The Earworm Thread

[french frank]

Good Vibrations had the same seismic effect on twentieth-century popular music as Beethoven's 3rd symphony had on symphonic music. Discuss.

What was this seismic effect that they had, respectively, from a purely musical perspective? How did these seismic effects compare on the Richter scale with televised snooker, sliced white bread, the internet? (I ask as one who owned a copy of Good Vibrations though I preferred Scott McKenzie singing If You're Going to San Fran-cisco which was released the following year. (Couldn't remember whether GV was the Beach Boys or the Four Seasons ('Sherry').

[Ian Thumwood]

That's coz there really ain't that much technically to talk about with pop music - that's my generalisation, at any rate!

That is a strange comment. I am prepared to cut some pop music a degree of slack.

I would never judge pop music by the same parameters as jazz or classical music yet i think there is clearly a division between pop made by musically educated people and those with limited musical understanding. I believe that listening to bass lines can be quite salutary and broadens your mind with things like Ian Dury's . "Hit me with your rhythm stick' being really surprising. It isi ntriguing because there are more jazz orientated musicians in pop who I think are very savvy. The likes of Prince, Steve Wonder, Nike Rodgers etc borrow alot from jazz. Clare Fischer was Prince's music director for a while.

I totally concur with alot of EDM or Rap.where the music does not stand up to scrutiny. So much is based in one chord or a four bar chord progression. It is very very basic.There is also an issue with British Rock where Jonn Lennon made musical ignorance fashionable. It is fascinating because there is a massive gulf between the rubbish and pop.which has genuine musical value. I think to dismiss it all is a mistake. Even popular stuff like Harry Styles is better than you suggest by a clear distance. The better Harry Styles is pretty decent pop.music and more enjoyable than a slog through Brahms even if the German is superior. Styles' live band is a very tight unit and I would not dismiss him.

[kernelbogey]

What was this seismic effect that they had, respectively, from a purely musical perspective? How did these seismic effects compare on the Richter scale with televised snooker, sliced white bread, the internet? (I ask as one who owned a copy of Good Vibrations though I preferred Scott McKenzie singing If You're Going to San Fran-cisco which was released the following year. (Couldn't remember whether GV was the Beach Boys or the Four Seasons ('Sherry').

Good Vibrations was technically complex, given the hardware available to recording studios of the time (1966) and Brian Wilson dubbed and overdubbed the material till he got it how he wanted it. Listen to it a few times in succession and you will hear its complexity. This soon became more easily achievable with multi-track recording machines - and now with the wonders of digital technology.

By comparison, with respect, the pretty Scott McKenzie song is pretty much a 1950s-style ballad.

Others on this forum are better equipped than I to comment on the longterm impact of LvB3....

I'll leave t'internet and Mother's Pride to others too, come to think of it.

Now Sherry is a different matter altogether....

[Ian Thumwood]

What intrigues me is that Radio 3 has offered genuine analysis of pop music as was the case with the programme hosted by the young saxophonist Jess Gwillum for the last few years. I am on the fence as to whether this is dumbing down but there is certainly smarter analysis on the nternet by the likes of Rick Beato.

I am bemused by the suggestion that the Beach Boys represent the apogee of pop sophistication..I have to say I feel that Black popular music is where the benchmark has been set whether we are talking about Blind Lenon Jefferson, Motown, EW &F, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Prince or Nile Rodgers. Somehow the baton was dropped in the 1900s buying still feel there have been RNd B numbers like 'Waterfalls' by TLC where a high standard has been set.

I would also suggest that Quincy Jones' work with Michael Kackon is deserving of serious analysis or indeed Prince whose own music is stuffed with interesting ideas. One track which has always impressed me is David Bowie's ' Let's dance which was arranged by Nile Rodgers and strikes me as owing loads to Miles Davis. By an large , the better pop music is far better than what is produced by white musicians. The British media tends to overlook for quality artists and is happy to trust the efforts of less produced music which is deemed more authentic. They are not very sophisticated or informed as the recent lauding of Adele has shown. Only write people woukd tolerate rubbish like this.



The giveaway is often whether there are real musical instruments on there I just a synth and drum machine. The other interesting point is that few jazz versions match the original. I think this is because the original arrangements are si definitive. I agree with Smittims to a degree as nostalgia does play a gig part. However, in my case this is not the case as I grew up listening to jazz. Good music will always get its credit where it is due even if it takes a while to be recognised.

[french frank]

I feel that Black popular music is where the benchmark has been set whether we are talking about Blind Lenon Jefferson, Motown, EW &F, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Prince or Nile Rodgers..

I think the comments about 'pop' music not being discussed analytically, or being worth analysing, was referring to current mass market pop.

[Petrushka]

Going back to earworms, I haven't been able to get the main theme of the first movement of the Mozart String Quintet K406 (K516b) out of my head. Nor, as it happens, do I want to. This work is an adaptation by Mozart of his own Wind Serenade K388 in which form I got to know it.

[Serial_Apologist]

I think the comments about 'pop' music not being discussed analytically, or being worth analysing, was referring to current mass market pop.

