Pop music: The (possibly) noble mongrel
Over the years, I’ve fallen in love with Ravel and Debussy’s work and gaped at and then studied their complex, soul-crumpling harmonies; I’ve gone through my progressive rock period and my jazz period (fusion to big band to mainstream) and thankfully escaped sane; I often enjoy playing a Renaissance piece on the guitar; I’ve even dabbled in Gaelic folk music, for Pete’s sake. I’ve learned to appreciate all of the great classical stuff that really doesn’t move me much, just because it has merit supported by years of scholarship. But, in the end, the music I have the most faith in — the music I think has the most potential — is popular music. I still think 95% of it is total crap, mind you, but that doesn’t stop me from believing it is the musical area with the greatest artistic potential.
First of all, I’m not really sure what pop music is. It’s not a genre — I mean, how can Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, James Brown, The Rolling Stones, Ben Folds, Aretha Franklin, The Foo Fighters, Barry Manilow and Mister Mister all be part of the same genre? It’s music made for the popular audience, though. And I don’t want to hear that Iron Maiden and Disturbed are not pop music because they write and play dark and hard. It is pop. It’s packaged for sale. Pop is music that is supposed to appeal to lots of people, for business reasons. But there’s more to it than that, I think.
To me, one of the most artistic practitioners of pop is Sting. While I think he is one of the greatest lyricists of all time and while I think he has scads of natural talent for music, I don’t qualify him as a great composer. Still, he is one songwriter who gets what pop music should be. He says:
I like the impurity of taking one genre and twisting it into something else. I’m not terribly respectful of genres; I tend to pervert them when I get a hold of them. My interest is not to create pure country or pure rock ‘n’ roll or pure jazz or pure anything. People tend to want to compartmentalize music, to have it in these neat little boxes – “This is what you do. You can’t do something else because it’s not a pure form.” I’m not interested in pure form at all. I’m much more interested in a bastardized form of music, where some kind of mutant can grow. Pop music at its best is that sort of mongrel thing. I enjoy breaking the pattern.
On some level, I think pop music becomes this “mongrel thing” naturally. Songwriters absorb what they hear and it comes out later in their work, even if by accident. Unfortunately, this usually goes no farther than a combination of other pop forms: R&B; funk; country, etc. But in the hands of a competent songwriter with a real ear, you can hear things culled from all of the music in the world. You hear Puccini in Elton John; Prokofiev in Sting and Rachmaninoff in 70s pop. Indian rhythms (probably thanks to Bollywood) are making their way into dance music. The Beatles (and let’s give the lion’s share of the credit here to Sir George Martin) pulled in influences from all areas of the musical world to start the pop-mongrel ball rolling.
If pop music is marketed to the world, it is only fitting that it should be a melange of the musical ideas of the world, from the present and from across time. Think of how poignant that makes pop, potentially. I say “potentially” because if the writers don’t do their homework (and most don’t) we get a mere commodity — a product, formulaic and sterile, to be sold like Billy Joel’s proverbial “can of beans.”
The pop songwriter has, through technology, a world of sounds and instruments to choose from. He has no limits, really. The modern songwriter has the means to express himself without fearing that a break in convention will give him away for a phony or for a destroyer of the purist code. If the fixation on selling could be dropped, pop could become “serious music” and the music snobs could stop grinning condescendingly at it. (A condescension it sometimes deserves, for the record.)
Still, pop’s greatest strength might just be its attempts to appeal to a wide audience. This keeps the songwriter under control. It keeps him thinking first about his audience and second about artistic innovation. (Don’t get me started on composers like John Cage.) While innovation can be a great thing — in fact a necessary thing for the growth of music — it can also make composing nothing more than a self-indulgent experiment. If the greatest thing about music is the communication between the composer and his audience (and I think it is), then pop music has immeasurable potential to move the world audience.
We can appeal to the masses without feeding them crap, you know. In fact, the higher quality writers tend to stick around, don’t they? McCartney, Joel, Sting, Elton John and their ilk certainly are not one-hit-wonders. I would argue that poor, tortured Brian Wilson is a musical genius who belongs in the company of the master composers, and he’s a pop legend. The people of Earth might eat all the candy you give them, but they, in the end, reward quality.
When musical geniuses lose their egos and go for the heart instead of the head (but still stay smart), the greatest music is born. There’s no reason pop music can’t be taken seriously if the writers take it seriously first. The song has to be more important than the money, the parties or the “chicks” for this to happen. Sometimes, it is. But I fear pop music is forever destined to remain a “sometimes” art, with us all on a constant search for prospectors’ gold.
Chris Matarazzo’s ARTISTIC UNKNOWNS appears every Tuesday
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Your attitude towards John Cage is a familiar one, based on the usual misinterpretations, mythologies, and misunderstandings. I’d encourage you to actually look into it without dismissing the entire category of experimental music out of hand.
Innovation is essential in all genres of music. Look at how techno keeps coming up with new sub-genres, then folding them back together in new ways. Innovation is also what drives pop, it’s just that the musical language remains based on historically-known forms, such as the ballad. Virtually ALL popular music is based on a very small number of musical forms: ballads, blues, etc.
Sting’s concept of bastardization is a good one. And you may not know, but it’s basically the same idea of hybridization espoused by Thomas Dolby and John Cage. Pop innovates usually by doing recombinations, not by producing anything radically new and different.
What you’ve managed to do here, in redefining pop music, is to show that Worldbeat, or World Music, or other forms of cross-cultural musical fusion have hybrid vigor. Basically, you’ve proved that Worldbeat is the most viable form of pop, because it is open-ended and inclusive. Nice job of redefining.
Art — I may not think Cage contributed much, but just as you say “innovation is essential in all genres of music” I also said, above, that “innovation can be a great thing — in fact a necessary thing for the growth of music.” You and I agree on this, if not on Cage. I think he was amazingly creative, if not amazingly musical. I think twelve-tonal music, for instance, was musical innovation, but I don’t think a pianist sitting in front of a piano without playing it is.
I never dismissed experimental music. I dismiss music that becomes a “self-indulgent experiment” — music that forgets the listener entirely. I respect the work of Roy Harris and Vincent Persichetti. To me, their work is real innovation that says within musical parameters. I’m not a great fan of metaphorical or conceptual trappings around music.
I know other pop artists have created musical hybrids — Dolby is good at it. I suppose I want other to dig more deeply — into both other cultures and into the past. When it is done well, it is magic.
I would agree with you: Worldbeat is, at present, the most viable form of pop. A good lead for other songwriters to follow.
In the end, there is nothing worse that pop songwriters with blinders on, looking at a money pile in front of them.