Where Did Pop Music Go?

I'm listening to an "oldies" station on radio. I just noticed that most of the songs were very familiar to me, even though I've never been a pop music fan or paid it much mind. It seems these songs used to be "everywhere" - stores, restaurants, elevators, boom boxes on the street, etc. People used to sing these songs, alone or in groups. You couldn't live without hearing the "top of the pops" all around you. But these are all old songs. What's happened in the last 20 years? I can't think of any recent songs I know or hear. What gives? Is it iPods and such making listening private? Is it me? Why is pop music no longer a ubiquitous part of public life?

 

you're just old...very, very, old...

my parents had the same complaint, just as I do now too...you(we) tune to the music of your(our) youth, as we age we still prefer it and don't hear the new tunes the kids and young are tuned into because we don't associate with them...occasionally I borrow my daughters car and the radio is tuned to what her demographic is listening to and not at all familiar, very different from what I listened to...

 

[video=youtube;mmqrgbgGF7k]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmqrgbgGF7k[/video]

 

you got to get used to the new music..its rap crap now

 

You'll hear modern pop music in many public venues played over the speakers, such as restaurants, shopping malls, as well as in a lot of trailers for TV shows/films, etc

So it's still around yeah, though I guess with Ipods and portable music players listening to music has become more private, yeah

 

The "music" produced over the last 20-30 years is absolute garbage.
Rap is just poetry with drums..
Any female artist has to be half naked on stage to be successful...
Go back to the 80s and you will hear real music, sung with soul, heart and passion...
Most of the music from the 80s will live forever...the rap crap will die like the weeds in
my garden...

 

The advent of computers helped the quality to decline, since people no longer 'need' to have much real talent, or know how to play an instrument. They can create music on a synthesizer and simply "auto-tune" a terrible voice so that it sounds 'decent' (albeit robotic).

The advent of 'ipods' and downloadable music also shifted the target audience to a younger demographic. Teens are the main downloaders of music, so the music industry is dumbing itself down in order to market it to teens

That was always true to an extent, lol - though since music has become more commercialized, and has more venues for advertisement (ex. internet, youtube, etc) I think this marketing tactic's being employed more since it does succeed at attracting attention

I agree, the 90s is when a steady decline began.

Some of the earlier rap isn't bad honestly - most modern 'commercial' rap on the radio is awful and every song is the same - "i be ballin with dem gs, slappen' dem hos, pimpin' out my whip, yo dawg'

 

That is an excellent point regarding how music has become more private.

Remember when the larger your portable music device (i.e. boom box) was the cooler it was?

 

There hasn't been any good music since the seventies.
I examined that belief by trying to think of the most recent bands I would listen to.
Well I came up with Queen and Leonard Skinner Band. Both amazingly creative, in their own style and
good listening too.
Then I searched them and found, they are of the seventies.
So what happened ? Why ?
They had the "revolution" of the sixties to build on. No such era since. Just droll times and similar music.
Iraq, Afghanistan did not stimulate a wave of good music as did Vietnam.
I blame Generation X and all generations after as unimaginative twerps.



Moi

 

Its Lynyrd Skynyrd...get it right player....and when Ronnie Van Zant died on 20.10.77 in that plane
crash, the world lost a great talent...Johnnie, his brother has kept the band alive since then and LS music
will live forever and ever....rip Ronnie... 36 years to-day...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bxIuX8I2Mg&list=RD02NAbxZrzEvJQ

 

Bah, you're too young. The very best music was done in the 60s, some carryover into the 70s but not a whole lot. After that, nothing. All music from the 80s is dishwater.

 

I wouldn't call it dishwater...that an insult to every artist from that era...the sixties were good yeahh...60s 70s and 80s....lets call it a 30 year golden era....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOQwdRMTKEk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF-9zZrgTUU

 

Yes, I can still remember them playing the pan pipes in ancient Greece.

Kidding aside, I don't think I heard the old songs because I was a kid among kids. When I was a kid, I listened to classical music and argued with my friends about why it was better than their pop. But I still heard pop music everywhere. Those songs were enjoyed by everyone. You'd hear people of all ages humming them as they walked. Groups of young men used to gather on street corners or in parks to sing them. What's changed?

Part of the answer is implied by a profile in this week's New Yorker of Lukasz Gottwald, known as Dr. Luke. He leads a company that creates most of the songs performed by Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Kesha, Juicy J, Kelly Clarkson, Pink, Britney Spears, and others. The production process for these songs - and that's what it is, an industrial process - breaks the work down into specialties such as "producers, top-liners, beat-makers, melody people, vibe people, and just lyric people." Instead of musicians, computer software is used to experiment with different rhythms and blocks of sound. Background choruses are available in prerecorded sound bites. What you eventually hear is assembled from pieces separately conceived and then modified by Lukasz on his computer. The "artists" are really just singers who work as front people for a corporate project. When the product is performed, there are elaborate stage shows with costumes, special effects, make-up, lighting, props, dancers, etc. Musicians on a stage are no longer enough.

