So as this year’s LOL Factor comes to a close and Christmas number one is tied up for Simon Cowell yet again, it gives me a valid excuse to rant about the state of chart music nowadays. Oh, but you see, this isn’t one of those rants where I slag every song that’s made it into the top ten off. You see, pop music used to be good. Infact, it was good more recently than you might suspect. 2003, to be precise. Allow me to explain…
Now, to make sure this blog post consists of valid and informed opinion, I’ve put myself through veritable torture and listened to a big bunch of chart songs. The problem with music these days is that it lacks all emotion or variation. Its like most pop songs today are written by pressing one note on a MIDI keyboard and getting a big, special music-making robot to hammer out the rest of the song. Several recent chart-topping tunes consist of little more than one verse and one chorus, built almost exclusively around a single note.
You see, being built around one note isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are many forms of music which take it as its starting point, for example, Indian Raga music. If you listen to many of The Beatles’ songs, you’ll find that John Lennon managed to create many songs around just one or two notes. Let’s have a quick look, shall we?
I Feel Fine, The Ballad Of John And Yoko, Rain, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, A Hard Day’s Night, I Should Have Known Better, Help, Ticket To Ride, Noweigan Wood, The Word, I’m Only Sleeping, Tomorrow Never Knows, I Am The Walrus, All You Need Is Love, Julia, Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey and Come Together. Each one of these songs is based around a single note, and every one of them is completely different and unique. Modern music adopts a bastardised form of Lennonistic songwriting, taking the most basically simplistic melodic structure and churning it out ad nauseum for #1 hits.
Look, Keri Hilson. Look how pissed you've made Mr Lennon.
I have a theory. At some point during 2004, a mysterious assassin killed all talented songwriters in cold blood in a cruel cull of the music industry by butthurt Nu Metal producers angry that their chosen genre sucked. This theory accounts perfectly for the sudden drop in the quality of pop music after 2003. I’d like to show you a few examples. Justin Timberlake – Rock Your Body is possibly the greatest pop single of the last decade. It has flair, originality and unpredictability. There are funky 80′s throwback basslines, jazz-style breaks, and even a beatboxing breakdown. It has everything I expect a chart-topping pop record to have and more. This song should have topped the charts for every week since it’s release to the present day, with the exception of the one week that I would allow for my next example.
Outkast – Hey Ya is the second best pop song of the last decade. As with J-Timbers, it has originality and unpredictability in spades. The music is ridiculously simple, yet perfectly fitting. The only melodic variation outside the three-chord guitar and bassline is a little ascending riff on what sounds like a My First Synth(tm) and a subtle space-age wah-wah powered guitar effect during the chorus. Simple yet effective, Outkast are one of the last of the type of hip-hop artists popularised in the late 80′s and early 90′s, when the musicians were named after lame puns or plays on words (see Will.i.Am, Salt n Pepa et al), and it’s their connection to the good music of old that keeps them awesome.
Dudes with funny names get all the bitches yo.
Well, I suppose I should stop now. I could go on all day about how music these days is rubbish and you lot would still buy it. As long as you keep it to yourselves, I don’t mind. I’ll be in the corner listening to my 50′s Doo-wop if you need me.
