The pianist/head of music at City, University of London, Ian Pace has today posted on FB a couple of longish extracts from:
Both are of relevance to this thread. Here's the second:
Both are of relevance to this thread. Here's the second:
‘As long as humans live, songs won’t die, just as telling stories never will, but the basic structure of pop has collapsed, leaving just fragmented blasts of slippery assembled energy relying on increasingly present history to maintain the illusion that there is such a thing as a scene or a collection of scenes, containing new trends, leading to the next set of new trends. The initial energy that made pop music happen so instantly and persuasively – the charts, the sleeves, the photography, the record labels, the two-sided vinyl album and single, the way that one thing developed into the next thing, mostly leaving the last thing behind, other than something to fold back into the new thing, but in a new form – has become defunct. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just what has happened after all that movement, now that there is such a glut, of all the music happening now, and all the music that ever happened, all of it available to pluck out of the air, as the world becomes one big mobile playground, combined with one big ideological battleground.
The pop stars of today are the machines that the music is made on and then played through; the groups and singers that represent the machines and computers are like travelling salesmen, demonstrating the wares, acting out the necessary human-ish element of engagement, going through the motions of dressing up and performance. Pop stars are an impaired, occasionally inspired community of manipulated, manipulating commercial travellers, which has its attractions, but has less and less to do with music and more to do with a kind of dazed re-tuning of ancient show-business conventions. The next generation may well find all of this as stale and moribund as we do Vera Lynn and Cliff Richard.
Essentially, nothing now changes in pop but the technology; it used to be that way, but there was also an attached level of purpose and drama, of stylistic audacity, and even subversive, discriminatory focus, of exciting new forms of glamour and presentation that didn’t seem mere anagrams of previous glamorous presentations.
Technology has taken over and carries pop music all over the place, and even beyond all over the place. It’s not, as such, music any more; it’s either a sentimental wallowing in the past, for older people – just like classical music once seemed – or basic adolescent urges reframed using the new machines, so that today’s pop and rock is essentially about what it was about in the fifties and sixties, with different coverings, body shakes and street noises used to ensure it sounds like today, for standard as-cynical-as-ever commercial reasons. Music that was all about change has become music that is all about nothing changing, or changing so quickly it cannot be detected outside its own circuit.’
The pop stars of today are the machines that the music is made on and then played through; the groups and singers that represent the machines and computers are like travelling salesmen, demonstrating the wares, acting out the necessary human-ish element of engagement, going through the motions of dressing up and performance. Pop stars are an impaired, occasionally inspired community of manipulated, manipulating commercial travellers, which has its attractions, but has less and less to do with music and more to do with a kind of dazed re-tuning of ancient show-business conventions. The next generation may well find all of this as stale and moribund as we do Vera Lynn and Cliff Richard.
Essentially, nothing now changes in pop but the technology; it used to be that way, but there was also an attached level of purpose and drama, of stylistic audacity, and even subversive, discriminatory focus, of exciting new forms of glamour and presentation that didn’t seem mere anagrams of previous glamorous presentations.
Technology has taken over and carries pop music all over the place, and even beyond all over the place. It’s not, as such, music any more; it’s either a sentimental wallowing in the past, for older people – just like classical music once seemed – or basic adolescent urges reframed using the new machines, so that today’s pop and rock is essentially about what it was about in the fifties and sixties, with different coverings, body shakes and street noises used to ensure it sounds like today, for standard as-cynical-as-ever commercial reasons. Music that was all about change has become music that is all about nothing changing, or changing so quickly it cannot be detected outside its own circuit.’
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