All this makes a difference because today's pop music is no longer art. What I mean is that it's not the creation of one person, or a partnership between a lyricist and composer (think Lennon & McCartney or Richards & Jagger). That subtly transforms the music into something at once more sophisticated and less personal. The old songs were simple, but that was what made them accessible to a mass audience. They were less polished, but they came from the hearts of their makers straight to the hearts of their listeners. That can't be said of today's pop, which is a calculated commercial enterprise for professionals. The effect is to place a distance between the audience and performers. The naive ditties of the past could be sung by the most tuneless amateur. Today's pop dazzles, but it doesn't embrace.

The other big change is reproduction media. Long ago, people played music on record players, radios, and loudspeakers, which broadcast their sound to anyone close enough to hear. Now people use iTunes, YouTube (see ThirdTerm's post 3) and similar sources to stream and download music to their computers, iPods, and smart phones. None of these reproduction media broadcast their sound, unless you choose to hook them up to equipment for that purpose. People listen through headphones or low-volume speakers intended for close-up listening. So there is less music in the street, literally. Not because people aren't listening, but because they're listening in new ways that make it more private. But that means you have to seek this music out; you have to choose it. People like me, who aren't pop fans, have much less opportunity to overhear others' music.

 

You are not very familiar with Mowtown, Muscle Shoals or Chin and Chapman are you. Production style music dates all the way back to the 1940's. At the extreme end are Stock, Aitken, and Waterman, who in a 10 year period had more hits than Elvis, Beatles and Rolling Stones combined. They would write tunes Monday to Thursday, test them at their disco Friday Saturday, and start production on the records the following Monday

 

and that's what my parents said of the music of 60's and 70's, 'that's not music, it's crap"...I don't have the fondness of 80's tunes as you do, every generation thinks it's music is the best and their parents think it's crap...

 

Not only am I not familiar, I never even heard of them. So how many of their 1940s songs are still with us? It's obvious that music can be turned out that way. But is it music that lasts? Is it just "catchy," or does it really move people?

 

In this thread, old people talk about how music of THEIR generation was the best, and everything since, has been crap.

 

Well...yeahh..and everything since HAS been crap...

 

On a 3 hour drive home yesterday, I "forced" my two young passengers to listen to my playlist which consists of artists such as: CCR, Skynyrd, Dire Straits, The Supremes, Eagles, Fleetwood, Joe Walsh, Joan Jet, King Harvest, Lovin Spoonful, Neil Diamond, The Monkees, Norman Greenbaum, Pure Prarie League, Santana, Orleans, Steve Miller, Greg Allman, Leo Sayer, Three Dog Night....and so on and so forth. They pissed & moaned for a while, but by the time we pulled into the barn they both wanted to borrow my iPod. Personally, I find little appeal in todays pop rock or country music. But to each their own, I suppose...I'm getting old.

 

Not necessarily true. My dad played in a dance band during the fifties and I developed a fondness for the music of the thirties, forties and fifties. My music is that of the sixties and seventies. But I had two children who kept me informed for years and I still tune in to the local stations now and then to keep up to date. There are some good modern bands. But everything moves pretty fast and is supplanted very quickly. Seems like nothing good stays around long enough.

Frankly the current divas all sound (and look) alike to me. And don't even get me started on the lyrics.

Same with films. Hollywood is remaking the old movies almost as though they can't come up with anything original. Maybe the current generation HAS lost its imaginative powers growing up with so much technology.

 

ITT a bunch of old aged music snobs. Don't like new music? Don't listen to it.

 

I'm pushing 30 in a few years and I know those bands and groups well. I also listen to older music and newer music.

 

but your dad being musician would've been more enlightened musically than the average non musician...my son is musician and I'm finding through exposure to his training I'm listening to music I would never had paid any attention to...

which is the whole point, we love the music we heard when we hit puberty and through into our twenties, that stays with us forever, music was changing quickly back then as well we just never noticed because we were in the middle of it and our taste in music was changing right along with it...I still get nostalgic when I hear tunes from the 60's and 70's, it's still what I like best...

the diva image disgusts me, I refuse to take part in their kiss my a** games I pity people who get caught up in the celbrity diva worship...

harsh, a lot of those old movies weren't that good, I try watching some that I thought were awesome back in the day but watching again today they're really cheesy...movies back then could be every bit as crappy as what comes out of hollywood today...

 

and in 30 years from now you'll be like the rest of us, nostalgic for the old days because you'll have no clue what the new music is about...it's not snobbery but the reality of getting older you won't be hanging out in clubs or raves when your 35-40 and then the musical disconnect will have already begun ....

 

No. I'm talking about how long music stays in the top ten or forty or one-hundred. This generation manages 15-17 weeks at times then it's on to something else.

Frank Sinatra had a hit that was in the top forty for 75 weeks. The music was that good that it had staying power.