| June 11 2004 |
| System of a Spears: Pop is Dead |
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| I've spent most of my life idolizing a very select batch of musical acts, a selection that hasn't really changed all that much in the past fifteen years or so. It's not that I'm particularly narrow-minded when it comes to exploring new music, but moreso that there's been nothing new that's worth listening to. If a band doesn't jump out at me within 30 seconds to a minute, I toss them away. And so I've stuck to the principal bands that have entertained me for quite some time now, and every so often I hear something that I enjoy and that band trickles into my cadre of entertainment dieties. But one opinion of mine has been steadfast over the years, with only a very small handful of exceptions, and I do mean the hands of an infant: 99.9% of modern pop music is absolute and total trash. People have a mis-conception about the definition of "pop." They think that it applies only to groups and artists like Madonna, Britney Spears, and the Backstreet Boys. Well, guess what folks: if it's on the radio, and I don't mean college radio, either, but formatted radio stations that play commercials... then I'd hate to break it to you, but it's pop music. "Pop" is short for "Popular." It's a very broad term applied to the music that's popular amongst individuals between the ages of 13 and 21. This is usually gauged by the Billboards... the top 40 bands of any given era are typically labeled as pop groups. But the phrase can also extend out to bands who don't sell nearly as many albums but are POPular amongst social cliques... usually only if that group or artist has a recording contract with a big- money label. Let's first take a look at the heart and soul of Pop music, Bubblegum-pop. This style of music is filled to the brim with the likes of Britney Spears, Christina Aguillera, The Backstreet Boys, and Madonna. Bubblegum pop gets it's name from the little girls who chew bubblegum when they're buying pop albums, and the "style" is defined as any artist or group of artists who do not play instruments, but instead use studio musicians to create the music to which they sing, IE, the vocals are showcased as the principal talent. These artists rarely have had any real talent, but instead are popular because of how they look. They're attractive, and so people of the opposite sex want to be with them, and people of the same sex want to be like them. This in itself makes them not musicians, but actors. They have no musical assets to claim as talent, but have a groove thang and know how to shake it, and thus people buy their albums. Next let's take a look at rap/ hip-hop. This is a style of music that has been steadily declining in value since the mid 1990's. It began as a fun style of music that was more a novelty than a serious, message-laden musical form. Then came Run DMC, who brought hip hop to the fore-front of the music industry, and paved the road for the Beastie Boys to release the world's first platinum-selling, top 40 rap/ hip hop album, "License to Ill." But in the early 1990's, this style of music started to portray serious messages and fuel an east coast/ west coast rap war where rap stars like Tupac Shakur were murdered almost monthly. And then, as the 90's came to a close, rap again reformed to portraying that which was more entertaining and less serious... problem is, it was influencing kids to want to have lots of sex, do drugs, and party hearty. And it's a sad state of affairs when your kid is learning about the birds and the bees by listening to a pop record. R&B... here's a subject that gets to me. People nowadays confuse R&B, which stands for "rythym and blues," with bubblegum pop. The ranks of R&B heroes of yesteryear were filled with the likes of Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, and in my opinion the most talented of the lot, Sly & the Family Stone. They were talented... they played instruments, they wrote their own music, and they mostly created upbeat music that was less designed for sexual activities and more targeted toward getting people off their feet and dancing. But somewhere along the lines, R&B was taken over by the likes of Billy Ocean. People began to define anyone who was a black bubblegum pop star as R&B because they're black, and R&B is a primarily black style of music. Hence we are hearing people like R. Kelly, people who have NO bankable talent, being labeled amongst the likes of Otis Redding, one of the most talented human beings music has ever known. Newsflash: R- Kelly is a bubblegum pop star, just like Britney Spears. He doesn't write his own music (and he should fire his writers I might add), and he's never played an instrument in his life. In fact, I'd be surprised if he's even ever touched a music instrument. He sure does like making those sex tapes though, doesn't he? Last but not least stands the most popular style of music ever to grace a living room: Rock & Roll. I'm most assuredly going to catch a lot of flak for this one. Pop-rock was formed in the trustworthy hands of people like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Fats Domino. In the 1964 the entire style took it's first massive transformation when The Beatles shook their heads on the Ed Sullivan Show. Then again rock music shifted later in the 1960's when The Who stuttered their way through "My Generation." Again it changed when Led Zeppelin started bringing more of the blues into Rock music, and when Metallica popularized Heavy Metal in the early 1980's, rock began to cultivate a broader appeal. Today, pop-rock is flooded with bands who constantly steal from one- another. Radiohead, arguably the most succesful band in the modern world, is one of the very few groups creating original music nowadays and has become victimized by mainstream artists hawking their style. You basically have four types of pop-rock today: Radiohead knock-off groups (like Coldplay, although they have an excuse), 60's and 70's revitalization groups (such as the White Stripes), pup-punk groups (like Blink-182), and pop-metal groups (like System of a Down). Yes, I said it: System of a Down is a pop group, just like Godsmack, Creed, the Deftones (another group who blindly steals from Radiohead), and all the other top-40 metal bands around. So what's the big deficit I'm charging pop musicians to repay to society? First and foremost, modern pop musicis brainwashing the younger generations into believing that being a musician with quality-skill can be defined as having someone else do all of the work for you. The skill in creating music is rarely found today. Everyone sounds exactly the same because no one has the talent to write their own music anymore. No one is trying to forge their own style, their own sound. It's all just copied and pasted from other musicians... someone hears a catchy riff from one group, and suddenly, that group is using the same catchy riff. All of the guitarists have equatable skill, the drummers are more like machines, the bassists have no rythym, and the singers... nothing can truly be said that would decimate the morale of modern-day singers enough. There's barely any talent lingering in the music industries' throat right now. Thanks to the advent of computers in the music industry, quite literally anyone can be a pop singer today. With programs like Cool Edit Pro, a producer need only have a recording of your voice and clean it, alter it, repair it so it sounds clean and fresh. It's easy to make someone, anyone, sound as if they've been training how to sing their entire lives. People don't stop and realize that most pop artists were MODELS before they were "singers." And what would Madonna do if she actually had to sit down and write a song by herself? She'd kill herself outright... does anybody have a pen? And musicians today don't know what it is to write a song. Most of them only write lyrics, if indeed they write anything at all. People have misconstrued lyric-writing as "Songwriting" and with such a motion the general public today seems to think that writing the lyrics is writing the song. That's probably why people were caught off-guard by Piso Mojado and many of the other bands Colin and I have forged... because we didn't write lyrics, we wrote MUSIC. The instrumentals have ALWAYS been written before the lyrics when we wrote SONGS. The saddest bit of all this is, this paragraph alone will assuredly influence many of you idiots to write me e-mails claiming that writing lyrics takes more or equal skill as writing the music itself... that lyrics are more important than the music that the lyrics support. Well guess what people: Lyrics are intended to give a vocalist an excuse to use his or her instrument, nothing more. Sometimes they can be used to promote a theory/ belief the band shares as a unit... but the purpose of lyrics is not to really promote idealisms but rather to support the music itself. That's right. Lyrics are intended to be an afterthought. Once again I've run out of space to rant about a topic that really burns my butt. have faith though, feeble-minded music fans, I'm sure I'll get back to topic in the near future with an article title "Pop 2." There's too much to be said in one rant alone! -Matt Rock |