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Music: an art in decline ?

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Music: an art in decline ?

Zealot6619
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Posted 07/26/07 - 03:20 PM: Subject: Music: an art in decline ?	#1
Watch the hits for one hour, you will see 'artists' such as Fall out boy, Nelly furtado, beyonce etc etc, after about ten minutes you will start to feel as if you are listening to the same song. This is because the pop singer can only sing about a select few subjects in order to stay popular with their audience; you will notice they rarely stray from the subect of love - their love is so obviously feigned for if my understanding of love is correct you can not love several different men (or women) within such a short amount of time as a year (the amount of time it takes to release an album). Now to the point, music is considered an art form and my definition of art is 'expression through creativity'. With this definition I am reluctant to say that most typical pop music is art because they are not being creative but instead rewording other songs with background music. When music is apparently breaking new ground in the pop industry, is it really? Or is the industry really just going on a downward spiral? In this post I'm only talking about pop music, my definition of pop also includes emo and most metal, dance, and rock. Edited by Paul on 07/26/07 - 03:40 PM. Reason: fixed illiteracy, incoherence

JAC
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Posted 07/26/07 - 03:54 PM:	#2
It is because music has become a commodity, a product. It is no longer produced for art's sake, or for the sake of explicating one's feelings/emotions/thoughts/ideas; it has become solely a product, to be produced for some end other then itself - namely, money. Where is Frank Zappa when we need him?
"A life with love will have many thorns, but a life without love will have no roses." - Friedrich Nietzsche "I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece can not be moved." - Soren Kierkegaard

si
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Posted 07/26/07 - 05:47 PM:	#3
Zealot wrote: In this post I'm only talking about pop music, my definition of pop also includes emo and most metal, dance, and rock. Your definition is so wrong it hurts. All those genres are different genres not just all subgenres of pop. To say that is extremely ignorant. And emo (a stupid term people use incorrectly) by emo I assume you mean trendy, dumb pop rock bands that care more about their image than their music and whine about their virginity such as Senses Fail and From First to Last. Emo is short for emotional hardcore a subgenre of hardcore that began when hardcore bands started to sing more emotional lyrics besides the usual hardcore cliche songs (fucking, drinking, fighting). An emotional hardcore band is Rites of Spring go check'em out. Just because you don't like the music that their making doesn't mean it isn't art. There making music whether it sucks or whether it's a duplicate with a fresh beat it's still art. Most of them don't even write their own lyrics. So I don't even think most of them are singing about their own experiences. Most big name artists signed to fancy labels have song writers for them. And even I who despises FOB with my entire being can tell the difference between them and Beyonce. Most pop rock bands on the radio that are currently popular due to dim-witted teenagers that like Cartel, Senses Fail, FOB, Panic @ the Disco their songs sound alike because 2000 marked the beginning of pop rock lead singers screeching in high pitched, angst ridden yelps. So they all sound the same. And your definition of art is very louse I mind you. I can cut my arm and smear blood on my bathroom mirror and this could be my creativity expressed physically. Edited by si on 07/26/07 - 07:11 PM

JAC
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Posted 07/26/07 - 06:12 PM:	#4
si wrote: Your definition is so wrong it hurts. All those genres are different genres not just all subgenres of pop. To say that is extremely ignorant. And emo (a stupid term people use incorrectly) by emo I assume you mean trendy, dumb pop rock bands that care more about their image than their music and whine about their virginity such as Senses Fail and From First to Last. Emo is short for emotional hardcore a subgenre of hardcore that began when hardcore bands started to sing more emotional lyrics besides the usual hardcore cliche songs (fucking, drinking, fighting). An emotional hardcore band is Agnostic Front go check'em out. Just because you don't like the music that their making doesn't mean it isn't art. There making music whether it sucks or whether it's a duplicate with a fresh beat it's still art. Most of them don't even write their own lyrics. So I don't even think most of them are singing about their own experiences. Most big name artists signed to fancy labels have song writers for them. And even I who despises FOB with my entire being can tell the difference between them and Beyonce. Most pop rock bands on the radio that are currently popular due to dim-witted teenagers that like Cartel, Senses Fail, FOB, Panic @ the Disco their songs sound alike because 2000 marked the beginning of pop rock lead singers screeching in high pitched, angst ridden yelps. So they all sound the same. And your definition of art is very louse I mind you. I can cut my arm and smear blood on my bathroom mirror and this could be my creativity expressed physically. I would take the example in your last paragraph to be art, actually. And his definition of pop may seem rather misleading, but it is correct. Pop to me is music made for cash, not aimed at the quality of the music itself, or at expressing anything in particular, but solely as a product to be sold to millions of stupid teenagers who watch too much MTV and VH1. This includes many different genres of music which are all ultimately geared towards making money. It is not the act of making money itself that makes music pop, it is only when the purpose of music, and the main influence to make it, becomes monetary that music becomes what is today known as pop.
"A life with love will have many thorns, but a life without love will have no roses." - Friedrich Nietzsche "I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece can not be moved." - Soren Kierkegaard

