of the pop consciousness they tend to fade away because there’s actually not much there.

Pop music has been getting less complex and challenging pver the decades. That doesn’t promote longevity.

From here:

An Analysis of Why Modern Music Is So Awful

1. Over the past few decades, the timbre of music has dropped drastically. “Timbre” is the texture, colour, and quality of the sounds within the music being listened to. Timbre variety peaked in the 1960s and has since been steadily declining. Songs increasingly have less variety in their instrumentation and recording techniques. Instead of experimenting with different instrumentation and recording techniques, the vast majority of pop music today use the same instrumentation: a keyboard, a drum machine, a sampler and computer software. Consequently, all modern pop music sounds the same.

2. Since the 1960s, the melodies, rhythms and vocals of songs have increasingly sounded similar to one another, with many modern pop songs using the exact same sequence of notes in a given key: from the 5th note to the 3rd and back to the 5th. That is, music has become less harmonically complex. Why? Because this is a familiar musical sequence that music listeners are comfortable with.

3. For the past 20 years, music producers have been intentionally making songs louder by using compression effects in the studio. Compression is the process of boosting the quietest parts of a song so that they match the loudest parts, thus reducing the dynamic range or “distance” between the loudest and quietest parts. The effect of this application is to make the entire song sound louder, no matter how loudly the listener sets the volume. This is done to make a song “stand out” among a pack of similar sounding songs – i.e., for competitive purposes. The trade-off is that compression reduces the timbral quality of the song.

Moreover, the video makes some additional observations:

1. The lyrical quality of songs has gotten worse over the past 10 years – lyrics have become more mundane and simplified.

2. Because technology allows music fans to have access to so many songs, today’s pop songs are laden with hooks that appear in a song as soon as possible in order to keep the listener listening, otherwise, he or she will skip to the next song.

3. The timbral, harmonic and dynamic homogenization of today’s pop music (as described above) is a result of risk aversion on the part of the music industry. Because it takes so much money to invest in developing new musical talent (many of whom are discovered on talent shows such as America’s Got Talent or X-Factor), record labels want to bet on a sure thing by taking no artistic risks.

4. The music listening public has been “brainwashed” into liking this music because it’s being played everywhere – on the radio, in shopping malls, on the internet, in films, and on television shows. The video’s narrator describes this as the “Mere-Exposure Effect” which is “a psychological phenomenon by which people develop a preference for things they see and hear often“. More specifically, our brain releases dopamine when we hear a song that we’ve heard a few times before, and the effect gets stronger with each listen.

All of this is undeniably true. It’s a formula for a song to break through the noise and become a hit, but to do it the song has to be simple and hook-filled, which makes it wear poorly over time.

My music from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s is filled with horns, strings, complex melodies, literary lyrics, sophisticated chord structures, unique beats and sounds, etc. It makes it easy to listen to them over and over again. You can hear country songs woth flutes and pianos, rock songs with string sections, etc. Procol Harem recorded ‘Conquistador’ with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. ELO traveled with its own orchestra. The Beatles used every instrument they could find. People still talk about what chords were used in various sections of their songs because they are unique and complex.

IMO, these are the factors that have made older pop music stand the test of time while today’s pop rises to great heights then fades away almost instantly.

[xtenkfarpl]

There have been a lot of new songs in the ‘Modern Country’ genre over the last couple of decades, And they are often well crafted with sometimes quite clever lyrics. There are some very capable writers, producers and players in Nashville.

But from time working as a sideman player (bass) in a ‘new country’ band, I find that we have to keep learning new ones because those songs just don’t… last.
For the gig next month you need a new set to please the crowd with the new stuff they just heard on the radio.

[JohnGalt]

So we were in Las Vegas in 2019 and has plans to go to the Cirque du Soleil Beatles show Love (which I loved). We stopped in the adjoining gift shop, and I asked the young sales woman if she was aware of the upcoming movie Yesterday, which had just been announced at the time. I said something along the lines that a new generation will get to know rhe music of the Beatles. She replied, indignantly, that her generation already knows all about the Beatles and their music. I should have known better.

[TriPolar]

Musical success in the 70s and 80s was found on the radio. Then video killed the radio star.

[Orville_mogul]

and in a twist of poetic justice, one of the biggest bands of the 70s absorbed the band that created that video.

[F.U.Shakespeare]

@JohnGalt

I should have known better.

ISWYDT.

