The Decline of Pop Music

From what I've read, the Grammy's were bad.  I've never actually sat down to watch the Grammy's ever, though I like music enough, but I'm not particularly interested in the lives of musicians.  (Not particularly interested in the lives of actors or athletes either).  Award shows are woman things - women are the audience for the "human interest" stories and gossip about private lives.  That's probably why these things end up as more fashion shows than anything else. 

Speaking of fashion, it's a riot to see someone complaining about sexual harassment (that's the white rose) while dressed like this.  The Red Carpet for most award shows ends up looking like a Slut Walk for attractive people.

 I like Aaron Clary's take on the Grammys - outshone by an X-Games competition with people playing outrageously in the snow.  But the Grammys are about pop music, and pop music is dying from lack of... well, music.

In the middle of last century, a bunch of semi-schooled musicians broke into popular music with new sounds and took the market by storm.  If you ever listen to "grown up" music from the 50's, it's mostly pretty sad.  There were some good Country acts, and hold-overs from the Big Band /Swing era, but... Paul Anka?  The Shirelles?   This song, by Johnny Preston, is considered one the 50 top hits of the 50's.   I'm not saying those acts or that song are awful.  I'm saying they were the best of what Pop music could muster back then without the new Blues-inspired rock-n-roll.

So the new sound took off, and young bluesey musicians were all the rage.  They needed talent, personality and sound, but not much in the way of training.  Elvis got some basic guitar instruction from his uncles, and Mississippi Slim taught him some chord techniques when he was 12, but Elvis was mostly self-taught (and famously had a music teacher in High School tell him he had no aptitude for music).  Contrast that with the famous Big Band leader Glenn Miller, who was taught by Joseph Schillinger, himself a graduate of the St. Petersburgh Imperial Conservatory of Music (which also graduated a guy named Tchaikovsky).  Some of Schillinger's other students were George Gershwin, Burt Bacharach, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey.   That Big Band generation of musicians were well-trained in classic techniques, even if they mostly wrote and performed songs based on Jazz.

Most of those early rock-n-rollers were largely self-taught like Elvis, though they learned in an environment with a lot of music tradition.  But not a lot of music theory.  They knew what worked, and they were talented enough to make it sound really, really, good.  And when they started making records, they were working in an environment saturated with studio musicians, composers and other professional still connected to the knowledge of people like Schillinger. 

But that was two to three generations ago.  Popular music is now dominated by the cultural offspring of Elvis, Fats Domino, The Beatles, The Stones and the like.  There isn't that much of a connection to the rich history of music theory.  All there is really are blues progressions, and we've just about mined out 12-bar blues.  Blues itself was born of multiple styles, but it's all that's left in a ravaged ecosystem where everything else was driven to extinction.    So modern Pop music is dying of boredom.  It all sounds the same because it is the same.

But there is other music, other ecosystems.  EDM and all the various House styles for instance, are trying to forge something different, even if much of it is derivative of Pop Rock twenty, thirty or forty years ago, it's at least derivative in different ways and also drawing inspiration from other sources.   Pop Music is also dying because the only economic model the record execs knew was the Album, and that's a pale shell of its former self.  So there isn't really the money to draw the new talent into the major labels (which don't know what to do with them anyway).  Go find stuff you like on Youtube and Soundcloud!