So here we are in the early 21st century. In another few hundred years, people will look back on this as the age of hip hop and pop music. When we look back a few hundred years from now, we look on the Classical age, the Romantic age… Baroque, Expressionist; on and on.
So… the point I’m trying to make here, is about people like Britney Spears, who rocked the world of popular music, along with others like Christina Aguilara(sp?), The Backstreet Boys and other huge moneymakers. How will our society see them in another few hundred years when they’re rotting in their graves? Great artists like Mozart, Beethoven, Handel and Wagner also made a huge difference on the worlds they lived in, and today we view them as Gods of music, and I’m sure that we always will. Is it possible that one day, pop starts will be looked back upon as some of the greatest “artists” to ever live?
As far as I see it, no way. These people will be forgetten as soon as teenagers and young adults realize exactly what they were listening too. Personally, I’d hate to see Britney Spears compared to Mozart at all. Justin Timberlake to Ludwig Van. Pop music is almost a disgrace to the art. Sure, they’re world famous, attractive, and their music is kinda catchy, but are we really going to be studying pop stars in music classes of the 22nd Century?
(Maybe this belong in My Humble Opinion, but I stuck in here anyhow)
Throw in your own opinions and ideas. What is the future of pop stars?
I believe (and sincerely hope) that they will be new chapters in one of my favorite books Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. They certainly have not contributed to music, fer bleep’s sake. The artistry is in the creating and selling of a pop pheenom, not in the writing, playing or singing.
I’m waiting to see about hip-hop/rap. As the current artists age, I expect to see a maturization of the style. I sure hope so, as what I hear on the radio (when my daughters are in the car only) is just as overproduced and lacking in content as the pop pap.
How many composers were there BESIDES the best known ones (Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, etc)?
I think that, in the future, performers like Britney, Christina, etc, will be footnotes in musical history. Perhaps someone will look back at pop music and have a section on pre-fab “artists” and mention these performers.
I’ve heard people get upset when comparing Lennon/McCartney to Beethoven and Mozart. Can you imagine comparing Timberlake to Mozart?
Time will tell what our pop music of today will be like in 100 or so years. I just hope that the Britney’s of the world will be like the 80’s fashion, forgotten and ashamed of.
Forget the pop crap, nobody will remember it in 20 years, let alone 200.
IMHO, The Beatles are the only thing in modern musical times that will indeed stand the test of time. I hear stories all the time about kids that are still getting turned on to them and loving them. That is the key, how well will the music get passed from generation to generation.
I don’t think Britney et. al will even be footnotes – but history will have to account for the period 1960-?, and pop music is a genre of Western music, so who knows. Maybe just film-score music will survive to serious-music discussions.
I think it’s silly to get upset with such comparisons. McCartney and Beethoven composed different kinds of music.
Besides Beethoven and Mozart and others how many composers (both of sympathies and more popular music, waltzes, for example) were active and making quite a bit of money and fame for themselves in those days? A great deal, I’d imagine.
How many are remebered by anyone other than the most studied historians and musicologists? Not many. Only the great geniuses.
Ptui. Hauling up Beethoven’s bones to throw rocks at Britney Spears is a pretty sad exercise. I like some classical music, just like I like some pop music – my enjoyment of the one in no way detracts from my enjoyment of the other.
Besides, I like some of Isao Tomita’s electronic versions of some classical pieces a LOT better than I like the orchestral versions (frex, Tomita’s version of “Snowflakes Are Dancing” squeezes most of the sappiness out of it that you get from the strings, making it sharper, crisper, and much more evocative of snowflakes falling on a crisp winter night.
So, does that mean that Tomita is better than Debussy? Or that I have shallow tastes? Does the fact that I have always found Jimi Hendrix much more fun to listen to than Mozart make Hendrix better than Mozart?
Nope. We all have our own tastes, and all we can do is enjoy what we enjoy, and let whatever combination of happenstance, marketplace forces and whatnot sort out who’s remembered as a god or not in the future.
I think what will be remembered post-Beatles (as the Beatles will surely be in the same league of influence as Beethoven and the other boys) are the various movements that occurred during the fragmentation of music. The jazz-blues-hip-hop transition will definitely be a big deal, though I’m not sure if any one hip hop artist can really stand as an icon. The folk-bluegrass-country movement will be remembered, and Bob Dylan may eventually stand as one of the cross-genre artists that symbolizes that trend. The whole electronica movement will probably be noted; I don’t know much about pure electronica groups; is there a defining type of band there? New Age may get mentioned, with someone like Yanni standing in as figurehead?
As for the pop-rock of Britney and company, I think it’s a bit too early to really tell who’s gonna make it into the history books. Michael Jackson will almost certainly get mentioned, and Madonna might (as she is one of the trend-setting people in this era’s marketing-fueled pop music).
As I see it, I think what will be noted about our era of music is the splintering of the mainstream, and thus the study of each of the individual trends and the major players in each. As for who will classify as the music gods, I guess it is up to whatever is most popular in the year 2100 (i.e. if the popular music at that time can most directly trace its roots to electronica, then our era’s electronica bands may be heralded as the visionaries that allowed it to happen).
If you want to see how Britney Spears will be considered in the future, think of Rudy Vallee.
Quite similar, actually – extremely popular pop singers. Yet I doubt anyone under the age of 50 knows anything about Vallee (except maybe his role in “How to Succeed in Business,” which is not indicative of his popularity in the 30s).
In other words, she may be mentioned, but won’t be particularly well known.
I doubt Britney will show up in music textbooks- although perhaps a marketing book or two.
Popular musics of the past (parlor songs, vaudeville pieces etc.) are largely forgotten today. Stars like Sophie Tucker and Gene Austin- or the composer Shelton Brooks- are mostly unknown except to those who study popular musics of that period.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that the pop stars of today will experience the same decline in popularity- until they eventually fade into obscurity.
And a lot of these people are performers, not musicians. We remember Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony, not the tenor who really nailed that fourth movement during the first performances.
People like Beethoven et al were geniuses. They had brilliant minds. They were able to compose fanstically complicated music, and they were able to play it also. They will always be remembered.
People like Britney can… erm… sing in tune, and thats about the limit of their talents. They will be forgotten eventually.
This topic is more on the subject of how these pop artists will be recognized in the future of music, not how one is better than the other, or how many more dance moves the Backstreet boys could pull off over Wagner. Though skill in the art definatly has an impact on their future, we already know Britney has as big an audience as an artist like Liszt had (The women did tend to faint at the sight of him).
Pah, she can’t even sing in tune! As far I’m concerned, she’s probably a good-ish dancer (and a scanky and erotic one at that, considering her audience being young, “tween” girls). Christina Aguilara has an awesome voice as far as I can tell, but her other “skills” disgust me. She should be in an opera house, not dancing around seductively half-naked.
It is also interesting to note that the future may hold as the finest musicions of our age people who are not very well known today. In their day I believe it was Carl Emmanuel Bach who was much more popular than his father Johanne. I listen to a program called In the shadow on CBC radio 2, which discusses and plays music from lesser known composers. Often, they were majorly popular in their time compared to who we consider to be the greats now.
So who nowdays is not that popular but has major talent that will eventually be recognized?
