Should we care that most pop music is awful?
Last week a friend told me about a rap artist from the UK called Skittles. My friend has good taste so I followed up on his tip and gave it a listen. I wasn’t disappointed. Skittles is great.
Of course if you listened to him you might think differently. But even if rap isn’t your thing or if rap is your thing but the northern English accent is too difficult or the cultural references too remote, you should at least be able to recognise the craft and talent at work.
As I listened to Skittles I wondered why it was I had never heard of him. I’m not very plugged in to the Zeitgeist but still, this guy is exceptional.
I searched around online I saw that I wasn’t the only one, most of the world has never heard of him either. I noticed too that being passed over by the London-centric UK music scene was a theme in his lyrics.
As has happened before when I discover an artist whose talent seems to have been overlooked I found myself getting enraged on his behalf. Enraged at a world where banality reins supreme at the top of the charts while true talent is relegated to the relative hinterland of YouTube views in the low thousands.
Whenever you make a statement like this — implying that most commercially-successful art is bad, and most great art gets overlooked — you run the risk of falling foul of the dominant cultural idealogy of our day: summed up best as a kind of shrug-your-shoulders post-modern relativism that insists that since everything is subjective any attempt to create a hierarchy of taste is doomed to failure from the outset.
There’s truth to this position. In a sense, there is nowhere to stand. Our likes, loves, prejudices and values are deeply enmeshed with the very particular circumstances of our lives. And nowhere would this seem to be more the case than in the way we value music. So who’s to say what’s good and bad?
Well, the philosopher Theodor Adorno thought he could. Here’s how Adorno summed up the difference in a famous 1938 essay.
“A clear judgement concerning the relation of serious music to popular music can be arrived at only by strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization.”
In other words, pop music is generic and so, by definition, the music we should take seriously has something unique to offer.
This quality of uniqueness is something I think we all connect to on a deeper level, in spite of our individual preferences. It’s what we’re pointing at when we throw around terms like ‘realness’. It’s the reason Nirvana’s arrival on the music scene in the early 1990s rendered an entire genre of hair bands obsolete seemingly overnight and why Straight Out of Compton might be the most important musical artefact of the late 20th century.
We all know ‘realness’ when we hear it.
But if this is the case why do so many of us waste our time listening to such derivative crap. Adorno said the answer to this question could be found by scrutinizing closely the development of western capitalism.
Adorno was a key figure in the Frankfurt School, a collection of German Jewish neo-Marxist philosophers forced to flee the Nazis. When Adorno and his colleagues arrived in the US in the late 1930s they were vexed by the question of why it was that the American working-class were so numb to the inequalities they lived under.
They came to realize that Marx’s belief that the proletariat would inevitably rise up to overthrow their capitalist oppressors was naive because it didn’t take in to account the bewitching power of consumerism.
American workers were alienated in just the way that Marx had predicted but instead of finding common cause with their fellow workers they sought to fill this spiritual vacuum through the consumption of products. And because mass consumerism arose at the same time as mass media the products that had the biggest influence on the average American worker were the cultural artefacts created by the emerging entertainment industry: namely TV, radio, film and music.
All this might strike you as relatively ‘so-what?’ We all know that commercial music is designed to appeal to the masses. But why is that bad? What does it matter if someone seeks relationship solace through a schmaltzy ballad or sublimates their aggression into the mosh pit at a heavy metal concert? Surely it’s better than beating someone up or falling prey to a dangerous ideology.
This is true and there would be no problem if that was the limit of the music’s influence. But according to Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues art has power and when you harness that power only in the name of maximizing profit you create untold damage to the psyche of a society.
When Adorno looked around at the cultural artefacts he saw in mid-20th century America he noticed that most of them were really just the same thing packaged in different ways. Standardization, in other words.
As he saw it, the problem with this standardization is that while art imitates life, life also imitates art. So if the songs you hear on the radio are mainly love songs that stress the message that true love can only be found in a romantic partner it’s not unlikely that you’ll internalise this message to the point that it ends up informing your entire belief system.
All this wouldn’t be a problem if the underlining messages were encouraging you to challenge, question and think critically about the world you live in. But we all know that that’s not the case. The purveyors of popular culture are interested in mass appeal and to gain the widest audience they generally play it safe. They dilute potency in favour of the bland and easily digestible and eschew discomfort in favour of a kind of complacent familiarity.
And because life imitates art we, the consumers of this middle-of-the-road fare, inevitably become more and more like the thing we consume. Less ready to challenge the status quo, more docile. More standardized.
This might be why it’s virtually impossible to have an encounter at a party that doesn’t degenerate into the generic. We’re all repeating someone else’s dialogue, and it’s not even very good dialogue.
As Adorno put it, we live at a time when “personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odour and emotions.
“The triumph of advertising and the culture industry is that consumers seem compelled to buy their products even when they see through them.”
We all know most pop music sounds the same yet we’re dancing along anyway.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not above any of this. I’m as susceptible as any to the latest fad. And how could I not be? The creators of popular culture have had decades of honing their craft and have become so adept at identifying and exploiting our deep-seated desires and fears that it’s nearly impossible to resist.
So what can we do?
In the first instance I think we need to take seriously the idea that art is food for the soul, and if we subject ourselves to bad art there’s going to be a psychological consequence every bit as serious as the physical effects of eating junk food every day.
So we need to practice discernment. But we also need to stop consuming so much.
A while ago a friend of mine who was going through some mental health problems told me that he had stopped listening to most music because he had become aware of how much it messed with his moods.
Later on when I started meditating regularly I found I understood what he meant. Really pay attention to yourself when you’re listening to music and you might notice it too.
And the same goes for practising discernment. The more in touch with yourself you are the more you’ll learn to trust your own judgement.
The late comedian Bill Hicks put it perfectly back in the early 1990s when referring to a media controversy concerning graphic sex scenes in the film Basic Instinct.
“Don’t get caught up in that fevered, hyped, phoney debate,” he cautioned his audience. “You’re just confused, you’ve forgotten how to judge correctly. Take a deep breath. Look at it again: ‘Ah, it’s a piece of shit.’ That’s all it is, nothing more.
“Free yourself folks. You are right. Not those fuckers who want to tell you how to think. YOU ARE RIGHT!… Now walk away.”
