If you say so. I’m not denying its influence on anybody, just its influence on anything relatively popular.
Ok, I am curious. Who was more popular than Beethoven in his time? Every biography I have read of the man claims that he was considered the greatest living composer of his era. His funeral was attended by tens of thousands of people. That’s not popular? Reminds me a little bit of Michael Jackson to be honest.
I haven’t heard much classical music with a drum machine. Or a backwards guitar solo. Or double-tracked vocals. The recording process allows musicians to create sounds that would be impossible to produce in a concert hall.
Wow. Opinions and personalities like this are the reason I dropped out of music school. There’s only so much pretentiousness you can take. And this isn’t the pit, so you don’t need to insult my musical knowledge - something of which you know nothing about.
We all understand that, it’s beside the point. The pop music of that era was leagues beyond todays pop music in sophistication. That’s what the defenders of todays pop music don’t seem to understand. Michael Jackson represents a devolution not an evolution, because even into the 50s there were classical performances on Ed Sullivan that were watched by millions.
Michael Jackson didn’t advance music, he regressed it.
This thread is devolving to about the most annoying ever, with the ridiculous comparisons to haute cuisine and classical music. But dropzone’s comment here is actually worthy of elaboration. He’s absolutely right - under the Motown banner, the Jackson 5 were simply interpreting songs written (sometimes) for them. In fact, most J5 albums as well as MJ albums on Motown have at least one or two covers - typically of a Motown artist. And as good a bad as they were, after Third Album in 1970, they didn’t have a sizable hit until “Dancing Machine” in '74 or '75.
Like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder before them, the Jacksons were chafing under the controlling Motown rein. I actually think Michael’s last Motown album, Dear Michael, finally got the right songs for a 17 year old young man to sing. It’s a great, underrated album. Nevertheless, they wanted to write and produce (and play on) their own records. Motown said no, so they left.
At this point it could have well ended there. Their first two albums for CBS were produced by Gamble & Huff (Philly International) and mostly written by others save a song or two. But the third album, Destiny, was produced by the Jacksons and they wrote the majority of the songs. And it was an excellent album.
Michael, of course, used this as a springboard to relaunch a successful solo career. What’s important though, is just as it’s been noted that he is an excellent stylist, the songs he is most famous for - Don’t Stop 'til You Get Enough, Billie Jean, Beat It, Bad, The Way You Make Me Feel, Black or White - were songs he wrote. Yes, Rod Temperton wrote some excellent songs, and a notable exception is Human Nature - written by David Paich from Toto - but I’m unsure if Elvis, Sinatra, or Joe Cocker, had/have that much of a personal stamp on their output.
It was an incredible risk for a boy band, indeed one that had seen its best days nearly a decade earlier, to do it mostly by themselves. (Which explains why CBS only let them have the reins two albums in.) And if they didn’t have the chops, the albums wouldn’t have sold and become hits. I think the Jacksons, and Michael, aren’t recognized for their writing, producing, and studio savvy. The dancing and singing were the obvious indicators of their skill, but it went deeper than that.
I think a recent example of this is Justin Timberlake. I believe all of the N’Sync stuff was written by pop producers, but after he went solo he took greater creative control of his work and has gained some respect for his output.
I think it’s fine to hold the belief that classical>pop or rock or funk music, but I don’t think that there’s anything empirical about that opinion. It’s your taste, and it seems ridiculous to try to prove that one’s “taste” is superior to another’s.
Actually Knorf is making the best arguments in this thread. That people do not understand what he’s saying about listening to music as a primary activity shows the extent of musical illiteracy today. Hell, I don’t even know what he’s talking about, but the difference is that I am aware of my illiteracy. I can listen to a piece of music and tell which ones are far more sophisticated than another.
I really like the song by Britney Spears: ‘Piece of Me’, but I don’t try to claim it is greater than it is.
Interesting. I’m not terribly knowledgeable about music (so feel free to insult my ability in this area; it’s pretty crap) but “sexiness, youth, marketability” all seem to me to be rather more recent than “pop music” in general; fitting more with the rise of video clips.
Now, if you want to argue that adding pictures has placed emphasis to youth, beauty, etc (even to the detriment of the music itself) then I think that may not be an unfair argument… but…
As I sit here listening (yes, and working and typing) to Meatloaf, Pink Floyd, Warren Zevon, Madness, Kate Bush, The Animals, The Kinks, etc I’m really not persuaded that they were responsible for destroying “the ability of most people to actually use listening as a primary activity”, and yet they are pop music are they not?
Are you really prepared to argue that, to pull an example, Wish You Were Here was not primarily created to listen to?
