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What he said
:: Posted by pierre8282 on January 07, 2013

I think Duke said it best: ’There are two kinds of music: the good kind... and the other kind.’ The debate about which is which is one of the things that make life interesting. (Or can make life interesting, if your opponent is a good debater.) For my money, early EJ, with Bernie Taupin, definitely goes in column A.

Of course, it comes down to what moves you, even if it only moves you to dance. Is Stevie Wonder’s ’Superstition’ a ’pop’ song? It was all over AM radio at one time. But if you can sit still for the playing of that song, there is something terribly wrong with your neuroreceptors.

pop
:: Posted by cantspelldiKc on January 07, 2013

  imo a "band" is a little army fighting for a better world, money is not the priority. if you can’t meet that criteria i got better things to do

R.E.M.
:: Posted by AgentOrange on January 07, 2013

From the ever Venal Leader’s diary on Christmas Eve:

"Rising to a dark, wet morning. Matthew the Gardener drove in. c. 07.30. What may a gardener undertake in the dark, I wondered?"

Just ask Michael Stipe and Robert’s cohort in Slow Music Peter Buck for the answer:

Gardening at Night was a song (mutch anthologized) which Mr. Buck describes as the first real song the band ever wrote at 2:00 AM on a front porch mattress watching a neighbor garden at night across the street in 1980.

TW

Pop matters...
:: Posted by emory0 on January 07, 2013

"advertisements for themselves" a friend of mine once observed

Hilarious. That really nails it. The best of the popular Pop songs also seem to capture something transitory in the culture, but capture and express it so perfectly that no one can fail to ’get it’. And the right melody seems to pull it all into place so that the song seems almost plucked out of the collective unconscious.

What’s funny is that there have been a small subset of such pop-perfect songs that I just ignored or blocked out for the longest time just because they were popular, only to one day discover (after actually paying attention) that the song was quite good artistically as well. "Do it Again" or "Rikki Don’t Lose that Number" by Steely Dan are great examples.

There’s also a category I think of as "Unpopular Pop" which is where music is made in a popular idiom but it’s so artistically dense as to be unpenetrable by the masses. My favorite example here is "Tiny Voices" by Joe Henry (Madonna’s brother-in-law): It’s ’popular’ in terms of melody and structure, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t really a disorienting 4 minute masterpiece.

night adventures 12/26
:: Posted by dubhthaigh on January 07, 2013

you’re not trying to tell us that Hendrix looked like Sting, are you?

:: Posted by peter29 on January 07, 2013

This conversation about pop reminds me of my latest pop-rock fascination of Polish/Czech female singer, Ewa Farna. Probably completely unknown in the West, she’s actually only 19 years old but with 6 albums recorded (3 in Czech, 3 in Polish language), and 3 DVDs. Unbelievingly strong voice (something like Christina Aquilera meets Adele) and very versatile at the same time just as her music is: from pop to hard rock and even metal.
 Don’t really know why I like her music. Perhaps seeing her performing at the age of 12 on TV contest with so much grace and conviction which was really moving. But there must be something beyond the music for sure (maybe the same date of birth? Not to mention her undeniable beauty).
Anyway, try her live interpretation of Adele’s Skyfall. Amazing...

re: Alfie Fripp
:: Posted by James999 on January 07, 2013

In the context of where my World touches yours Mr. Robert Fripp & Patricia..along the tangent of Music (and thru this website, intimacy given on your part)..I wish to express my Condolences on his passing, and your time of grieving.
     Myself I am a familiar viewer, shall I say..of the Wikipedia homepage (at least), and on occasion I peruse the Recent Deaths link.   And his passing is mentioned.

     my weighing in --
   
     Tempus Fugit
     Peace, a Theme
     Peace, an End

    Something to desire, nes pa?        

    How to work at it?  how did Alfie work at it?    If peace cannot be attained perhaps it should be abandoned?    I’m sorry to appear cynical ..or weak...  But WW II lessons..lessons which your Uncle went thru...  it never fades does it.    Still violence, still capture, still imprisonment.  

Bitching About Pop!
:: Posted by BenMMusTech on January 06, 2013

Quote from Robert Fripp-King Crimson to Guitar Craft by Eric Tamm "He thought of (R.Fripp) mass culture as when the music is awful and everybody goes "yea" and of popular culture when the music is great and everybody goes "yea" again"

Personally using Taylor’s Shit, sorry Swift as an example, the music is simple, almost childlike and not in a good way because it does not challenge the listener to expand their own musical horizons.  You might as well listen to The Wiggles.

From that you can deduce, I think the whole pop scene is drowning in mass culture and everybody is going "YEA" but they know it’s shit!!

Peace Ben

The Land of Make Believe
:: Posted by albemuth on January 06, 2013

OK, I have to agree about Uptown Girl.  I’ve thought many times about why I cannot stand that song, despite Joel’s obvious skill.  But I’ve never been able to give a satisfactory reason. 

To bring this back to KC just a little, recall this: The Land of Make Believe, by Bucks Fizz, featuring lyrics by our very own Peter Sinfield.

This makes me think of what I like about certain pop songs.  It has something to do with a bittersweet feeling.  These happy products ("advertisements for themselves" a friend of mine once observed) often carry a weird, off-kilter charge.  For example, the old song Downtown sung by Petula Clark is supposedly cheerful, but it seems to have an undertow of sadness.  That’s not a bad thing; it makes the song interesting.  This is one reason I like the Bucks Fizz song.  And maybe it is part of the reason why I do NOT like Billy Joel’s song.

I offer my condolences regarding our old friend Alfie. 

The art of pop
:: Posted by emory0 on January 06, 2013

"Dismissing everything pop doesn’t make you a noble defender of the purity of high art...more likely it just means you’re too old to notice that time’s train has left the station and you’ve been left behind"

With my musician brothers we sometimes discuss some pop (eg, Billy Joel) in its own category: As a sort of craft. In other words, the biggest Taylor Swift or pop princess may not make music that I enjoy, and I might even argue that it has little artistic merit. But purely aside from "If lots of people like it it must be good", there ARE some pop performers that have a weird, almost miraculous talent. Billy Joel, for instance, wrote countless little jewels of pop perfection: The melodies, the lyrics all sort of hit some popular little resonance. "Uptown Girl", for instance (a song I personally can’t stand listening to) has a sort of perfection to it. Elton John’s songs also have that perfect quality to them.

And I repeat that this type of "pop" is a category very different from music I might like or even believe have any real artistic merit. If you called most of those songs ’crap’, I probably wouldn’t argue, but one has to acknowledge that here is a certain type of odd ’genius’ behind the best popular songs.

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