I don’t agree. If someone gets as much of an emotional reaction while listening to “pop” music as someone else of different tastes does when listening to a symphony, how is the first type of music inferior to the second? To me, good music is good music. If that makes me some kind of troglodyte musically, then all I can say is… drrrrrr.
What is meant by a “higher life form”? In biology, even, I mean.
It’s a song about a rat. Not a cute and fuzzy Disney rat, but a nasty, murderous sewer rat. They fog up over that?
Well say, human over amoeba, but I see what you’re doing here.
Nobody who knows anything about Prince would argue that he’s not a towering musical talent, even if you don’t like his music (I don’t for the most part, but I listen to dozens of artists who would sound totally different or not exist at all without him). Rolling Stone, a publication constantly criticized for writing off any musician born after 1950, called him one of the 100 greatest artists of all time. He taught himself to play a dozen different classes of instrument, and played every note on several of his studio albums- as many as 27 different instruments. He’s one of the five or six most important artists in the history of electronic music and the use of electronic sound in music in general.
And (according to Wikipedia) Beethoven wrote pieces for one of his many mistresses, a guiny pig and 25 folksy tunes from Scotland. What’s your point?
So you’re saying artistic criticism is solely a matter of opinion. That’s fine, but then how can we even discuss the merits of Michael Jackson’s music? You disregard other people’s opinions, claiming that popularity is irrelevant. There’s not much to talk about if you think your opinion is the only respectable one.
As for “level balancing,” what are you talking about? EQ? Volume? I was referring to Auto-Tune, which is a pitch-correcting program. And it certainly wasn’t around in 1982 for “Thriller” or in 1969 for The Jackson 5…
There are classical afficianados who exalt Schoenberg and disdain Mozart as melodic pap. I don’t agree and I’m sure you probably don’t either.
Of course the works of Mozart and Beethoven (and Bach, Stravinsky, and Gershwin) are more complex than MJ. You don’t write pop music today that’s complex if you intend it to get air play. However, simplicity is much harder than it seems; it is extraordinarily difficult to craft a short, simple yet nuanced song. Billie Jean is an excellent example of a short but extremely well-crafted work, deceptively simple but very interesting to analyze. The Wikipedia article does a good job of just that.
What about Richard Rodgers? Is Where or When to be sniffed at just because it’s basically a standard sixteen bar song? Or is Cole Porter’s Night and Day dismissable because it too is a pop song that contains umpteen repeated notes and has a melody that simply winds its way up and down a scale?
Certainly not all pop stars are musicians to be admired. But some are, no matter what the ivory tower denizens may believe. And I think MJ is undoubtedly one of them.
(Sigh. I mean ‘was’. It’s still hard to fathom…)
Vocoders have been around since before the Jackson 5- Sly and the Family Stone pioneered their use on Sex Machine and Alan Parsons has used them on every record since 1973. I can’t find any references suggesting that MJ ever used one, but Googling for anything + Michael Jackson right now is a pretty fruitless endeavor, since every music related page on the internet has a link to something about him at the moment.
I know what you are talking about, but I don’t really understand what saving the engineer a few days work when producing an album has to do with Michael Jackson’s talent as compared to singers today. So the Engineer (not Michael Jackson) doesn’t get paid for another week or two of work to balance the levels in his voice. EQ/Volume/Filters.
That it’s weird to get misty eyed about a sewer rat. duh
Nope, everyone else is saying it’s purely a matter of opinion. Popularity is the opinion of many people. So if you think popularity is a judge of music, then you are saying that it’s only a matter of opinion, and I am saying the opposite.
But do most people get misty eyed over the subject of a song, or is it more the way the song sounds/is sung/etc.? Like, if they changed the lyrics to your favorite song to make them about a sewer rat, would the song suddenly get less touching?
I really don’t think you know what I’m talking about. I’m saying Michael Jackson could hit the right notes naturally, without the assistance of a computer, while singers like Britney Spears probably can’t. I’m not talking about EQ or volume. Only pitch. Flats and sharps.
And as for the vocoder, yes, that’s been around a while, but it’s a fairly obvious effect. Makes the voice sound like a robot, it’s not usually used to fix an out of tune voice.
To say Ben was just about a rat and not also about un-understood friendship is like saying that the Zauberflote is just about a magic flute. It’s nonsense and you know it.
Also, if the lyrics alone is the only merit of a song, then you are dismissing more than half of the classical music as well.
Again, a piece of music is not about the riffs, the lyrics or complexity. It is about the emotional response of the listener. Fear is an emotional response, and I remember being terrified of the Thriller video when I was 10 or so. It was well crafted, composed and performed. If you can concede that the orignal Dracula film was groundbreaking in its time for the movie genre, then you must concede that Thriller was groundbreaking in music history.
You may not like the direction it has taken, but it was groundbreaking nonetheless.
Yes a bit. I also think it’s ok to get misty about a sewer rat, but that doesn’t make it not odd.
Many singers still can hit the notes. Probably Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera could. And I bet as soon as auto-tune came out Michael Jackson was using it.
I’m not talking about that, and you don’t need to use a vocoder ONLY to make your voice sound like a robot.
I used to work in a recording studio and am a big afficianado of electronic music, so I definitely know precisely what you are talking about.
Michael Jackson was not an opera singer. A good singer, yes.
No I don’t know it because I don’t know that song. I was just pointing out the obvious meaning in another post that someone missed the point of.
This is a straw man that there is no real response to. I never said anything resembling this.
Well then I guess John Williams is the height of music then because he can create music that can make a poorly written scene seem so much more heroic and epic than it really is.
Yes, he was a ground breaking pop star.
You do realize that music can be scientific right? You can write music that will elicit certain responses from the listener just by picking the right notes. If you are a trained musician you know how to do this. Many people make a great living doing this writing jingles for commercials.
I find it odd that you trash MJ for his artistic ability while you don’t know his oeuvre.
You implied it by saying Ben was an unworthy song because of it being about a rat. But fine, I’ll let it drop.
It certainly is a major achievement, yes. While I might be familiar with his work without realising it, I don’t really know the man. But if he can do what you claim he does, then yes, he may be the height of music in his area of work
You do realize that the big classical names knew this too, right? Math and music have been matched in ancient greek times already, so that is nothing new.
But all this aside, I see no difference in Beethoven writing a certain piece of music for a particular dance, and MJ writing music for performance for millions of people, besides the scale of it. The goal was the same: have people like it so that they can dance to it. Neither artist wrote for themselves, they wrote for the audience so they could put food on the table (and occassionally buy a theme park).
I find it strange that you think not knowing one song is ignorance of a man’s ouevre, and that I am bashing Michael Jackson. I’m not bashing Michael Jackson, I am bashing pop music. He was incredibly talented for a pop musician, he just didn’t break any musical ground.
I didn’t actually.
You’ve never seen Star Wars?
Yes, I do, and they went much farther with it than the modern day pop musicians you are referring to.
Neither artist wrote for themselves? And you claim I have no respect for them as artists? You just called both Beethoven and Michael Jackson mere technicians, not artists. I think that this statement is probably untrue in both cases however.