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Has the pop-musical turn-around set in now?
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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 Has the pop-musical turn-around set ...
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There have been several run-ups already like with Nirvana which the disorientated generation thought to be new music that had to have its own name for who had never heard the preceeding `grunge´of Procol Harum, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Neil Young and those in between.
There have been very conscious looks back like of Lenny Kravitz, and even original dispatches like of Sheryl Crow.
However, the deafened consumer majority raised with looped simplicity was not yet fed up with monotonous cacophonies and not yet ready for a musical relaunch.
Apparently 3 decades of over and over rap´n tech triviality weren´t enough yet.
Now, maybe the time has come.
There is some "live" soap in German TV Channel RTLII which I watch sporadically, for the scenes shown there that I used to live in Cologne and Berlin. And in these shows the pieces faded in lately as sound tracks might be all the rage in hipster Berlin.
And what do I hear in those vastly project studio sounding ( nothing against amateur flair) tracks?
No hiphop, no techno anymore.
Instead what comes through from these brand new makes is The Beatles, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Papas & Mamas, Stevie Wonder, Steve Miller and Kraftwerk.
Having figured already in the eighties that actually inventing anything after the creative explosions of beauty in the esixties and seventies resides near impossible, I don´t mind leanings against past masters and actually appreciate each somewhat original sequence or arrangement.
What counts for me, if what I hear in those TV soaps actually and finally, finally may present a general return to musically containing, handcrafted, varying, accelerating, harmonical and rhythmically evolving music ... is that the main stream may return to consuming and appreciating organical, vital and eventually even pulling music.
Should this finally be the burial of a shallow fashion dictature of hyped undemanding noise ... should we be seeing youngsters again who be rocking along to something that doesn´t require you to invent solicitous movement as dance, and seeing lovers who be absorbed by atmosphere floated by some actual gear like acoustic strings and hiats ...
then may I raise that fictive glass to you my friends, where ever you are, welcoming you back to popular music with a toast like:
"We shall overcome... in a yellow submarine!" 
Ruphus
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Date Feb. 8 2013 19:59:27
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 RE: Has the pop-musical turn-around ... (in reply to Ruphus)
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Hey Ruphus, you and I finally agree on something. The Sixties were my favorite era for music, and my very favorites from that period were, and still are, Simon and Gafunkel, The Mamas and the Papas, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen. It was a period of marvelous musical creativity that was as much poetry (and very good poetry at that!) as music. I don't think any of the pop genres of the Seventies, Eighties, and more recent periods come close to matching it. I still have a stereo turntable and continue to play my vinyl albums of those, and other, groups from that era.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Feb. 8 2013 20:18:15
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Has the pop-musical turn-around ... (in reply to Ruphus)
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I don't think so. What happened in the sixties was that for a brief moment the artists escaped the music business. They actually had something to say to their contemporaries. The music business played catch up, and made money by signing artists that actually appealed to their audience. A similar thing happened in the twenties and thirties with jazz and swing.
But real artists are a pain in the ass to business people. They want to do their own thing, not what the bosses tell them to. Today and the preceding couple of decades seem to me to resemble closely the 1950s, when music biz executives ran the show. The result was a stream of dreck, as they tried to guess what they could sell you like a shirt or a stick of chewing gum.
I had a band in high school in the 1950s. We played dances. Kids still knew the classic steps. We would get together on Saturday morning and listen to the top ten songs on the Top Forty radio program. A third of the nine members of the band were literate enough to write out the tunes as they were played (three verses were enough to get it right). We would spend an hour getting the chord structure agreed upon, and lead sheets written. That way we could play most of the requests we got.
What really got the kids out on the floor was not the crap heard on the radio, but swing and jazz. Kids could still dance swing and bop (jitterbug) in those days, and they recognized good music whether it was familiar or not. We copped stuff off of old jazz records. We bought sheet music, written for piano, of classic swing tunes and wrote our own arrangements. When we had a good string of gigs, we had the money to buy scores of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Woody Herman at the music store, copy out the parts, and woodshed until we could play the big band classics. The kids loved them.
iTunes began the process of killing off an already moribund music biz in the 21st century. Spotify and the like are finishing the job. It remains to be seen whether a generation of artists will emerge who can reach their audience by a new means of distribution.
The behemoths of the music biz used to record and distribute classical music as a public service. They never made any money on it, often lost money. But they felt it was their duty to culture. When the accounants finally gained complete control of the big music companies, and when the prestige of classical music sagged, the big labels basically quit the classiclal field. People bemoaned the disappearance of recorded classical music.
