The shallow world of Popular Culture.

[SimuLord]

Earlier today I went over to the mall food court for lunch. While eating, I was treated to pop music videos on a continuous loop, and I swear I saw the entire range of modern marketing-driven Top 40 in the roughly six or seven songs I heard---all auto-tuned junk that was either ear-scraping techno, faux-rock with a cute girl singing over it, or...well, whatever the fuck Ke$ha falls into genre-wise.

The point was, after not even a half hour, I felt like it was already getting repetitive, and without exception I'd never heard any of these songs before (nor would I recognize them if I heard them again, except for a Black Eyed Peas tune that sampled "Time of My Life" from Dirty Dancing and made me want to skewer Fergie and the black dude on a gigantic shish kebab and spit-roast them.)

Maybe BonsaiK knows the reason why this is so, but I had a bigger question about pop culture and the marketing people who create it, namely:

- Is popular music a case of "we'll build it and they won't know any better so they'll love every bit of it if we market it as 'cool' enough?"
- Or are music trends driven by the listeners, in which case people actually DEMAND and LIKE this insipid garbage?
- If tomorrow Top 40 disappeared, to be replaced by something a whole lot less annoying, would tweens buy Mozart if you played it in malls and put a whole bunch of Mozart merch in all the mall stores I don't shop at but my friends with kids that age say are all the rage?

I hate to think that modern pop is actually the result of consumer preferences influencing music, because that REALLY doesn't do much for my faith in humanity.

 

[Kortney]

People would of said very similar things, if not the same things, as you are saying fifty years ago.

That's my thoughts on the matter. People have gotten a sense of superiority over not enjoying popular music for a long, long time. Me included.

 

[delet]

90% of everything is shit. When you get a genre that is made up of 'popular' things, it will almost undoubtedly be filled with that 90%. That's why, especially with music, it's much better to go for the more obscure bands, as they generally have a higher quality to 'em.

This stuff is popular, so they'll sell it. Autotune makes things easier, so it will keep getting used, granted it can be nice if used correctly.

 

[Ldude893]

It's just another phase popular culture is going through. Music tastes change every decade. In this case, people do want to listen to this kind of music and they want more of it. They're idiots, but if that's what they want, that's what they're going to get from the music industry.
I doubt that tweens will start liking classical music because it's being played in malls a bit more constantly, classical music isn't "cool" enough for people.

 

[TonyVonTonyus]

Today music is about image and marketability. I don't like to mention his name but Justin Bieber. He makes money and sells albums for these two reaons. One, thirteen year old girls like him and therefore think he's a good artist. Two, most of the world listens to rap and pop so there's a bigger chance he'll sell. Ensiferum does not fit this. They are a viking metal band from Finnland. They have long hair, don't wear shirts on stage, growl a lot, play power cords and don't sing about freaking sunshine, puppies and love. So they don't fit into the niche of everybody else and you'll never see them being played in a mainstream place, unlike Pop.

 

[Hader]

People would of said very similar things, if not the same things, as you are saying fifty years ago.

That's my thoughts on the matter. People have gotten a sense of superiority over not enjoying popular music for a long, long time. Me included.

Took the words right out of my mouth.

The point was, after not even a half hour, I felt like it was already getting repetitive, and without exception I'd never heard any of these songs before (nor would I recognize them if I heard them again, except for a Black Eyed Peas tune that sampled "Time of My Life" from Dirty Dancing and made me want to skewer Fergie and the black dude on a gigantic shish kebab and spit-roast them.)

If it's any consolation, I never heard of any of the ones you mentioned and I am sure I have never heard of anything else you might of heard there either, heh.

 

[Dags90]

I don't really see this as a problem of pop music at all specifically. Even a lot of the "metal/hard rock" bands I listen to fill albums with emotionally shallow songs of generic angst/etc. The songs aren't deep or compelling, and are about as memorable and substantive as your average pop track. The idea that marketing, focus groups, and executive meddling is exclusive or even mostly contained to pop music is ridiculous.

Alecia Moore consistently puts out well made and well thought out pop music.

 

[RUINER ACTUAL]

Earlier today I went over to the mall food court for lunch. While eating, I was treated to pop music videos on a continuous loop, and I swear I saw the entire range of modern marketing-driven Top 40 in the roughly six or seven songs I heard---all auto-tuned junk that was either ear-scraping techno, faux-rock with a cute girl singing over it, or...well, whatever the fuck Ke$ha falls into genre-wise.

