On 06/08/12 19:46, Brent Busby wrote:
On Mon, 6 Aug 2012, Simon Wise wrote:
On 06/08/12 02:16, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
Most people paying for listening to music aren't musicians theirselfes. They
neither are that (self-)educated that they need (or even are able to listen)
to more complex music. Mass media have the
which is perhaps one of the huge changes in music in the last 60 or so years
... most popular music was played and sung by the listeners until then, the
ability to play something pre-recorded, here music that is not directly
connected to your own playing or singing, or at least someone in the room with
you, is really very recent in the development of music. Older popular music
was as much about the pleasure of reproducing it as it was about listening to it.
That was true I think until the late 90's, and definitely has changed in the
2000's back to the way it was in the earlier period you're talking about. Pop
music now seems to be about vocals, vocals, vocals...and by the way, did I
mention the vocals? If there's any instrumental track to speak of at all, it
usually seems to consist of some TR-909ish bass drum playing quarter notes, and
maybe some sine wave synth bass on top of that, a few padding chords if you're
lucky. And on top of that, it's literally all singing, all dancing. The bass
drum part is only there to keep someone out there from proclaiming the emporer
has no clothes when they notice there's actually no song really there.
And the listeners seem to like it that way. If anything is too instrumentally
complicated, they think it's "weird." Psychedelic music is now "creepy." We've
re-entered the era of the campfire singalong. And let's not even get into the
prevalence of karaoke games for consoles. Styles like rock and jazz are starting
to feel to me, much as I love to play them, like something musicians do for
eachother's enjoyment, sometimes in over-the-Net collaboration projects. It's
almost become something where you have to be a player yourself to even
appreciate it.
there is plenty of traditional popular music that is quite complicated, and also
meant to be played by many not just a few experts ... sometimes its more fun to
try something tricky than something easy ... that's the whole point of lots of
games, popular and widely practised does not always mean dumbed-down.
Simon
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