i wrote this freshman year
Ian Thistle
Short Assignment #4
WR 100 EA
Anyone with a true interest in music would agree that popular music has, for quite a long time, been generally bad. There are a few rare cases in which a band will be popular and good, but not since the 1960s have the most popular musicians also been the best (at least in the realms of rock ‘n’ roll). Corporations control the music industry, and corporations only want what will sell. Often what sells is not good music but a certain image of an artist, or a spectacle that an artist creates. To use the most obvious contemporary example, would people be interested in Britney Spears if she weren’t a physically attractive woman who puts on an exciting dance act? No, they probably would not be. Good music has been produced in droves, but people are unaware of it, for all they know of music is what they hear on the radio, and, recently, see on TV. What people are buying when they buy a Backstreet Boys, Marilyn Manson or Linkin Park album is not a collection of good music created by talented musicians but rather, respectively, a “cute” dance group with nice voices, a shocking artist who may anger the “parents,” or a band who is marketed as understanding what young people feel.
What makes good music? There are exceptions, but generally, an artist must put at least one of the following elements in their music:
Innovation: Much of the problem with musicians today is that seemingly everything has been done before, and thusly we are beginning to see many styles recycled over and over again. This has been especially prevalent in the 1990s, as we have had to sit through one genre “revival” after another, from 1994’s punk revival, which included bands like Green Day and the Offspring, to 1996’s ska revival, which included Reel Big Fish and countless Clash/Operation Ivy imitators to the current neo-garage scene popularized by the Strokes and the White Stripes. However, while imitating a band makes for weak music, emulating a band, if it is done well, can, while not producing anything new, result in good music. An example of this is the band Interpol. Their style is very similar to the late 1970s English band Joy Division, but they manage to refine Joy Division’s sometimes caustic sound a bit and are currently one of the most exciting new bands in the United States.
Technical Prowess: This is an important device, for if a band cannot play well they will not be able to produce good music. While bands which lack the skills necessary to play technically challenging songs can be good, in order to do so they must make up for their lack of skill in another way, by writing simple catchy songs, expressing anger or emotion and a captivating way, or writing smart lyrics. A good example of this is punk music. By definition punk is a very simple style of music. Most songs are short and few require many more than a bass, guitar, drum set and three chords to be played. In order for a punk band to succeed they must not just play their simple music, but must have charisma like Iggy Pop, write catchy songs like the Ramones, or simply reek of attitude like the Sex Pistols. If you or I started a punk band without these elements or something catching to compensate for our lack of skill, then we would surely fail.
Soul: For lack of a better term, I call perhaps the most important element of good music its soul. The music must be written with a purpose and express some part of human emotion in it. While this seems obvious one would be surprised how many bands lack this essential piece. This one element explains much of what is good about music. It explains how Kurt Cobain can simply sing “Yeah” eight times in the chorus of “Lithium.” It explains how music can invoke moods; if the musicians fail to express human emotion then all you feel when listening to it is boredom. Good music doesn’t belong in the background. It should be listened to.
These rules are pretty simple, but there is so much music that is popular now that doesn’t follow them. It is up to us as the consumers to seek out the groups that produce good music and reward them for doing so.