It means pop has turned into a social psychology experiment designed to maximise the return invested in production, and not an individually expressive art form.

The obvious end point will be AI-generated muzak which tweaks all the right receptors but is devoid of any disturbingly non-optimal fleshy surprise.

Commercial art in general has been that way for centuries. Doesn't mean that it's intrinsically devoid of quality. Many of the classical masterpieces were made to order to cater to the fancy of some rich patron.

Many? Virtually _all_, either for a rich individual or the church. An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it, is a pretty new invention. Probably a big part of why post-19th century art is so much more interesting and diverse; Western art pre-19th century was largely about technical competence in whatever the current fashionable style was.

> An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it

I sincerely doubt if that's how it works even nowadays. You need to be discovered by a well-connected and well-heeled patron who thinks what you do can be marketed with just a few tweaks. Very seldom does the artist become the patron of their own work is my guess. Banksy might be one of the few exceptions that prove the rule.

I think the difference today is that the normal path is that an artist does a lot of stuff, potentially quite innovative, and is _then_ discovered (or not; see Van Gogh for instance). And at that point, maybe discovered by the market, not a single patron; I believe an artist having a single patron has been rather unusual for at least the last century.

A few hundred years ago, by contrast, artists tended to get into it via, essentially, apprenticeship to another artist, and attempt to get a patron that way. Some artists ended up being technically proficient, but stylistic innovation was very, very slow and minor by comparison to the late 19th century on.

Art has been democratized in recent years. And not just the drawing type of art either: music, videos, 3d modeling, animation, digital print, literature, etc can be produced on a computer. So today, pretty much anyone with a computer can create whatever random idea is spinning in their brains.

You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability. GTAV comes with an animation toolkit for making films.

Most people create art for fun or their own pleasure. Tiktok is full of "modern art" in the form of short videos.

> You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability.

I'd argue that that's still talent, if the product is any good. You don't need technical expertise, but you still need creativity.

The talent has moved from your actual technique to your message. How many 10-20$ words can you shove into your statement about the art.

She switched out of painting when the someone in class used pain straight from the tube (no mixing) and just made a vagina that was smoking a cigarette but then had some real good fluff backing it up.

She deeply respected the impressionists so it was rough for her. She's happy in her new medium tho.

source: sister with a masters in fine art from a very prestigious university.

Art is subjective. I never found Guernica aesthetically pleasing, so by your standards I could judge it as a bad painting with "some real good fluff backing it up".

Art is always about the message and the emotions it impresses on people, not raw technique. Or do you think that literature is the art of typesetting?

You're still talking about this smoking vagina, how many other pieces from this class do you mention in casual conversation? Clearly if it was meant to be a provoking piece, it worked to a certain extent.

That's why I said "talent." You don't need to play an instrument to make music anymore. You don't need to draw to make digital illustrations. You can get away with a computer, the right software, and your imagination.

"has" should be "is" right. Most mainstream music has been, from what I understand for a few centuries, a combination of artists expressing themselves while trying to cater to an audience. Otherwise it's an art or a hobby. I don't know any "music as a (pure) art" and I guess with me most causal listeners.

Has "pop music" ever been anything other than this? Since the beginning, it has typically been manufactured by producers and songwriters for mass appeal.

Not only that, but it's such a young form of cultural expression that saying it isn't what it used to be is kinda pointless. For thousands of years, we had people singing songs badly in pubs. Maybe someone could afford an instrument.

And then someone invented the wireless and the record player. According to the myth, it quickly reached its optimum time when some fashionable person was in their youth. And it has been degrading ever since.

Now, as for me, I would think all commercial music is worse than all traditional music. If you can talk, you can sing. But here someone in this thread has suggested that perhaps as little as 1% of the population can sing well enough to be autotuned! (This is insane. The proportion of the population who can sing well enough to be autotuned is much closer to 100% than to 90%.)

Someone else might say that commercial music has done quite well, and it keeps doing better. Certainly there's more and more detail added to it.

But the fashionable story is that at some point, probably in the 1960s, music became brilliant, and then all these grubby gen-xers and millennials got their grubby hands on it and turned it all into the most dreary computer driven sounds imaginable.

> And then someone invented the wireless and the record player.

Even before that, you had music halls as popular entertainment (and music hall music was indeed very formulaic, arguably more so than modern pop music).

These 90/100% figures really vary by society. I'd argue that in Ireland, because of the public singing culture, there's more people that can sing passably than in the US. Like learning another language, you're much better off doing it young. I know many fellow Americans who never sing (and are embarrassed to, even though no one has any great expectations) and as a result aren't even passable at it. Relative pitch recognition and vocal pitch reproduction are both nontrivial and better learned young. Fortunately I had some music classes in elementary school that involved singing and I've been singing along to music ever since and thus am OK at it, but many people haven't and aren't.

Saying that before the Top 40 music was reduced to people singing songs badly in pubs and the few who could afford an instrument is a pretty reductive view of musical history.

if the question is whether pop music has ever been anything other than muzak written by AI to tick a number of emotional boxes, I think the answer is pretty obviously yes. That's a ridiculous conclusion. We don't have to dig very deep in the well of incredible pop music...all of Motown, psychedelic rock, etc. was the pop music of the time.

