Kids these days

[oslo]

A few videos:

[Several YouTube Embeds Hidden]

Iggy Azalea:

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DJ Snake and Lil Jon:

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Nikki Minaj:

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So I try to keep my ear turned to what's happening in contemporary pop music, just because I find the ways that it develops (potentially) fascinating, in a kind of musicological sense, while also being a source for new music that I enjoy for its own sake. When listening to this

Comments

[matrexius]

For what it's worth, I probably enjoy a lot more contemporary pop than you do and I don't like any of those examples you posted.

[matrexius]

Like, electronic music is now among my most-listened-to genre and I don't much care for the DJ Snake piece because there isn't much interesting stuff going on, either in terms of novel/rich/powerful sounds or musical structure. (Also Lil Jon's yelling is obnoxious IMO.) Nero's music has some fairly rich sounds, e.g. Me and You and Promises. Skrillex, probably the king of the electronic music genre, puts out all kinds of diverse stuff (and rarely fails to accompany it with a cool video), e.g. Try It Out (Neon Mix) and two songs in which he combines his music with (of all things) Reggae vocals to great effect, Make It Bun Dem and Ragga Bomb.

Of course, this stuff really isn't for everyone. It took more than a few listens before my brain could process most of Skrillex's stuff as anything other than cacophony. Now I find the sounds and bass drops in this sort of music viscerally moving.

[oslo]

Hm. Nero sounds to me a bit like a lighter Justice. Do you think that Skrillex is doing anything actually interesting in his music? I guess to my ear, it sounds like a lot of other stuff, except with his signature - "effects," for lack of a better word.

Anyway, I can at least appreciate that music, what it's trying to do, the aesthetic it's aiming for. Some of the Reggae-infused stuff comes off as basically rap, for instance.

You know - apropos of hardly anything you've said here - I am thinking of Lady Gaga's music. My mind goes to her because I'm thinking of other pop artists who get a lot of credit despite doing hardly anything interesting. Lady Gaga's latest oeuvre is hard to discern from the efforts of an art school graduate whose professors have disserved her by rewarding self-important shock-value as though it were originality. But she's got good pop music chops; my favorite song by her is this:

[peristaltor]

Those last two reminded me quite a bit of Frank Zappa.

But yeah, the first few? Sorry. Unlistenable.

Somebody (Chuck Barry?) pointed out to another musician (Keith Richards, I believe) that the black/white divide in music starts in church. White churches generally sing downbeat, meaning the beat is emphasized on the 1 and 3. Black churches, though, emphasize the upbeats, the 2 and 4. You can see this divide at funk music gatherings and see who "gets" the difference by noting when they clap to the music.

This divide is difficult to overcome. Thus upbeat music-what you played in the first three-sounds unrhythmic to downbeat-trained ears of mostly European extraction.

[oslo]

I appreciate what you're saying, though I don't believe it's the source of my difficulty with the first three tracks. I'm not sure this quite captures the "upbeat" you're describing, but I don't have any trouble appreciating this (for instance):

I think a lot of mainstream rap artists kind of fall in the same vein, don't you think? I might not have the right ear for it, though.

To be honest, I can appreciate each of the first three tracks, to an extent. Just not enough to understand their wide popularity. I've seen the Iggy Azalea track dubbed the "song of the summer" for 2014, for instance, which is incomprehensible to me when just last year it was Get Lucky and Blurred Lines (both downbeat tracks, from what I can tell, if I'm not mistaken).