[Ike_Witt]

And how did that work out for them?

[Orville_mogul]

Actually the 1980 album they made together was pretty decent. And the singer went on with that band to produce one of the biggest albums and singles of the 80s. And the keyboardist is still with the band.

So not too shabby.

[pjd]

@WildaBeast

But, at least as far as I know, no one calls music from that era oldies. I’m pretty sure oldies still means music from the 50s and 60s.

I frequent the /namethattune subreddit… and they do it there ! To some people,
anything earlier than 2000 is “oldies”. Young bastards !

[FlikTheBlue]

@pjd

I frequent the /namethattune subreddit… and they do it there ! To some people,
anything earlier than 2000 is “oldies”. Young bastards !

2000 was 23 years ago. Back when I was a kid, let’s’ say 1985 to take a year that makes the example jump out more, music from 1979, a mere six years earlier, was already the oldies. Even more dramatically, by 1994 Tupac and Notorious BIG had rendered the music of MC Hammer from 1991, a mere three years earlier, the oldies. I doubt anyone today considers the music from 2017, much less 2020, to be the oldies. Since the music back then changed a lot more quickly, that means we have a smaller sample size for each era. It’s a lot easier to remember those few good songs from a 2 or 3 year time period than it is to remember the many good songs from a now going on 20+ year time period.

[LSLGuy]

I htink some folks are confusing “the oldies” with old music.

IMO “The oldies” is stuck in the 1950s - 1960s to mayyybe early 1970s. Back around 2000 when my contemporaries had teenage kids, the kids referred to 70s-80s music as “geezer rock”, not “the oldies”. The term still meant “obsolete & vaguely embarrassing” to them, just like “moldy oldies” was the term we used when I was a teen in the 1970s to refer to the 1950s music.

As to what kids are doing / saying now in the 2020s I have no way to say. I just don’t hang with that crowd.

[Jophiel]

I think that today’s youth is just a lot more accepting of wider tastes for whatever reason. When I was in high school, I’d listen to the oldies (50s/60s) station and practically have to hide it to avoid being mocked. Even acts like the Beatles or Rolling Stones weren’t really cool to be into. Now that stuff is 40 years older and no big deal. Less shits are given if something is new or not.

I believe that the Band Hero style game boom in the earlier 2000s helped a lot in bringing older music into use. Probably less of a factor with today’s kids since that style of game has fallen out of fashion but, for a good five years, you had a ton of kids playing along to hits of the 60s-80s on their plastic guitars and drum sets. Even if today’s 12 year old isn’t playing those games, I think they gave a lot of songs/bands a persisting boost of cultural relevance.

Since the 2010s were mentioned, I’d just like to say that there are about a bajillion covers of Robyn’s 2010 hit “Dancing on My Own”. I was picking my son (12) up from school one day and a cover came on Spotify. I said it was a cover and played the original so we could decide who did it better. Then we got through about ten or twelve different covers over the next couple of afternoon drives and only scratched the surface. He settled on a twangy country music cover which scandalized my wife something fierce.

[digs]

@Jophiel

He settled on a twangy country music cover which scandalized my wife something fierce.

Ahhh…fond memories of playing music that makes your parents yell “You call THAT music?!?”

Of course, Dad said that about the Beatles in 1967. I’m still listening to them fifty-five years later, as are my kids. Dad was listening to nothing but post-war Big Band music from only twenty-five years earlier.

[Elmer_J.Fudd]

@LSLGuy

I htink some folks are confusing “the oldies” with old music.

I remember when “the oldies” were almost all pre-1968 with special exceptions for “Crocodile Rock” and “The Longest Time”. The next ten years were “Classic Rock”. That term became meaningless when they started including U2 songs.

[TriPolar]

My previous post was somewhat serious. Popularity on the radio required a broad appeal. The actual change that ended that era wasn’t video. Video started in the 80s, but not long later it was online access to music that changed everything. Like everything else in the age of online communication and commerce smaller subsets of music could find target audiences and the broad appeal of popular radio music dies off as a result. What emerged was the superstar era of popular music, not based as much on bands but individual singer/dancers and massive show productions. It marked the end of the singer-songwriter, the superstars didn’t write music, their output became studio produced computer enhanced promotions that made more money for the select few that could attain that level.

The great popular music from the 50s through the 80s had to have broad popular appeal to succeed. The day that was no longer necessary was the day the music died for real.