Most of what I hear of commercial pop seems to my ears hardly have changed at all since the 1980s, but I lost my connections with what was going on when Techno and Hip Hop splintered into myriads of named genres or sub-divisions distinguished by names such as Grime without supporting explanations as to what was going on in the music to signal changes. Most of it sounded indistinguishable to me - and I am not a listener who does not pay a great deal of attention to details. Having said that Late Junction promotes a good deal of interesting song-type material, most of it emanating from beyond our shores as well as America's. I usually enjoy much of Late Junction.

[kernelbogey]

I am bemused by the suggestion that the Beach Boys represent the apogee of pop sophistication..I have to say I feel that Black popular music is where the benchmark has been set whether we are talking about Blind Lenon Jefferson, Motown, EW &F, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Prince or Nile Rodgers. Somehow the baton was dropped in the 1900s buying still feel there have been RNd B numbers like 'Waterfalls' by TLC where a high standard has been set....

Ian - I didn't mean (or say) that 'the Beach Boys represent the apogee of musical sophistication'. I used a whimsical exam-question style to challenge Serial's assertion: That's coz there really ain't that much technically to talk about with pop music.
My understanding (and I have a hot line to an American who grew up in 1950s mid-Western suburbia) is that white kids indeed agreed with your view that the 'apogee' was with Black musicians, Black radio stations.

I think the Beach Boys, as white surfing Californian kids, began to move the dial; though admittedly they recorded plenty of ballady stuff too.

So I stand by my 'exam question'. (And BTW I give you an A+ for your answer. )

[smittims]

Ian, you say 'I would never judge pop music by the same parameters as jazz or classical music'.

Why not? The same claims ('great', 'classic' 'immortal', 'influential') are made for it. In 2000 Robbie Williams was voted the greatest musician of the Millennium . Given that relatively few people know any music from the first half of the millennium and could not have heard any of its musicians, I think that's excessive to say the least. Stevie Wonder was called 'the greatest songwriter in history'. When I compare him with Brahms, let alone Schubert, he seems an overrated charlatan.

[Ian Thumwood]

Smittims

Returning to the original thread idea of ear worms, one i would single out is Stevie Wonder's ' past time paradise ' which immediately grabs your attention . The song hinges on quite modern and dissonant harmony which is far more progressive than the Conservative harmonic language of Brahms. In fact, the whole ' Songs in the key of life is pretty special and covers a broad base from a Bach pastiche eo5h counterpoint and a track which is pure jazz. So many of the songs on this album are standards and I feel underscore that Wonder is far more than musically literate . For my money, he is a brilliant musician who straddles pop and jazz. In the pop field I would suggest that his significance is greater than that of Brahms in classical music.

If you took a straw poll of professional musicians from classical and jazz , I would be surprised if ge did not come out top as the pop musician they respected most. It s ridiculous to consider him a charlatan. You are the only person I have come across who has dismissed him. Like many musicians ,he chose pop music as a vehicle to express himself. That does not make him inferior to classical music and a bit ridiculous if you contrast what he wrote to someone like Mompou who better fits the description of charlatan. There are plenty of ropey composers in classical too and few as cringe worthy as Brittens attempt at song writing.

You can argue the same about sophistication with Prince who again was taking his cues from.jazz as opposed to the likes of the Beatles who were working at a much reduced level of sophistication. Prince worked with Clare Fischer who was another jazz theorist. Quincy Jones's arrangements for Michael Jackson are also far from dumbed down.

Black music has dominated the 20th century and dictated what is fashionable in popular music. As a generalisation there is a division between black popular music which has been made by educated and trained musicians who have often come from the church. Many English rock and pop bands are naive in comparison although you still find there are Rock musicians like Joe Satriani who studied with the jazz theorist Lennie Tristano.

I think it needs to be argued that some pop is serious regardless of the fact it us fun to listen to and can be an ear worm. There is plenty of rubbish in pop music yet I would strongly argue that are are aimed groups where the level of musicianship is extremely high.

[smittims]

Thanks for your post, Ian. I'm sorry you didn't answer my question. Clearly we have a lot of opposed, perhaps irreconcileable views, and I don't think we could address them without sitting down together and listening to all the music you mention, with your demonstrating its qualities bar by bar. Without that we can't resolve some of the assertions you make.

For instance, I find it impossible to reconcile your remarks about Brahms' 'Conservative harmonic language' with what Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Rosen say about it in their essays. I think of moments such as the key shift on the entry of the wind instruments at the start of the Violin Concerto, which Rosen shows is more radical than Beethoven's equivalent progression in his G major concerto, or bars 109-110 of the second movement of the fourth symphony, which Brahms' friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg considered an unacceptable dissonance. What about the opening bars of op. 119 no.1. or the Webernian lead-back to the recaptulation in the third movement of the second piano concerto. Conservative? Really? And many musicians who have studied and performed Britten's songs could not I think accept your remark about his 'cringe worthy attempt'. Britten is not one of my favourite composers but I have to say his songs are a significant step forward in the genre, when you compare them with those of his predecessors.

