The Elephant In The Room

[koganbot]

Posted this on a Freaky Trigger comment thread:

The elephants in the room of popular music, the ones who not only don't get talked about by critics and who (as far as I know) don’t get paid attention to on news or entertainment sites either, but who also get undercounted on Billboard and are mostly excluded from the Brit singles chart and

Comments

I'm posting this so that your own comment can be a reply and won't get lost among the spam

[koganbot]

My favorite fact about the U.S. "Adult Contemporary" chart is that from June 6 to December 12, 2009, the number 1 spot was held by females under the age of 21. What happened in mid December wasn't that the top song was displaced, but that Taylor Swift had her 21st birthday. [UPDATE: Whatever the elephant in the room is, I hope it can do arithmetic better than I can. From June 6 to December 12, 2009, the number one spot on the U.S. adult contemporary singles chart was held by teenagers. On December 13, 2009, Taylor Swift, born Dec. 13, 1989, turned 20. "You Belong With Me" held on at number one through the week of January 23, 2010; on January 30 it was displaced by Michael Bublé's "Haven't Met You Yet," the week after by Colbie Caillat's "Fallin' For You," then "You Belong With Me" returned for a final week on top. Back in 2009, prior to "You Belong With Me," the top song on AC was 16-year-old Miley Cyrus's "The Climb" (week of July 18-week of October 24), before that Taylor Swift's "Love Story" (week of June 6-week of July 11).](Of

[askbask]

I guess I have a relationship with that scene through artists I care about having a relationship. Especially Mraz. I don't know how many times I've seen artists cover Mraz, even if I find myself skipping ahead when I can.

Also k-pop artists have a very deep love for some 'cafe pop' or MOR singer songwriter stuff I don't understand. Like 'Officially Missing You' which must have been in the top 10 here with like 3-4 different versions, not to mention other cover versions.

[koganbot]

I think if I were to spend the time, I'd start historically, going back to, say, artists like Isaac Hayes who drew from "beautiful music" without being it; so I'd want to find out whom he drew on, and give them a shot.

In general, when it comes to easy listening, where to start? Mantovani? Ray Conniff? (Okay, just listened to a Conniff track that was dreadful; but I have the vague impression that some interesting Latino musicians think he's tops.)

Or I might go to country slush: Kenny Rogers, whom I'm sure I underrated. Might want to try his duets with Dottie West.

The AC stations and smooth jazz stations play plenty of good material, much of which wasn't designed specifically for them. I remember Anthony Miccio on Rolling Teenpop 2006 talking about how Evanescence crossed over to AC, not just with pretty stuff like "My Immortal" but via the crunchy "Bring Me To Life," too.

[dubdobdee]

And you very much find it in reggae also.

[dubdobdee]

Something like this phenom seems to be pretty common in all kinds of pop musics, from all over the world: it was a pretty useful corrective, when writing about Ghana or Nigeria in the 1980s, to have respectfully to acknowledge that Gentleman Jim Reeves was as important there, if not necessarily more important, than James Brown or Michael Jackson (not to mention locally significant figures old and new). I can honestly say that I'd *never* encountered discussion of Reeves in US or UK rockwrite at that date, in many years of close reading. I knew who he was in the sense that I knew his face from record sleeves in second-hand shops, and best-ofs in the oldsters sections in UK record shops.

[koganbot]

(But if I'd been online today between the time when Tom announced the Pop World Cup 2014 and the time - twelve minutes later - when all 32 spots were taken, I'd have been back in. Doubt that even if I'd been awake I'd have beaten Iain to South Korea, but I long had the alternate dream of managing the USA and making my entries exclusively songs in some language other than English.)(But wait, didn't Lex manage the USA once before, or was that in some other competition? A bunch of other blokes are on the waiting list anyway, hence ahead of me, so I'll not make an issue of this.)

[askbask]

I fantasized last time the cup was around about managing the Korean team, this time I'd like the Japanese for the better chances of taking people by surprise with selections, although I would probably have picked some of the songs the man in charge now will pick.

[koganbot]

Patrick actually lives in Japan, doesn't he?

[askbask]

Yep that does give him an advantage.

[petronia]

I consume lots of the coffee shop sort of music myself. In the past I usually got my fix from the Asian pop scene -- I don't have to pay attention to Japanese lyrics if I don't want to, whereas I hear the lyrics in a Jason Mraz song whether I like it or not. Nowadays I usually queue up a Songza playlist.

I remember Nick Hornby noting in the intro to one of his books that he didn't listen to classical because it turned into air freshener, for him, and he thought that was no decent way to treat good music. Personally, I think air freshener is one of the key uses of music; the reason I don't listen to classical myself is because it doesn't make the room smell the way I want it to.

BGM

[koganbot]

Classical music was originally wretched for me, since my well-meaning parents took me as a tyke to the University Of Connecticut's highly impressive concert series - Cleveland Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and the like - and since I could neither follow the musical development nor do anything else such as read or play while stuck in my seat, uncomfortable in jacket and tie, I was massively bored.

I think background music is a frequent - possibly the most frequent - use of music. Even in active settings - e.g. dancing, bar-hopping - music is part of events rather than the focus of an event. Heard in the background, music nonetheless provides mood and social markers, just as when the music is being more consciously attended to. And TV watching, while not fitting the usual connotation of "uses music as background," is of course a major part of many people's time, hence of their exposure to musical sound

[koganbot]

Most of my awake listening accompanies reading, doing the dishes, and so forth; even when music is my supposed primary activity, I'm likely reading at the same time, or at least thinking or daydreaming or watching the video (which I usually do only half-attentively anyway). I rarely concentrate on what's playing. One reason I like to write about music is that needing to say something spurs me to be more attentive.

As a writer I demand that people actually think about music when they purport to be thinking about it, which I suppose runs counter to my frequent actual use of music - though it's not certain to me that having music in the background and absorbing the social markers and mood can't be considered part of thinking, even if in such "listening" I'm not immediately picking the music apart for how the mood was caused and the markers marked.

Matana Roberts

[koganbot]

Whom I listened to last night while drifting to sleep:

Christmas Crayons

[davidfrazer]

Someone on reddit says:
People are saying this sounds like a rehashed Bar Bar Bar but it's actually much closer to Dancing Queen. People are saying it sounds like J-pop but actually this sort of disco-trot style is one of the most distinctly K-pop sounds there is. Are we all listening to the same song?

As well as disco-trot, anyone think it's got a bit of an Austral-Romanian vibe?

Re: Christmas Crayons

[koganbot]

What David embedded above:

"Lonely Christmas"

It does have a little bit of "We No Speak Americano"'s silent-film-era Austral oom-pah vibe.