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And i kin ramble on like that....
I like Fred.
And oh, I can ramble, too. Watch.
So anyway, I have to put in a small cry of support for pop music. I think
basic pop has...oh, I don't know. The more it changes, the more it stays
the same.
It's so humorous-- in the past few days, I've been thinking about this so
much. It's been VERY relevant. Lemme 'splain-- no, there is no time.
Lemme sum up....
When I was in high school and college, I threw myself with almost
religious fervour into the pursuit of pop music. I mean, you have to
admit that the 80s were the height of pop. The musical scene wasn't as
fragmented as it is now, and if I listened to the radio in London, for
example, I could hear Mission UK, The Sundays, and Kylie Minogue all in
the same hour on Capital FM. And I owned albums by all of them and called
it pop. And it was good. Ahem.
Anyway-- boy, I am rambling-- I was also, and still am-- the world's
biggest Duran Duran fan. (Someone just asked me the other night to come
out on a particular night in June and I automatically thought, "That's
right between John and Nick's birthdays." Sigh.) And I wrote a very long
paper (146 pages, I think) on the history and development of Duran. And
my hypothesis was that DD was the logical extension of Pink Floyd.
Quoth Fred:
"And part of Sid and Johnny's angry reaction had to do with the fact that
rock and pop--the people's music, right?--was being taken over by
bourgeois trained musicians in gazillion dollar studies. The people's
music comes from the people. The people live in the houses. The houses
have garages, but rarely gazillion dollar studios. Rarely expensive
guitars. Rarely time for heavy music training. But the average joe can
learn to play a guitar and sing nice songs, or angry songs. Simple and
real."
Well, exactly. Thus came the Sex Pistols & thus Chic, thus the New
Romantic movement reacting against the anger of punk, thus Duran, amongst
others. I did very well on the paper.
But by the time grunge hit-- and prolly well before-- there really was no
more single pop scene. '91 was, I think, when the whole thing started to
fragment. For a while, i think, one could hear Nirvana on the same
station at Rick Astley, but now we wouldn't even think it possible.
("Back when _I_ was a kid...!")
Well, for years, I pretty much did without pop music, poor me, unless it
was on tape or vinyl. I got into CDs really late. Eventually, I
discovered Country, and lemme tell ya, country ain't nothin but good pop
music with a twang. And a story, usually. So there's a lot of country I
adore.
But as a lot of you know, I'm also a Goth. And recently, I've become
aware of the new synthpop movement-- it's pop! It's back! Wooty woot!--
and started exploring what's out there. It's funny that pop is "back" as
it were via the Goth angle-- for me, at least. But if you listen to
Apoptygma Berzerk or :wumpscut or Wolfsheim, you're listening to pop.
Dark, driving pop, but pop.
And so I kicked my own butt until I being a little more proactive.
http://www.nation.demon.co.uk/
Go do some exploring. This is a band called VNV Nation. Listen to some
of their Mp3s, and tell me what you think. Try "Standing" and a few
others. This is what I hear at Goth clubs. This is new Synthpop, or EBM.
Or a few other labels. And I'm listening to it quite happily.
Now, I took it into work yesterday, and one of the guys grumped, "This
isn't music. It's guys sitting at a computer. Any monkey can push
buttons. I wanna hear guitars! I wanna hear musicians!" I wanna kill him,
but I restrained myself. He also called it "New disco," and at that
point, I was REALLY ready to go for him. But yes, it IS dance music. It's
more like S'Express or Information Society than Diana Ross, but I can at
least concede the dance part. Yes, a monkey can push buttons. But a
monkey isn't a musician. A monkey can't program a sequencer like an
instrument, bend electronics to make emotion in music.
So I guess my point is that pop isn't dead or even particularly
moribund-- it's still out there, it's just wearing different hats. And
yes, sometimes it does wear baseball caps and grin a lot and make the
girls swoon. But really-- it's all part of the tradition, and it's all
good.
Well, did I say I could ramble, or what?
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