Popular Music Is Stagnant
Yes, really—it is.
Someone once said all art is restatement. On some level this is true. But it seems more true than ever these days—especially when it comes to popular music. (And by popular, I mean music that is typically described by the words songs or tracks and an album/CD/project typically has 10-20 of them.)
Pop music is stagnant. Only the artists are new. But the music itself is going nowhere fast. Here are a few reasons why…
The vast majority of it consists of songs or tracks less than 10 minutes long—with most being in the 3-4 minute range. Sure, there are jazz albums and progressive rock albums and the odd live jam band album that might have a single track 15-30 minutes long…but these are the exception, not the rule. The 3-minute song still rules after decades.
Why is this? Do we watch 3-minute movies? Do we read 3-paragraph novels? Do we follow television series where each episode is 3 minutes long? The “bite-sized song” paradigm is absurd…yet we’re still mired in it.
Time signatures are still overwhelmingly dominated by 4/4. With the endless potential for rhythmic variety…the immense potential of odd meters and mixed time signatures…the majority of pop is still stuck in the 4-beats-to-a-bar rut.
Sure there are artists who get away from 4/4, but they’re rarely mainstream, and their metric adventures are still simple-minded compared (as just one example) to the mind-blowing rhythmic sophistication of Indian music.
Guitars still dominate. Yes, guitars are great and incredibly versatile instruments. And yes, they look cool. But there are many, many other instruments that are every bit as versatile (and many even look cool). Sure, there are plenty of bands that use other instruments…but again, they’re on the fringes. If you’re talking mainstream, you’re talking guitars.
Western drum kits still dominate. The world of percussion is almost unimaginably vast. There are thousands of cool things that a drummer can beat on that make awesome sounds. There are also melodic percussion instruments like marimba and vibes. There are world instruments like tablas and pandeiros and frame drums. Yet here we are, still stuck after decades with kick, snare, hi-hat and toms.
Chords are still the same…after decades. I-IV-V chord progressions still rule. Thousands of albums are still constructed entirely from endless variations on the same few major/minor/dominant seventh chords. This never changes…and yet…there are entire harmonic languages (the kind pioneered in orchestral music by composers like Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok) that are ignored, even though they are infinitely richer and more expressive.
It drives me nuts when I read pop music reviews that use phrases like “fresh new sound” (no, it’s old and stale)…or “groundbreaking album” (no, the ground was broken long ago)…or “like nothing we’ve heard” (yes, you’ve heard it many times).
These reviews would be more honest if they all started with a disclaimer:
While this band, like most others, demonstrates absolutely nothing arguably new or innovative, we’ll review them within the context of an endlessly repetitive cycle of sameness.
There’s not a thing wrong with liking hamburgers. I love a good hamburger. And I’ve had many, many different hamburgers: different buns, different beef, cooked differently, with different sauces and spices, different toppings, different thicknesses. Lots of variations. But they’re all hamburgers. I might say one is really incredible—for a hamburger. I won’t call it a completely new kind of food. That would be absurd.
In another post here on Medium, Tyler Hayes ponders the fact that most of our discovery of music—the intense, can’t-get-enough exploration in which our tastes are really defined—happens in our youth (often high school and college).
He wonders why that same passion for exploration and discovery doesn’t continue throughout our lives. Well Tyler, I’ve got a simple answer for you: because once we get well past our college days, we quickly begin to realize that there is a vast amount of sameness…and we get bored with it.
Furthermore, the source of the endless repetition is glaringly obvious: kids don’t know any better. Every year, there’s a new crop of kids discovering their generation’s musicians and swearing they’re the most awesome ever…while being blissfully ignorant that every other generation already did the same thing.
And each generation of kids makes the staggeringly self-centered assumption that their generation’s music is somehow better, when it really isn’t. It’s just theirs—that’s all that’s unique about it.
This endlessly looping sameness isn’t confined to pop music. Take a look at concert music (typically called “classical,” but that’s a poor label for it). Until the mid-20th century, there was a lot of innovation. Real innovation.
We went from Gregorian Chant to Beethoven in a couple hundred years…then in just the next 150 years, we had the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel (completely unlike anything before), and the extraordinary sonic languages of Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich.
But when these composers passed on, their musical languages died with them. Sure, there was a lot of experimentation in the 20th century…but nothing really stuck. Largely because (you guessed it) it became an endless loop of repetition…and because pop music ascended and soon dominated.
I wish I could know the future, because I’d die happier knowing that someday, pop music might actually go somewhere. Songs might one day be longer than 3-4 minutes…and people might write popular songs using major 2nds and bitonality and odd meters.
But as it is, I continue to listen to new pop, halfheartedly…because every time I hear someone say “Did you hear that awesome new song?” I know before listening to it that there won’t be anything new about it.