enkidu
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Posted 07/26/07 - 07:06 PM:	#5
JAC wrote: I would take the example in your last paragraph to be art, actually. And his definition of pop may seem rather misleading, but it is correct. Pop to me is music made for cash, not aimed at the quality of the music itself, or at expressing anything in particular, but solely as a product to be sold to millions of stupid teenagers who watch too much MTV and VH1. This includes many different genres of music which are all ultimately geared towards making money. It is not the act of making money itself that makes music pop, it is only when the purpose of music, and the main influence to make it, becomes monetary that music becomes what is today known as pop. I agree. But this phenomenon is nothing new, popular art has always existed, there are countless 19th century european authors, who were extremely popular in their times, publishing endless feuilletons in newspapers, especially in Russia and France, that are totally forgotten today. And many a 18th or 19th century composer whose name is completely forgotten were extremely famous among their contemporeans. And one can even go before, most italian painters of the Renaissance have not reached posterity though their production, as insipid as it was, may have enjoyed a local fame in their times. Even in antiquity, you may nowadays find some compendium of popular greek literature, which was the most popular read of their times (it was not Plato or Aeschylus, surprisingly), and their authors, who certainly enjoyed some fame, are now hardly identified by the best historians. Popular culture has always produced such works of mediocre quality, only aiming at being entertaining and popular, and nowadays at making money, since it happens to be the commodity of success these days. But it does not mean that music as an art is in decline, simply that pop music is only marginally an art. Edited by enkidu on 07/26/07 - 07:31 PM
Tight toy night, streets were so bright. The world looked so thin and between my bones and skin there stood another person who was a little surprised to be face to face with a world so alive. I fell. (Tom Verlaine)

si
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Posted 07/26/07 - 07:12 PM:	#6
I meant to say pop rock. Pop rock is not metal nor dance or grindcore. Sorry for lack of specification.

killerofgod
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Posted 07/29/07 - 01:17 PM:	#7
It is extremely difficult to tell whether or not music is in a state of decline. There are forces pulling it in both directions and as far as pop music is concerned, I would say that the pull may be stronger in the degenerate direction. By looking at what pieces were popular over a wide period of time and the progression the music has undergone, it's quite plain to see a recent pattern of regression in most pop music. In the Classical era, popular music meant literally "folk music", the music of the populous, the people, the commoners. Simple, easy to sing melodies with even simpler harmonies. Only diatonic chords were used and pretty much only I, IV, and V. Contrary to this was the music of noble entertainment. Beginning in the Renaissance or perhaps even earlier (I'm not up to speed on my Medieval music history), nobles would hire composers like Handel, Haydn, and Mozart to entertain them with their symphonies and string quartets. Eventually, they began composing for entertainment on a wider level. For the most part, this meant opera. Opera houses had been supported by ticket sales to the public since the Renaissance and would continue to be a popular form of entertainment pretty much until the end of Romanticism and the big schism that came around the turn of the last century. Early forms of Jazz quickly took over as the pop music of its day. Folk music still existed and is actually still being composed today with a very similar aesthetic as its origin (expressing the life of the common people in ways understandable to the common people) although it is no longer very popular or very common in today's industrialized society. Even Jazz isn't really pop music any more. I don't know the answer to this question, but how many Jazz artists have gone Platinum recently? Classical? Now how about what we typically consider pop (using the umbrella definition that today includes rock, metal, dance, etc.)? Now that we all know what the popular music has been over time (and please feel free to add information or contest what I have given you. I am, after all, still a student), let's take a look at the music itself. Folk songs had simple melodies with simple harmonies. Classical opera had a much wider harmonic vocabulary and more varied thematic structure and greater development of its ideas. Romantic music pushed the tonality further, with time. High chromaticism and ever-developing themes and motives. When Jazz took over as the popular music, the harmonies where mostly Classical and early Romantic with a seventh, ninth, eleventh, or even thirteenth added to nearly all of the chords. Still, progress continued as harmonies and melodies expanded and became more complex. Even when soloists just improvised over repeating chord changes, at least the improvising was mostly improvised developments on a theme or two. Classical music (using the broadest use of the term) was still more complex and advancing faster, but it was no longer popular. When rock and roll became popular and expanded into the genres we have today, the complete decline began. Instead of this new art form evolving and growing, becoming more complex and varied, it devolved back to the beginnings of western music. Our popular music once again takes it's harmonic and melodic structure from purely diatonic keys. Half of what you hear on the radio consists of nothing more than four or five chords. Watch this absolutely hilarious video and you'll see what I mean: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM Basically what I'm saying is that popular music has all but stopped developing the way it once did. It has utterly halted its growth and chosen instead to simply repeat itself endlessly. Intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-outro all on the same chord progression with two themes that repeat, undeveloped. That being said, there is hope. There are bands, mostly metal bands, that push towards development. Tool and System of a Down are great bands and, although you don't typically hear them on the radio, they are more popular than people like Eric Whitacre or Libby Larsen (both living composers of "classical" music). But that's it. The emphasis has switched from development to repetition and until we switch it back, the degenerate forces on pop music will prevail.
Just my own meaningless thoughts and opinions.

