rustywire wrote:
Pop music has come to represent a very specific sound or brand, while pop music a few decades ago could have been anything from r&b, country, rock, funk, so on...
This. So much this.
I think the one repeating theme I've agreed with the most throughout this thread is the whole 'homogenization of pop music' thing. I'm twenty-six, hardly of note, age-wise, but unlike most of my friends and peers, (in my area, at least) when I was in my teens my parents were pushing fifty. My mom was an AC/DC, Janis Joplin, The Beatles, etc. type, while my dad is a Conway Twitty, Reba McEntire, Kenny Rogers type.
That was my entire musical world growing up until I got into middle school and realized there was OTHER music out there. As I've gotten older, music collection has become a bit of an obsession to me, and I have a rather large vat of sound sitting on my hard drive that, 90% of the time, I just run on shuffle. All genres and time periods constantly whirring around each other in eternal flux.
On the other side of the coin, I work at a shitty restaurant and, subsequently, have to listen to shitty top 40 'hits' for twelve hours a day while my brain slowly melts into goo. And the biggest difference I see between the pop music of from...let's say from the 50's to the late 90's and the pop music from the late 90's to the present is the lack of
diversity.
Obviously, as stated earlier, cost-effectiveness of production, new technologies, etc etc, all have their impact on music of all varieties, not just what's popular, and this is apparent through most music I've listened to from pretty much any era of recorded music. But in the last fifteen years or so, I've definitely noticed a...narrowing of the field, so to speak. "Pop" music used to just be a catchall for music that was popular, but these days I feel as though there is a very specific type of sound associated with pop music.
Of course, I suppose you could argue that the last fifteen years or so, considering my age, could just be what I'm the most aware of/familiar with and therefore things that are older and before my active cognizance of music automatically seem more diverse and interesting. A sort of imagined nostalgia, I guess.
Homogenization, narrowing of the field, whatever the hell you want to call it, there's definitely a trend in modern mainstream music of simplifying and, as some of the early posters in this thread said, it's more about entertainment value then any sort of musical 'worth' in the pieces presented for consumption. But I think the keyword in there is
mainstream. I think we can all agree that the further you shift away from radio-'worthy' music into the realms of the less discovered (regardless of the genre; be it doom/stoner, post-rock, blues, alt-rock, techno, etc etc), the more you find things that are more interesting and creative, even if they're not 'groundbreaking'.
Someone said earlier this sort of trend will continue until the modern music industry consumes itself, and I agree one hundred percent. At this point in time I feel as though all the music industry does is restrain artists in a variety of ways and that, for the majority, it's just a bunch of crotchety old men that don't understand how these 'interwebs' and 'em pee threes' operate. But eventually, the industry will collapse. And, really, the infrastructure for a new industry is already there, in the form of things like Pandora and Spotify and general digital sales and streaming media (I hate streaming media and much prefer digital files, but that's an entirely different argument).
So I guess the tl;dr version of this:
-Modern (mainstream, pop, et al) music sucks but,
-this doesn't matter, because
-eventually it's all going to topple onto itself anyways, so
-just ignore what's popular and listen to what you like.
(As an unrelated side note, I almost NEVER get involved in these conversations because I always feel like I'm a little...under-read, so to speak, in comparison to a lot of other people. So I apologize if any of my missive seems unclear/nonsensical/repetitive.)
It took Pink Floyd years to become fully recognized. Led Zeppelin had a quick rise to fame and obsession, but it wasn't so easy for Pink Floyd (at least from what I've read).