Coyote Blog

El Gato Malo (@boriquagato) wrote a piece the other day about modern pop/rock music, saying in part:

there is nothing because music is product.

it became pure product, produced by product managers with hand picked performers chosen to dance and vamp and papered over with autotune and post-production. it’s music by committee and front folks by casting call.

damn near all of them are just stage performers. all the money is in concert tours now. it’s about flying over the crowd on your fairy chariot and packing in the kids.

it’s fricking disney.

and rock and roll that ain’t.

it’s also hideously uncreative, arch-conservative, play-it-safe marketing as lacking in gritty realism as it is in fun.

it starts to take on the repetitive aspects of a compulsory floor routine.

I don't really disagree, but normally I would have just passed over it as another generational rant -- yada yada autotune yada yada etc.  But three things grabbed my attention.

One is that his conclusion for what to do about it is subtle but kind of awesome.  It really struck me the more I thought about it.  I won't ruin it, you will have to hear it from him by clicking through.

The second reason this grabbed my attention is that I had just watched a bit of the Netflix series Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE about the creation of kpop group from scratch, in a totally synthetic manner that goes even beyond Gato's rant.  I could only watch so much, because there was not really anyone likeable on the show and it is produced in the totally irritating fake reality show format where you know everything is semi-scripted because who the f*ck acts normally with a camera following them around all day?  Every dance move down to that signature kpop girl band wink is scripted and rehearsed endlessly.  It is a synthetic reality show about the creation of a totally synthetic band.

The third reason that this piece got me thinking is that I had just watched Kpop Demon Hunters, a wildly successful animated movie improbably about a kpop girl group who are also demon hunters fighting off a soft of apocalypse.  And you know what?  Despite the animated movie being as synthetic as it possibly could be, it was far more enjoyable and the characters more endearing than anything in Pop Star Academy.  At least in Kpop Demon Hunters, they were using the synthetic nature of the animated medium to explore creative new ideas, vs. the case of KATSEYE working to deliver the absolutely expected.

I am not a music expert to go much deeper on this, but I will refer you to another aging white guy who is a music expert: Rick Beato, who has built a second or third career as an internet teacher and critic.  He has many videos on the topic of modern pop music but this one addresses roughly the same issues discussed above about the hugely synthetic nature of modern pop.

You can see from the comments that a lot of folks hate such observations.  Perhaps it is simply a different aesthetic generationally,  I have often made the observation that when I was in high school, a party that had a DJ rather than a live band was considered by all to suck.  When my kids were in high school, the preference reversed, with kids greatly favoring a DJ to a live band.   I have always chalked this up to a preference among modern kids for high production values -- they want to hear the carefully produced original, maybe even further produced by the DJ, rather than a cover by some local garage band.   I personally think that live music in a small venue has a raw energy that almost always trumps studio production, but it is not crazy for someone to disagree.

However, it does leave one wondering about creativity and radical new frontiers in music.  If all the competition is in production values, then you get higher and higher levels of production values aiming at the expected rather than anything really new.   You can't just have a great singer, you have to have a great singer who is attractive and can dance and is backed by a world class song-writing, production, and PR team.  Its hard to figure out after watching Pop Star Academy where this can go from here.

It is in this context that I think Gato's suggestion for improvement is surprisingly apt.

Postscript:  I will somewhat counter my own thesis -- the 1960s also saw a real competition on the production end of music -- Phil Specter waking everyone up to the production end, followed by Brian Wilson who tried to outdo Specter with Pet Sounds, and then the Beatles crafted the masterpiece Sergeant Pepper in specific response to Pet Sounds.   Later in the decade producers like Alan Parsons on Dark Side of the Moon further pushed the envelope.  But perhaps it is just my age bias, but this all felt like it was pushing boundaries into new things, rather than more reliably delivering the expected.