And here is the problem. It IS empirical. **Knorf **is doing a better job of explaining why, and a guy I know on another message board who was trained in Communist Romania as a concert pianist explains it in a mind-blowing way, such that I feel like a total heathen when I hear what he has to say. There are aspects of art that show that one is better than another. Modernism in visual art and Pop for music have ruined our ability to appreciate true craft such that we equate the industrial design of music with true art. It’s not that subjective. Some music is objectively better than other music.
Nah Sinatra played on sexiness and marketability back in the day. It is what Elvis was about entirely. The only difference is the rise of mass market media. Michael Jackson’s genius is overblown due to the luck of positioning in the rise of mass media culture.
The argument is that people don’t know how to LISTEN to music. They don’t LISTEN to it, they HEAR it, but they are not LISTENING.
Right, it’s background to some other activity. You don’t put on the music and do nothing else but listen to the music. That’s **Knorf’s **point and would be the point that anyone else classically trained would make to you as well.
‘Wish You Were Here’ is leagues beyond anything Michael Jackson ever produced. If you wanted to compare Pink Floyd to the classical composers you’d have a stronger leg to stand on. MJs artistic genius was not musical, it was in the crafting of an image.
Sure, but through the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s it was still possible (I think) to be a very popular musician without being terribly photogenic, young, sexy, etc. I’m not sure how true that still is.
Fair cop (based on what I wrote), but they’re all artists that I have done exactly that with – but on the 'phones and laid back and grooved to as a primary activity. (And don’t tell the boss, but that can still happen at work when certain tunes come on). I also listen to Mozart, Orff, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky while working – that doesn’t make them less listenable to as a primary activity either.
This was less in response to MJ and much more in response to Knorf’s broad anti-pop music brush. Pink Floyd’s music is pop music (I think – in the music genre sense), so unless we’re going to get all True Scotsman some pop-music is empty crap but all of it is not.
Never much liked MJ, though I could appreciate that he was a pretty good dancer. And yes, image, the whole package, not pure musical ability.
Well, you and I have very divergent epistemic beliefs about music. It reminds me of a series that the BBC did a few years back with a brilliant professor of music, Howard something-or-other, who deconstructed the Beatles’ music and pointed to many academic and impressive achievements that had their origin in classical, ancient folk, and Indian music. Two working-class kids from Northwest England wrote those songs. I recall that one of the episodes had a recollection of McCartney discussing these links between his songs and these esteemed academic concepts, and of course he just laughed. He had no idea or inclination to write “complicated” or “sophisticated” music.
The ultimate goal of most artists, I think, is to find a way to express their thoughts and views through their craft, and hopefully entertain/educate/impress/shock people along the way. Perhaps some do it to show how clever they are.
I’m just not comfortable telling anyone that their enjoyment or evaluation of a piece of music is “objectively better.” It smacks of cultural hegemony. Here in the West we have a rich musical tradition; in other parts of the world, music is quite different; scales and intervals vary greatly. I don’t have a problem with you or anyone else thinking that one form of music is better than another; my problem is that you feel the need to go further and state that your view (or anyone else’s) trumps what somebody in Lagos, Detroit, or Moscow thinks and feels.
Agreed, and that is to the detriment of music. It’s style over substance. Michael Jackson was a brilliant mix of style and substance. I don’t hate Michael Jackson’s music, in fact I like it, but that’s beside the point.
Well to be fair my experience of music has nothing to do with training. I am an untrained heathen, I don’t know the vocabulary at all. But I have an innate ability to dissect notes just by listening and as such sought out a combination of musically complex and poppy. To be fair Beat It and Billy Jean are two of the best club tracks ever written. Thriller too.
Well I don’t think Michael Jackson’s music is crap, far from it, it’s good music. The thing is that Michael Jackson’s genius was not entirely or even mostly musical. His genius was in his style, and styling and presentation as a performer is an artform in its own right. It’s just not ‘music’. Michael Jackson was a multimedia performer and he was brilliant in that regard, the music was a part of that package. Pink Floyd on the other hand was more musicality than image. In Beethoven and Mozart’s day, sure they were the rock/pop stars of their era, but it was music first, personality second, not so today. I think Michael Jackson comes within the cutoff, somewhere between Elvis, Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson image overtook musicality. Roger Waters didn’t benefit from that because he’s a fucking tool, and Syd Barret was a psycho. If they weren’t amazing composers it never would have worked. Roger Waters is not charismatic, Michael Jackson was.
Sure, and there is some merit to that, but that doesn’t deny that there is an objective level to music. If there wasn’t an objective level then music wouldn’t move us outside of its ability to remind us of parts of our lives.
I agree, but craft is craft.
