“Pop music sucks.”
That phrase comes from varied places. It’s poorly constructed. The artists are trite. The lyrics are terrible. It isn’t of artistic value.
I’ve always defended pop music as both having a place in the world. That there’s a need to counterbalance “deep” music. That isn’t always duck confit and salmon roe and souffles. Sometimes you just want a cheeseburger.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about spectrums. Firstly as a varying characteristic (the loudest at one end, and the quietest at the other.) And secondly as a distribution (how many loud people exists versus how many quiet people exist.)
I get the sense of anti-pop people think about the latter. That it should be all “good” music, and no pop music should exist. That’s been the general argument I’ve engaged in.
But a thought occurred to me: what was about widening the spectrum? People say there should be more good music. More thoughtful singer-songwriters. More complex chord progressions. More cohesive songs and albums. That seems to me as making the spectrum taller.
A taller mountain of categories. But what about widening? What would that mean? I think about the advent of jazz music. It wasn’t just new and novel sounds. But the flexing of known conventions on how to create music. The articulation of a new emotions and ideas coming from people of impoverished or difficult lives. Its integration of new technology and techniques (e.g. electric guitars.)
Its own expanse and experimentation widened what was known to be possible to be music itself. And it moreover, it expanded music in all directions. Its ideas being subsumed, translated, misappropriated, properly appropriated at all ends of the spectrum.
Things always happen in-parallel, but we often just talk about one vector for simplicity purposes. So we talk about the increase and refinement of a category. But at the same time, it’s should be remembered to talk about the expansion and creation of new categories.
Dynamic Hypocrisy 