jaybzjaybz
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Posted 07/30/07 - 02:54 AM:	#8
This is a response to JHBowden's Pop MusicL The Aesthetic v The Self-Advertisement thread. But i couldn't post it - it wouldn't let me, sorry - my first post and a very rambling one at that, but I thought it was in the spirit of this thread, so here goes: In the same way that I can't hear the subtleties of Mozart's harmonic structures or whatever, you can't hear the subtle meanings and references that a particular sub-bass sound can instantiate in a Digital Mystikz piece. This is because pop-music, and related musics, have a [more] complex set of objectives and functions than you seem to presume, as is hinted in Reformed Nihilist's message. If you take Peter Gabriel, or gang gang dance, or dizzee rascal, or Malcolm McClaren on a purely 'musical' basis then obviously they don't measure up to Beethoven or Bach. Because they're not trying to. So in that way you're right - but only because your definition of 'successful' or 'good' music is too narrow. I think the stuff about idols is right when it comes to some pop, but it's not a fair assertion about a large section of pop music... and, speaking of idols etc, I think your holding of the past in such reverence smacks of religiosity and idolizes the past as much as the people who idolize a pop-star. Music, it seems, has it's own 'antiquity', it's own myths and gods, to which you seem to ascribe (just to perspectivize things a bit). Someone like Malcolm McClaren is a kind of cultural-musical-conceptual architect, whose music's aim is wider than 'pure' music, if such a thing can exist. This I think is another fault of seeing 'classical' music as pure: it's always bound up in the superficial just like pop music - it can't be magically divorced from power-relations. It's just that pop music recognizes this and uses it in a creative way, good pop music that is. Just listen to someone like Einsturzende Neubauten. Edited by Paul on 07/30/07 - 06:07 PM. Reason: fixed illiteracy

Calcutechnician
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Posted 08/03/07 - 04:29 AM:	#9
So what? If you don't like the music they play on the radio, don't listen to it. There's plenty of good music out there, if you can't find it then that's your fault. If people want to listen to shit music, that's thier choice, not yours.
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Post-burnt
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Posted 08/03/07 - 07:01 AM:	#10
Calcutechnician wrote: So what? If you don't like the music they play on the radio, don't listen to it. There's plenty of good music out there, if you can't find it then that's your fault. If people want to listen to shit music, that's thier choice, not yours. This is probably the most pertinent point in this thread, methinks. From another point of view, do we expect that when a singer sings about 'love' or any number of the few subjects of 'pop' music they must believe it? Do we ever criticise an actor for not genuinely feeling what they're saying? Pop music, in the broad sense of songs about general experience, is a lot broader than the artists hitherto mentioned, and a lot broader than Anglo-American songs. It's not that the love song is exhausted, it's that there are enough songs out there for one to ignore those instances one doesn't enjoy. Simple as that, I would say. If you don't enjoy Anglo-American songs, try a bit of Soukous, or Soca, or Qwalli [sp?] or any number of things out there. I'm pretty confident that there is more than enough music out there to satisfy whatever needs you have, rendering any criticism of the music you don't like uneccessary.

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