My Thoughts on Pop Music

I recently thought of the perfect way to describe my distaste for mainstream pop music. I was so happy when the idea dawned on me, and I've been planning on writing these thoughts down. Then I decided to search the internet to see if it had been talked about before. Lo and behold, the has come up before... shocker (thank you Google). Anyway, I've still had a lot of feelings on pop music bottled up with the recent surge of terrible "music" that has struck the airwaves like a deadly plague.

The thought I had about pop likened it to fast food. There is a quote by a man named Marcus Eder, described as a rogue scholar and an angry liberal who wrote a book called, "Rorschach’s Ribs" ... his quote is in the exact vein I was talking about. It goes:

"Pop music is like fast food. It's always available quickly and might even taste good while you're eating it...but eventually you're going to shit it out and see it for what it really is--all the packaging in the world can't cover up the fact that it's excrement."

I'd like to expand on his beliefs with some of my own observations. What I wanted to say originally is that pop music is like fast food, in that it's quick, always available, and you don't have to look far and wide to find it. It's shoved in your face, or should I say on your ears, every time you turn on the radio, much how like every time you turn on the television there's a commercial for McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King. But this music, like this food, has little substance. Its availability does not make up for that fact. It takes hard work to find truly worthwhile music. You have to dig a little deeper, strain yourself a little more, like finding a truly good eating establishment with food that won't keep you in the bathroom for hours on end. In the end, the satisfaction of finding that truly worthwhile music, like that truly tasty food place, will be more than fulfilling.

Unfortunately, the masses don't want to go through the trouble. They are more than happy gobbling up the first catchy, brain-dead song the industry will throw at them and the radio will overplay and oversell. The problem with so much pop music is that it is mass produced to satisfy a wide group of people who aren't looking for anything other than a catchy beat and generic, recycled lyrics. Like Mr. Eder said, it's presented in a shiny packaged that's heavily glossed up to hide its major flaws and shortcomings and to convince you it's really wonderful.

The illusion of catchiness as a suitable substitute for style is disheartening for me. To me, music is an art form. It is absolutely inexcusable in my eyes to accept sacrificing the artistic component of music to make a product everyone will like. The excuse that music is "fun" and "catchy" as a reason why it is a good song boggles my mind. Ke$ha, Miley Cyrus, and Katy Perry are hardly talented. Don't get me wrong, they are fantastic pop musicians... because they know exactly how to succeed the same way people like N*Sync and Britney Spears knew the formula for becoming successful.

What about their songs is truly inspiring? The lyrics? I don't think so... unless you count the same generic words regurgitated over and over as progressive lyrics. The music itself holds no weight of its own. Music, like writing a book or painting, is art and should be cherished as such.

The point of my rambling is that I can't take when people say they have good musical taste and list off generic pop acts as something that is more than it is: terrible music covered up by high tech production (especially auto-tune... God I hate auto-tune) hoping to package it off to the masses as the newest "big thing". Look no further than Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair Back and Forth". The song is awful. Do you really think the 9-year-old wrote this damn song by herself? She is the daughter of two powerfully rich celebrities and probably had the finest people working on the song for her to recite. The lyrics are terribly brainless and the beat itself is mind-numbing.

I do want to stress that any person has all the right in the world to listen to Willow's song or Ke$ha's "We R Who We R" or Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" or 3Oh!3's... well, any terrible song they've ever written. But don't try to spin it as music gold when we've heard those tunes before, just like you shouldn't try to tell me that McDonald's is great food. It's not. You can enjoy it, you may enjoy it, no one should stop you from enjoying it, but don't act like it's good. I myself enjoy a couple of guilty pleasure songs/bands that I know are musically unimpressive (not to the extent of Willow Smith or Ke$ha, thankfully).

How many people talk about and listen to Thrice? Kevin Devine? Brand New? Rx Bandits? Streetlight Manifesto? Those musicians have talent. They dig deeper, they evolve, their music progresses from album to album and they always try to improve. Bands like Brand New had a formula that everyone loved, and they still changed their sound to challenge themselves without worrying about what others think. That's what pop music lacks; that conquest, that sense of discovery. Mainstream pop is complacent in its own filth. Ever listen to Vheissu by Thrice? I highly encourage that CD, because it represents the musical thought I wish you could find in the mainstream. Same goes to ...And the Battle Begun by the Rx Bandits, truly one of the greatest albums I have ever listened to in my entire life. And there are a ton of great bands I've never heard of and you've never heard of, but it's so gratifying to hear them and discover their music.

Before ending this rant, that's not to say all mainstream music is trash. There are musicians that will challenge the mainstream norm and expand on the formula most pop acts will rely on. It's just frustrating to wonder where they are sometimes.

Enjoy the music you listen to. God bless the artist for making the most money they can, that is well within their right to do so. But do know that there is good music beneath the surface. You just have to find it.