I’ll admit this up front: I do have a little bit of the music snob in me, there are certain things that I just can’t stand to listen to. That said, I think those songs are in the significant minority, and I wouldn’t say that there were any entire genres I look down upon. I’m not a big fan of a lot of modern chart pop or RnB, but, even then, I still think Kylie’s Koocachoo is an absolutely superb tune, be it bubblegum pop or not.
If you’re a downer on all popular music though, where do you stand on The Beatles? Or Motown? Will people in forty years be looking back at S Club 7 the way we look at Martha Reeves now? Actually, I’m not 100% on that… What I like to think though, is that, even if I don’t like to listen to the music, I can still appreciate the effort that’s gone into making it. Celine Dion for example, I would never voluntarily listen to one of her songs, but you can’t deny she’s got a good pair of lungs on her…
Before I bought my Maschine Mikro, I was checking out some of the demos on YouTube, and came across one by finger-drumming maestro Jeremy Ellis. This guy is good. When I checked out the comments, I found one from someone who was asking if this is what music had come to, with people thinking that pressing buttons quickly makes someone talented, before going on to say that cellists, pianists etc spend time mastering their instrument and that real music died some time ago. I think this is pretty unfair.
I think his thought seemed to be that hitting those buttons quickly didn’t require any practice or training. Perhaps the originator of this comment would like to pick up a sampler, make some hits and loops, program his groups and play something for us to show us how easy it is. These arguments are nothing new, the attitudes to jazz when it was breaking through had the same sort of ring to them, and some people still look down on anything other than ‘classical’, orchestral music.
Me, I think some classical music is incredible. Listen to Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in D minor and try not to be moved by it. However, I find a lot of classical music dull and uninteresting. I think you can perhaps make a good argument that the only real originality and experimentation in music comes from electronic music these days. Modern ‘classical’ composers seem to be trying to be more dissonant and avant-garde, but are they doing anything that hasn’t already been released on Warp?
This post first appeared as a news item on NowThenRecords.
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