Max Martin and Dr. Luke, between them, are responsible for writing the majority of hit pop songs recorded by a host of different artists, which does rather explain why they mostly sound the same. And Steve Jobs, whom we revere, normally? Well, he came up with the iPod which put thousands of songs at people's fingertips and ultimately resulted in the risk-avoidance of the modern music business. Go watch the video, which is well-argued.
I could make a lot of criticisms of it, from an aesthetic point of view. For example, the mere fact of the reduction of timbral variety need not have any aesthetic implications. Take Steve Reich's Drumming for example. It reduced every possible kind of musical variety down to the absolute minimum, which I think makes it one of the most important musical works of the 20th century. Not everyone agrees, of course.
But the creator of the video critique, known as "Thoughty2" makes a lot of good points. The only thing that really drives modern pop is dollars. And, if he is correct about the marketing, it is the dollars that drive the popular acceptance of the music. Rather a vicious circle.
I suspect that the main reason I like Kanye West's music is that he does in fact "write" his own songs and he certainly produces his own videos. Remember "Famous"? Blogger won't embed that one either:
John Seabrook's book The Song Machine gets into quite a bit more detail about Martin and Dr. Luke and the development of boy bands in the 1990s through to more recent stars.
ReplyDeleteThe pervasiveness of the I-V-vi-IV progression as the backbone for most ballads, alongside the pervasiveness of the Millenial Whoop has made for a lot of songs that sound the same. "Best Day of My Life" by American Authors is one of the most infuriating example of the Whoop, in which it seems that the gesture appears forty-ish times in a fairly short song.
The bro balladeers seem to be the worst about it, though. I got sick of Lewis Capaldi's "Someone You Loved" the first time I heard it. If the female pop stars Beyonce or Swift have slightly more presence it might be as simple as more finely crafted stage personas and a penchant for choosing slightly more creative subdominant harmony substitutions. The guitar-slinging bros seem pretty content with the core I-V-vi-IV and derivatives i-VI-III-VII whether it's Jason Mraz, Shawn Mendes, Vance Joy or X Ambassadors or Ed Sheeran or ... you probably got the idea by now.
Oh, yeah!
ReplyDeleteHolland Dozier Holland had a similar stranglehold of the Motown catalog which was huge in the 60s and early 70s. Yet those recordings have plenty of variety and life to them. I think the underlying issue is that the computer has made things too easy and is replacing what I would call micro variability with standardization. Even autotuning does that. Also dynamic compression is much more heavily applied than it was in the 60s -80s. All of these things together have created a kind of dead sounding music even at its loudest. Even a lot of the non-Top40 material has been affected. It is like listening constantly to the old TV commercials with their similar compression.
ReplyDeleteI think that what it comes down to is the need for sales overcomes the need for creative originality. In pop music today, you have to do something familiar enough that the ordinary listener can feel mostly comfortable with it on first hearing. That rules out most original ideas. All that is left is finding a hook that is just a bit different and choosing your wardrobe! Sadly, some of this attitude seems to be seeping into the classical world as well.
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