Have you listened to the album Artpop by Lady Gaga? It plays with this idea in an intelligent and musically interesting way. IMHO.

If it were an experiment, it would be more interesting than it is. Experiments can be fun.

Pop as we know it started as a social psychology experiment in the 1960s or earlier. It has now reached the phase where the experiment is over and the results have been published. That is why pop sounds so boring and samey now: the record execs know precisely what works, and all songs must contain certain elements if they are to chart, all while swapping superficial details around to sound "fresh".

The last time there was experimentation going on in pop music was probably the 80s. That's why Michael Jackson's chart-topper "Thriller" sounds so much more layered, complex, and interesting than nearly anything shat out by the chart toppers of today.

I think they mean pop music lacks musicality, most of what they listed were to do with sonic tricks that are not really tied to musicality or musicianship. Anyone with even a vague understanding of music can write a song on the same level as a pop song. Every now and then a great musician makes it into the pop scene, and you get interesting chord progressions, melodies and rythms. So it's not the pop style that's bad. But most of the time it's the same four chords, a riskless melody, and four to the floor percussion.

> pop music lacks musicality, most of what they listed were to do with sonic tricks that are not really tied to musicality or musicianship

This is a paradox, though. You’re saying that one of the most popular types of music “lacks musicality”. The only way that can be true is if you start with a narrow and arbitrary definition of what “musicality” is.

If you examine the history of ideas of what is “real” or “authentic” or “objectively good” in music, who has been a proponent of those ideas through history, and why, you will find is that a lot of it is rooted in white supremacy. The idea is that a certain style of white European music is the only true music, and that other music is only valuable to the extent that it happens to fit within the theoretical frameworks developed around those styles.

I guess what I’m saying is, please watch this excellent video, “Music Theory is Racist” by Adam Neely: https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA

I had watched that a bit earlier, it is excellent. I am definitely aware of the vast expanse of music culture though, I think my use of the word musicality could better be replaced by the word substance.

I think saying western Top40 lacks musicality within the context of western music is a totally fine thing to do though, because it's not that it's something different and good. It's trying to be western music, but it's derivative and shallow interpretations of it. Western music being a broad brush, including many of the subcultures of music contained within somewhere like America.

Top40 is often the crap versions of the good stuff that's out there, cheap versions of the culture that dwells beneath. My main point is that it's popularity is not because of musical excellence regardless of what that excellence is for the given genre/culture, it's manufactured popularity through repetition and distribution. Sometimes they pick good songs to pedal, so I'm not saying Top40 contains zero good music. It's just not a good representation of the state of music culture by any means.

It's hard to talk about music without seeing it through your own experience, because it is a language you share with those who know it. Adam Neely about his Jazz Ambassador tour, said he felt he could connect only tangentially with the Mongolian performers. There was some crossover and they could speak some of the same musical terms, but there was much of their musical language that wasn't immediately compatible. Sort of like a French language speaker sometimes interjecting English words, you can hear them but you can't intuitively know the context, and unless you knew both you couldn't really comment on how well the sentence was executed. But of the genres that end up in Top40, I typically know good music in those genres, so I feel I am able to comment on their quality.

Complexity in pop music is driven by timbre and instrumentation rather than harmonic or melodic complexity - but timbre and instrumentation are no less valid forms of musical expression and complexity (talk to Ravel or Varese). The desire to judge all music based on the dominant ideas of 16-19th century european classical music seems to exist not to better understand musical expression but instead to let people feel superior to others.

I don't think exploration of timbre has been novel for just as long. EDM has been around for decades now which is where a lot of that exploration happens, yet count how many Top40 tracks just use the 808 and call it a day. Modern artists and classic artists all explored timbre, and there are modern artists doing just as much with timbre and musicality.

Ooorr... because those measures correspond to something in the experience, that humans have been found to value.

This is obviously wrong, because there are entire classical traditions (centuries or millennia long) from outside of Europe that prioritize musical features beyond traditional western harmony. Any claim that harmonic complexity is fundamental to human experience or uniquely valuable among musical expression is ignorance at best.

All words in my mouth.

A lot more goes into writing a song than a chord progression. Writing pop hits is an art few people master. That’s why so many hits are written by the same people. See Max Martin for example.

I thought writing a pop song was 10% talent and 90% marketing? Written by the same people because they gatekeep those marketing dollars.

There is massive competition to be a chosen producer or song writer. Being chosen as the one who is marketed is where the competition is. Their positions are earned.

They're earned the same way big movie star roles are earned -- by knowing the right people or sleeping with the producer.

> Anyone with even a vague understanding of music can write a song on the same level as a pop song.

Ok, why don’t you prove it by writing a hit pop song? Come back to this thread when you have your gold record, I’ll wait

The entire point is making the song isn't the hard part. Marketing and managing the artists image is.

I don't even care about the actual gold record or any accolades of any sort. I'd love to hear the gold record level pop song written by someone with only a vague understanding of music. I have 0 respect for most modern pop music, but that's complete nonsense.

As the other commentor said, that's my point. I could write a song that sounds just like a hit pop song, but it wouldn't be a hit because the music that gets popular isn't the best examples of music, it's just the music chosen to be pushed and sold.

But those characteristics are all things that can be mechanically tweaked by a music producer, rather than innovations that make one recording artist more valuable than another.