I'm always on the lookout for bad music because it is often very revealing of aesthetic principles. But it is surprisingly hard to locate bad music. When you search for it you rarely turn up good examples. So I stumbled across this with some anticipation: Turn It Down Please: Here Are The Most Annoying Pop Songs Ever Made:
There’s a fine line between a great song and an unbearably annoying one. Both get stuck in our heads, but the songs that get on our nerves dig in first. It doesn’t make sense. If a song is bad, why does it play on repeat upstairs? It’s counterintuitive.
One sample from the list Cher, "Believe" the big hit from 1999 and the beginnings of Autotune:
There is lots of bad Baroque music as well, but a lot harder to run down. Baroque music was never bad in the sense of badly crafted, but more in the sense of boring and unimaginative. Routine, pedestrian. I'm sure there are lots worse than this, but here is a piece by the fairly dull composer Johann Friedrich Fasch:
But I'm sure he has admirers that will vociferously disagree. Here is another example, from the Classical Era, The Battle of Prague by František Kocžwar:
Anyone have any other suggestions?
I'm reading you fine, Bryan, as usual, but my music here is so good (Christina Pluhar and her L'Arpeggiata ensemble) that I won't stop it to review your curated samples of bad music, though I trust you've selected well. There are so many layers to the question of taste. I hear plenty of contemporary horrible music on the job, as my co-workers often bring their bluetooth speakers onto the roof so we can all share in their noyse. I don't know what is more disturbing, the vulgarity and hardly civilized crassness or the lack of ability to play musical instruments or even to sing, it's either rap or computer-altered voices no doubt covering lack of intonation. There's no any love in it either. Very bleak. And to me it's all the same, though the guys around me know who's who and what's what in that sonic hell. I think it would mostly be called hip hop, though I expect there could be much better examples found if only these guys had some taste. They must think I'm completely square. It's not about race, since so much of the earlier African-American music I loved, from blues and (old) R&B to jazz...but what the hell happened? It's got the n-word in every line, it's proud of thuggery and strikes me as illiterate in both English and music. To me, at least in the context of American musical history, this is BAD music!
ReplyDeleteUh-oh, I think we are likely to get a riposte from Ethan.
ReplyDeleteI have to admit though, apart from a few specific examples, I find if I listen to any pop music, I have to clear my palate afterwards by listening to some Bach or Mozart just to get it out of my ears. I think it is mainly the rhythmic aspect that I dislike.
Scott Joplin, no less, complained that ragtime (which was more a genre of popular song than the piano rags Joplin became famous for) would have more partisans if the lyrics were not, as he put it, so degraded and full of bad stereotypes. That doesn't mean I think Treemonisha is a particularly compelling opera, it has less suspense than an episode of Blue's Clues, but it DOES mean that as I looked into ragtime history I learned that in the 1890s ragtime songs were considered to have trashy lyrics by no less than the King of Ragtime.
ReplyDeleteOperas could (and do) have fairly raunchy/vulgar/violent plots and a friend of mine told me he went and saw one opera that was basically the same plot as ... Sam Raimi's Spider-man 3.
But to stick with my Scott Joplin example, Joplin felt there was musical and lyrical trash in his day but Stark gave him a publishing platform through which to give an alternative and Joplin's work has earned its place in the canon. Only specialists now even know of the inauspiciously titled ragtime song "All Coons Look Alike to Me"!
The summation of that article on bad pop songs (and I disagree that all the songs in that list are actually even bad songs in the realm of pop), could probably be summed up in a single concept--the hook (such as it is/was) gets overplayed without any contrasting ideas or to put it another way, it's often a dance-hall type of sound where you're not even supposed to be actively listening to it for structural developments a la Theodor Adorno's structural listener in Introduction to the Sociology of Music.
ReplyDeleteLed Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love wasn't on the list but it's one of the more annoying songs I'VE heard in my life time and it literally spells out the musical annoyance of playing the hook to death. Stairway to Heaven clearly went in the opposite direction and had a fairly complex structure for a pop song (not Steely Dan or Yes levels of complexity but Yes, arguably, erred in super-saturating songs with so many ideas no one can remember the songs who hasn't listened to Yes albums obsessively since the 1970s).
I tend to find a lot of Led Zeppelin pretty annoying. Lately my YouTube page has been infested with Dua Lipa clips. Attractive yes, but this is really low calorie mediocre music. And how could prancing around on stage with your ass sticking out be considered a good job?
ReplyDeleteI prefer BabyMetal to Dua Lipa. J-pop meets death metal.
ReplyDeleteEh, I'm too tired. Most current pop and hip-hop songs are boring and unimaginative, just like most classical compositions, most jazz recordings, most bluegrass tunes, etc. Old music has the benefit of passing through the great filter of time. We remember the Beatles and forget the Dave Clark Five. There is plenty of excellent hip-hop being made, you just have to dig a little. Yeah, yeah, vulgarity. Sometimes people like to have a laugh. Not everything has to be refined and polite.
ReplyDeleteYes, agreed. Not to mention Herman's Hermits!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure Dua Lipa is doing it for laughs...
I don't love Dua Lipa, but her style of music is just surface decoration for groove, and the grooves in her stuff are pretty solid. If you're sitting in a chair listening with your complete attention, you're not in the right frame of mind, anymore than a packed nightclub is the right place for the Art of Fugue. Dua Lipa works fine in her intended context of social dance. Not as well as James Brown or P-Funk, but she's aiming for the same general concept.
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