Instead, the digital recording revolution gave small purely classical companies and individual artists control over their own fate. Orchestras have their house labels. Individual artists like the classical guitarist Manuel Barrueco run one-man labels. Companies like Naxos turn out a much wider variety of stuff than Decca or Deutsche Gramophon ever did. Classical fans are better off than they ever were before.
We just have to wait until the pop music industry dies a well deserved death, and hope something good emerges from the ruins.
RNJ
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Date Feb. 9 2013 7:11:15
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Has the pop-musical turn-around ... (in reply to mark74)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mark74
F*ck the Beatles
Finally, a distinguished ear! :O|
Lenador,
the weird thing with much of what´s considered dance music now is that it is actually so montonous that the dancers, mostly just alternating their stand from one foot to the other, have to invent something deliberately for their upper body to find some move and vary it where the music is static.
Whereas so much of actual music, including what is not considered explicitely dance music, kicks your butt off the chair and and keeps your limbs moving along an evolving track.
Many don´t know what dancing is while they stand around to percussive finess of a diesel engine, waving spastical looking bent wrists or sticking out fingers for a lack of actual dance.
Even when switching to athletic performances by sweeping the floor with themselves, there never is a connection to a rhythm. Because there is none.
-
But I know what you mean.
What I observe here is the same thing only with lyrics as placeholder for what is meant as dance in your case.
Not concerned or discerning about music, folks here value mainly by the lyrics. ( = Commonly, the more cheesy the better.)
Ricardo,
So you predict the gab or two-finger synth line over a bits ´n bytes looped sound floor to be staying the major shizznizz for all times?
Bill,
I see the seventies as the culmination though.
Even yet the cheapest disco and schlager trash of that time compared like compositiory and performing sophistication to the following levels.
The skills and genius were unparalleled, and will remain so forever as the potential plains of music have been vastly grazed since then.
Since then you can´t even mind any maker, not even the ambitious and talented to be layering off. Whether consciously or unconsciously. There is hardly any choice left since the Klondike of those two decades.
Richard,
I suppose one of the technical problems with internet distribution to be similar to the one with graphics, which you can prevent from being dowloaded, but not from being screen shot ( with possibly lower resolution ).
In such a way auditioning of demos can be recorded.
( Though there have been self-destructive images been introduced recently, eventually allowing same for audio files.)
There can be mutes inserted or only sequences streamed, but then again. Some self-publishing artists who skipped all CR concerns and relied on the consumer fraction willing to pay, appear to have faired well. Apparently better than with major label´s left-over crumbs.
What remains is PR. That is where big companies have their ledge.
Single exeptions of sudden Youtube popularity, can´t cover all the needing and deserving artists´fortune, I guess.
-
Anyway, I sure hope that we might be on path back to handmade music. Or at least to actual / versatile music writing, and be it even just with easy means like late movement-to-sound translating gadgets.
Just hoping to see an end to a mainstream of brain killing monotony.
Ruphus
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Date Feb. 9 2013 9:38:38
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Has the pop-musical turn-around ... (in reply to Ruphus)
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Although the Sixties was the musical era I consider overall to have been the best, I agree with Ricardo that although each era has revivals, none will make a comeback and begin topping the charts in the mainstream again: Not the Big Band era, nor the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, and beyond ad-infinitem. Nevertheless, there will always be individual musical artists who transcend any and all eras and who maintain a consistently high level of popularity. I'm thinking specifically of Frank Sinatra. Sinatra started in the Big Band era of the Forties with the Dorsey Brothers, continued on through the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and beyond with his own unique singing style and sound. And he was always good.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Feb. 9 2013 11:01:08
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runner
Posts: 357
Joined: Dec. 5 2008
From: New Jersey USA
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RE: Has the pop-musical turn-around ... (in reply to Ruphus)
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In one of the most penetrating and profound books written on aesthetics and the future of music and the arts, Music, the Arts, and Ideas, author Leonard B. Meyer prophesied back in 1967 that all of the arts would enter a terminal phase of, essentially, random brownian motion, with no clearly marked, continuous path in any direction for more than a brief period. We are clearly in that phase now, with media instantly spreading every "new" art trend or school or movement everywhere. Meyer, chairman of the U.of Chicago music department, laid out his thesis and arguments in the central part of this wonderful book, and I urge anyone who is really interested in the future of the arts, or if the arts have a future, to check it out.
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Date Feb. 9 2013 21:27:44
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