We are both, I expect, shaped by our upbringing and experiences, as you have admitted in previous posts. I admit freely that I 'grew out of' pop music at the age of 13 when I discovered classical music , so it's difficult for me to separate it from an inference of immaturity. And since the pop music I hear comes to me as nuisance noise from other people's cars it's hard for me to think otherwise when:

the melody,the harmony , the words and the rhythmic structure are all derivative and trite;

there is no meaningful relationship between them (for instance there is nothing in the words to explain the repeated cymbal crashes and thumping bass drum) ;

the most trite element , the 'THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD' bass, always in the same unvaried tempo, is the most grotesquely overamplified .

Is there any rock music in triple time, let alone five-four? How 'conservative' is that?

My questions are rhetorical. I've asked them many times and never had convincing answers. I have to conclude that people who call Robbie Williams and Stevie Wonder 'great' are saying 'we like it' raher than stating a fact. I've met people who tell me they 'just know' that 'Dancing Queen' is the greatest piece of music ever written. How does one begin to 'unpack' that (except to recognise that it contains a quotation from Cesar Franck's Symphonie in D minor)? What would Andras Schiff say?

[Serial_Apologist]

I remember the fine American composer and Schoenbergian Gunther Schuller saying something to the effect that once beyond the dismissive attitudes of his elders and betters towards jazz, its musical background and circumstances, he became committed lifelong to its promotion and celebration, claiming the finest of Basie and Ellington to be analyseable on common terms and criteria with Beethoven symphonies. The 1950s pop explosion - in my opinion, mind - emerged out of particular times and circumstances (effectively Keynsian postwar resuscitation modelled on American consumerism) from theretofore marginalised black minority musical cultures, influences upon which pop via down home white Country music fed, and fed back into jazz as the new manifestations of the 60s threatened to serve radical political causes with associative potential to resonate among the newly educated middle class white young.

Memories of radicalisation in the early 70s evoke concomitant broadenings in musical tastes among those drawn into thinking a bit more deeply about divisive forces shaping individual tastes, and how the formative processes driving reductionist world viewpoints implicated stereotyped imagery, with reductive music a vital ingredient in publicity dissemination, for which pop predictability fitted the bill. Inevitably when one seizes on simplicity as a counter to (perceived) over-complexity, one need not look far for gifted exponents - McCartney, Wonder - quick to pick up on where earlier generations bequeathed still ripe possibilities for later retrospection - just as had the musical age of CPE Bach, keen to jettison all that contrapuntal ecclesiastical fat in favour of narrative realism and "directness"; early C20 composers like Satie and Vaughan Williams returning to the "purity" of pre-Baroque, pre-Classical (viz pre-capitalist) modes of musical expression if not productive relations; the Minimalists's early reduction of musical processes to rhythmic re-configuration; Gorecki's, Tavener's and other so called Holy Minimalisms with their (em)balmed illusions of unmediated return to spiritually unsulled earlier ages. This is why bringing context into any discussions on relative aesthetics is inevitable for criticism to make sense.

[Ian Thumwood]

I partly agree insofar that people who call Robbie Williams 'great are simply saying they like his music and have no real analyse of the music. That said, I grew up with jazz and never had any affinity towards music. My original opinion would have chimed exactly with Smittims albeit from a jazz perspective.

My point is that there is so much pop music which is intelligent and of merit of critical analysis. There is probably more rock that uses odd.m asymmetric meters than in classical music. 5 /4 is common on popular music.

I just feel that there are people who are really switched on musically who work outside of classical and jazz. Someone like Frank Zappa is a good example.

I am open to pop music much more these days. Yes,I is commercial but this does not mean it is not of merit. As I said, there is plenty of pointless and redundant classical music just as there is some really dreadful jazz which just hangs off one chord vamps.

As I said, my ears are more open to music beyond jazz these days. I can appreciate scarlatti or Syzmanowski but equally Stevie Wonder. No issues or me. There is at of jazz and classical that bores me and I am quite happy to appreciate the brilliance of artists like Bling Lemon Jefferson who were essential
rural.artists responding to their own communities.

Happy to explore allsorts but also honest to know there is stuff I can never get into.

[kernelbogey]

...there is plenty of pointless and redundant classical music....

...and a lot of it gets wheeled out on R3 either because it's short or has short movements which can be filleted out. There are pieces at which I immediately switch off. I'm thinking Portsmouth Point overture, Crown and Sceptre, some celebratory piece by R Strauss whose name I can't right now remember, Something Festivo by Sibelius... just off the top of my head meanderings. I'm sure everyone will have their pet hates.

[LMcD]

...and a lot of it gets wheeled out on R3 either because it's short or has short movements which can be filleted out. There are pieces at which I immediately switch off. I'm thinking Portsmouth Point overture, Crown and Sceptre, some celebratory piece by R Strauss whose name I can't right now remember, Something Festivo by Sibelius... just off the top of my head meanderings. I'm sure everyone will have their pet hates.

Andante Festivo.