The point was, after not even a half hour, I felt like it was already getting repetitive, and without exception I'd never heard any of these songs before (nor would I recognize them if I heard them again, except for a Black Eyed Peas tune that sampled "Time of My Life" from Dirty Dancing and made me want to skewer Fergie and the black dude on a gigantic shish kebab and spit-roast them.)

Maybe BonsaiK knows the reason why this is so, but I had a bigger question about pop culture and the marketing people who create it, namely:

- Is popular music a case of "we'll build it and they won't know any better so they'll love every bit of it if we market it as 'cool' enough?"
- Or are music trends driven by the listeners, in which case people actually DEMAND and LIKE this insipid garbage?
- If tomorrow Top 40 disappeared, to be replaced by something a whole lot less annoying, would tweens buy Mozart if you played it in malls and put a whole bunch of Mozart merch in all the mall stores I don't shop at but my friends with kids that age say are all the rage?

I hate to think that modern pop is actually the result of consumer preferences influencing music, because that REALLY doesn't do much for my faith in humanity.

I really don't think it is listener preference. I think it is all market driven. Let's go back to the 70's when Star Wars came out. Since then, movies have been highly geared towards boys and men. The massive number of 80's action movies, and recent ones like Gamer and The Expendables. They aren't necessarily good, but they move tickets. This is faded away in recent years with more family and female geared movies. I think I would actually blame the Beatles and the "British Invasion" for this. They made girls crazy. Then through the 80s with the homosexually questionable "hair" bands. Then the 90s brought Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, and Nsync - The true beginning of modern pop music. All of this music is built by committee. Fergie, Kesha, and Justin Bieber are not artists on this planet or any other. As movies were geared towards men, music is geared towards women, especially teenage girls. It's all to make money. Notice how fast they and their songs disappear? This is all a theory obviously. I don't listen to the shit either- I prefer European metal.

Top 40 could use some Mozart... \m/,

 

[Why do I care]

Compare it to FPS games. We have a never-ending library of them because game developers see that the public right at the moment wants FPS games so they make soulless copies of other games all because the market will buy. Remember back in the 90's when adventure games were the shit? There was a good collection of them, and they had a good market, but they slowly died down and FPS games took over. You could say that the same thing happened to disco when it was all that, and now apparently stuff like Lady GaGa or Ke$ha is popular (I really wish it wasn't). 10 years from now, something else will be the big hit.

Long story short, anything popular will not remain popular forever due to the market.

 

[RUINER ACTUAL]

Today music is about image and marketability. I don't like to mention his name but Justin Bieber. He makes money and sells albums for these two reaons. One, thirteen year old girls like him and therefore think he's a good artist. Two, most of the world listens to rap and pop so there's a bigger chance he'll sell. Ensiferum does not fit this. They are a viking metal band from Finnland. They have long hair, don't wear shirts on stage, growl a lot, play power cords and don't sing about freaking sunshine, puppies and love. So they don't fit into the niche of everybody else and you'll never see them being played in a mainstream place, unlike Pop.

Plus most Americas don't know what or where Finland is. There is a chance for metal in the US though. Lamb of God got to #2 on the Billboard 200 in 2009 with Wrath, All That Remains was like #8 with their last one, and Devildriver has been in the top 10 too. But you don't hear their music on the radio, which is where the top 40 come from.

Also, listening to Ensiferum. Pretty damn good.

 

[Geo Da Sponge]

So far I have asked three people, and all of them were the same as me; we thought Dubstep was a band before we found out it was a genre of music. Are we just weird, or is this as common as I think?

Just to throw that irrelevant titbit out there.

 

[TonyVonTonyus]

So far I have asked three people, and all of them were the same as me; we thought Dubstep was a band before we found out it was a genre of music. Are we just weird, or is this as common as I think?

Just to throw that irrelevant titbit out there.

I thought it was a band too, mainly because someone did a project on it and introduced it as a band...

 

[CarpathianMuffin]

Kids will listen to anything and think that it's good. The simpler it is, the better. I feel your pain each time I have to shop at that insipid mall. I think you'll notice how at least half of the people there are in the 11-17 age range, the main market for that. Generally if they're kids, they'll like the music if they think it's cool. As they get older, their tastes are molded completely around autotune and wall bang-inducing simplicity.

What's scary is I know a lot of folks, even in the older age range, that think that kind of music is good. It's mostly driven by sales from the demographic that grew up on it, it molds from there into forms more palpable to the mindless youth, and it just keeps repeating in a vicious cycle of mediocrity and blandness.
Just my take on it.

