I know things have been quiet lately. I'm currently in Colombia taking a much needed trip away from DC life. As much as I love this city, the pressure to escape has been escalating. Because I'll be gone for a week and work has kept me extra busy, I've reached out to a few friends to see if they'd like to guest post here.
My undergrad friend and former roommate, Issac Purton, was happy to oblige. His blog, EmpireXL, is an exploration of music and creativity. His guest post is a critical and clever reflection of the authenticity of modern pop and the implications on music now and in the future. Enjoy!
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If there’s a problem with modern pop (and that’s a
big if, mind you) it’s not that no one writes their own songs anymore. The idea
of authenticity, and the lack thereof, gets batted around by people in
thick-framed eyeglasses as the determinant of what makes a song great. One’s
experiences, the theory goes, fuels one’s writing, and makes the final product
superior by virtue of it being ‘real’. This is why people dismissed Lana Del
Rey when they found out her name was Elizabeth Grant, and why people, faces
hazed by smoke, still listen to Robert Johnson’s 31 songs on vinyl. This
ignores, of course, the fact that Ms. Grant probably wrote more of her material
than Mr. Johnson did.
Authenticity is an artifact of delivery, not
origin. Presidents aren’t hailed as great orators because of how well they
write their speeches; I don’t think a single President in the last half-century
has written a single word they’ve spoken in front of an audience. Similarly,
the singers we respect most, Elvis & Sinatra, for example, never wrote a
word or note of their own material. Hell, Paul Anka, of all people, is the one
who wrote “My Way”, a song that people seem to hold as Sinatra’s spoken motto.
Most pop songs are written with the universal in
mind. This is why so many of them revolve around love, be it young, puppy, or
on sight: it’s a fair bet that everyone has been in love at least once, and
that’s exactly who the target audience of pop music is: everyone. Pop music, in
the corporate sense, is designed to appeal to the broadest group of people
possible, which is why artifacts of music that organically (more-or-less)
gained popularity get assimilated into it. It’s important to remember that
Auto-Tune, as an audible effect, only got popular because an engineer screwed
up the effects on a Cher song.
The thing about music being written about
universals like love (or death/murder (country), heartbreak (blues, jazz),
depression (blues), etc, etc) is that you don’t need to have written it to
relate to and express it. Frank Sinatra didn’t need to write a whole album’s
worth of songs about being miserable: instead, he could draw from a whole
catalog of standards to construct the definitive heartbreak album, In The
Wee Small Hours (an album beloved by Tom Waits, a hipster idol if there
ever was one). The question of who wrote a song like “What Is This Thing Called
Love?” is an issue for trivia enthusiasts and accountants only; it has no
relevance whatsoever on the quality of the piece itself.
This applies to music in a broader sense as well.
If a song is truly well written and able to communicate its emotion or
sensation of choice, it follows that someone else can pick it up and make it
their own. The content of the song can trump the performer (as is often the
case with “Hallelujah”, which
sounds beautiful in almost any context) or the performer can change a
song completely, and bring something new out of it. A performer can elevate
a song, and a song can elevate the performer. This doesn’t have anything to do
with authenticity: it has to do with what’s written and who’s speaking.
My go to for this point is to look at the music of
The Band. I can’t stand most of their performances (due mainly to the obnoxious
production), but performances
like this one prove that there’s something there, beyond the production
and, maybe, even the performance itself. A song can have a life of its own, and
in that context it doesn’t matter what its origin was, or whether the original
writer was heartbroken, half-in-the-bag, bleeding out from the chest, or
whatever. What matters is what’s written.
In the consideration of modern pop, the problem is
not that modern stars aren’t writing their own material, or even that they
aren’t making it their own. Quite simply, it’s that the singers aren’t really
the focus any more. They’re the performers, sure, but the publicity that
surrounds them is usually more significant than their concerts. The real stars
these days are the producers. They’re the core musicians, and they’re the
source of the main divide between singer and audience in modern pop: Auto-Tune.
Auto-Tune was the unstated dream of every
producer, manager, and engineer in the world before its invention, and now that
it exists you’ll never hear a truly human voice in the Pop Top 10 ever again.
The brilliant producers labels have at their disposal have achieved the dream
of turning even the human voice into a synthesizable instrument, something that
doesn’t rely on the caprice of a performer and whether they’re on the right
combination of uppers and downers for the day. It’s a fantasy world where the
singer only has to be in the studio for half-an-hour, at most, before the work
of finalizing one’s masterpiece can begin. If vocoders weren’t so comical I’m
sure labels would have washed their hands of pop stars decades ago (Casablanca probably
tried).
A lack of authenticity, of a certain tragic origin
story, isn’t the problem with modern pop. That’s been the state of affairs
since pop music got its start in the 1950s and things were doing just fine. The
problem we’re facing now is a lack of humanity, where the worst part of
electronica (the vocals) got mixed with hip-hop’s emphasis on the producer/DJ
as a major part of a performance.
This is not to say that Auto-Tune can’t be used
well; it can, and can even, like a guitar pedal, express emotion in a way
that’s unfamiliar and exciting. As an audible effect it’s no more horrific than
something like ADT. The problem is when it’s used to smooth a vocal
performance into an uncanny territory that’s almost, but not quite, entirely
inhuman. The problem is when it gets used in country music, basically.
This is, of course, assuming there’s a problem
with modern pop music at all. It’s not like previous decades of music didn’t
see plenty of chaff rise into the Top 10 of the charts. The difference between
then and now, quite possibly, is simple perspective. The bad music was
forgotten, and the good lived forever. The same will likely be true 20 years
from now, with the mediocre being cast into the margins of history and the
brilliant living on in our classic rock radio stations (or Spotify playlists,
whatever).
Or maybe the next wave of music will be so
bizarrely alien to us that we’ll rush to Miley Cyrus’s side, apology in hand
and tears in our eyes. If you thought Imagine Dragons was irritating, imagine
what your children will be showing you.