Western music is the most sophisticated music in the world, I think it’s fair to say that. Now I can’t analyze why because I do not understand music theory enough to say why, but I have heard convincing arguments, and I can hear the music and understand why people think so. I understand when one kind of music is more polyphonically complex than another, and polyphony is rare in music throughout history.
OK, sorry Knorf, it’s really mswas’s “broad anti-pop music brush”.
Maybe this is an age thing… I’m old enough that my first experiences with popular music were purely auditory. I bought vinyl and listened to them on my parent’s big cabinet record player through headphones because my parents disliked them and thought them “not real music”. Those first records were Atom Heart Mother, A Question of Balance, Sgt. Peppers, Wish You Were Here, and other albums from Pink Floyd, Moody Blues, and groups of similar vintage. (“Real music” was apparently sung by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra – music which their parents had objected to because “crooning” wasn’t real music).
The most visual the marketing message on these albums got was (maybe) a photo of the group.
mswas, I’m just objecting to your painting of so much recent music with the same brush. If you were to argue that video/marketing and music were now intertwined (to the detriment of the music) then I’d probably agree with you.
It’s actually much older than that. Women didn’t fight over Franz Liszt’s handkerchiefs just because he was a great piano player, although he certainly was. And thinking of Liszt’s contemporaries, Richard Wagner was considered a living genius by many in his own time but was dismissed by others as being more about spectacle than music. Indeed, some considered his work awful noise that hardly deserved to be called music at all, not to mention being a corrupting influence on the young.
Interestingly, there was a writer on Sound Opinions (weekly NPR show/podcast) a few weeks ago talking about an interview he did with Quincy Jones where he asked what it was that made Michael Jackson such a success. Quincy said MJ had “ass power”, which is what he called the ability to sit there for hours and hours and stay on task and do what had to be done to get it right. (Someone later called in to say there’s a term for this among chess players, but I can’t remember what it was.)
There is tremendous art and craft behind MJ’s music, and while a lot of it can be credited to Quincy Jones or Berry Gordy or whoever, you have to give most of it to MJ himself.
I’m inclined to agree with you, but the devil is in the details. Is Yngwie Malmsteen’s music better than Michael Jackson’s? It’s certainly more complex, with solos full of 256th notes in scales with unpronounceable names. But I have zero desire to listen to it.
I have no problem saying that Miles’sKind of Blue is a better album than Britney’s Baby One More Time, and no need to preface it with an “IMO”. I’d question the sanity (or hearing, or musical taste, or all three) of anyone who disagreed with me on that. But my reasoning for saying so would eventually come down to “it’s just better”. If it’s truly objective, then there have to be criteria that don’t depend on individual interpretation that make one piece of music better than another, and music just doesn’t work that way. (Fortunately. It’d be kind of dull that it did.)
What could it possibly mean for some music to be objectively better than other music? Sure, you can point to some specific formula or characteristics or what have you and say “See? This song has more instrumental layers/less parallel fifths/a greater number of beats per second/closer adherence to a harmonic minor scale/more diminished sevenths/less modulations of key/less diminished sevenths/more modulations of key/whatever”, but so what? What makes [whatever formula] objectively the metric by which music is to be judged?
You can say “___ makes so-and-so objectively better than such-and-such”, and demonstrate that ___ really does hold of so-and-so rather than such-and-such, but what compels me to agree to recognize ___ as ultimate arbiter?
It does work that way. You are mistaking your own lack of vocabulary with a lack of objective criteria. Some people could explain it, even if you cannot. This is not a criticism of you, because I also lack the vocabulary. But I know it when I hear it, as you do.
It’s about it synchronizing with our nervous system. Good music elevates us. (activates nervous properties that other other music does not) I have read convincing arguments regarding the corrolation of advancement in music with the same culture advancing mathematics and physics etc… Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky’s place in Russian history isn’t accidental.
In America our popularization of everything is our boon as well as achilles heel. We are great producers, we are great innovators but most of our invention comes from immigrants. Why do we need to import Werner von Brahn or Albert Einstein to compete in physics, but Bill Gates born and bred along with Steve Jobs can bring computers as a mass market tool to the world and bring power and prestige to our entire nation as a result? Pop music follows the same pattern, it is not ground breaking but it elevates the masses by mass marketing the invention. Musical advancement corresponds with mathematical and scientific advancement, clearly there is some connection between our ability to understand music and our ability to understand the fabric of the universe, but pop music doesn’t delve into the depths, it brings to the forefront what a small group already knows, and gives it mass appeal.
but “sexiness, youth, marketability” all seem to me to be rather more recent than “pop music” in general; fitting more with the rise of video clips.