 

[MisterGobbles]

Believe it or not, I think people actually like this stuff.

Rap songs and pop songs are incredibly easy to write and produce, half the time the beat is already made by someone else and the singer doesn't even write the song. It doesn't take much effort to crank out pop singles...but some of them are standable. For some reason I can respect something like Katy Perry, even though I wouldn't normally listen to anything she does I'm not going to smash the radio when she comes on.

For instance I just skimmed the top 40, and I saw a lot of stuff I hated, and a lot of stuff I had never heard. But I also saw a couple things that I had heard and could stand.

Personally, I think popular music is dead, and we're all into our own scenes. But there are a lot of people that don't listen to music often, and don't really know what good music sounds like...therefore when they do hear something they mistake a beat and vocals for amazingness, and "oh it's popular so it must be good right?" The simple, modern pop is for those people. But even though most of them suck, you can't deny those songs are catchy. Like a G6.

 

[Irony's Acolyte]

Probably the reason for the blandness of current pop music has to do with it being "engineered" to be as popular as possible. The people who support the pop bands and artists want music that can reach as many people as possible so that they can sell more. This means that most of it is pretty similar (even more so that other genres) and there isn't to many unique or experimental stuff in it. It doesn't help that American society seems pretty consumer driven now-a-days. With a genre of music controlled by an industry, is there any wonder that its all so same? Why make "Great" when "Good" sells better?

 

[Wolfenbarg]

Popular culture of any particular era can get extremely aggravating because of the absolute assault of the same thing coming from every direction. When you get past that era and look back in retrospect, you see the things that were legitimately good are the ones that live on in people's memories. That's why I like retrospective celebrations of pop culture (like in Vanilla Sky) as opposed to glorification of things in the present. It just feels so... ugh.

 

[Blue_vision]

Because pop music's catchy. It's got a fast beat, strong rhythm, and easy texture. Sure, it ends up being a ragtag and bland mixture of all music that's ever existed, but that's the point of it. It's something that everyone can at least bob their head to, if not enjoy. And I'll say it, if you simply get angry at pop music playing, then there's something up with you. Obviously, you can argue about how current pop music isn't the best solution to appealing to the masses, or that pop music will simply never be the best that music has to offer. But the point of pop is that it has elements of universal appeal.

And really, try playing Metallica or Daft Punk in a shopping mall and see how many people would prefer that to just generic pop music. I'll guess not many. Now how many of them might be impartial to pop music playing, appreciate the fact that there's arranged noise, but might not even listen to the music for the sake of doing so? I'm guessing quite a few.

 

[dakorok]

In the end it's all about the money. Record companies back these popular artists, and so executive meddling ends up fucking over whatever talent might have existed in these artists. (I honestly believe the majority of artists today have potential, but they've been whored out by the record companies).

 

[sageoftruth]

Believe it or not, I think people actually like this stuff.

Rap songs and pop songs are incredibly easy to write and produce, half the time the beat is already made by someone else and the singer doesn't even write the song. It doesn't take much effort to crank out pop singles...but some of them are standable. For some reason I can respect something like Katy Perry, even though I wouldn't normally listen to anything she does I'm not going to smash the radio when she comes on.

For instance I just skimmed the top 40, and I saw a lot of stuff I hated, and a lot of stuff I had never heard. But I also saw a couple things that I had heard and could stand.

Personally, I think popular music is dead, and we're all into our own scenes. But there are a lot of people that don't listen to music often, and don't really know what good music sounds like...therefore when they do hear something they mistake a beat and vocals for amazingness, and "oh it's popular so it must be good right?" The simple, modern pop is for those people. But even though most of them suck, you can't deny those songs are catchy. Like a G6.

Sounds about right. Can't hate on someone for not pursuing something as much as you do right? I once read a cookbook that opened with the author hating on people who don't take the time to master cooking.
However, recent (or not so recent) forum discussions, have shown that even the less popular, more underground music tends to involve using scales, riffs, beats, etc. from other artists. What really floored me was when someone posted a series of songs from a bunch of metal artists, who all used the same riff (To clarify, it was the one from Iron Maiden's Two Minutes to Midnight). I'd better stop here before I end up trying to hijack the whole discussion.

 

[Paksenarrion]

I like to battle pop music with pop music. If someone's blaring pop music out of their cars, I turn my CD player waaaay up, and sing along...

I wanna be the very best! That no one ever was! DUN DUN DU-DUN!
TO CATCH THEM IS MY REAL TEST! TO TRAIN THEM IS MY CAUSE!