I am a low-culture junkie, I've never seen a play, cannot identify a piece of classical music and I have never read the classics, but I take offence at the terms 'high' and 'low' culture. While there is an obvious distinction between the compositions of Beethoven and the Pokémon theme tune and their relative importance and influence, to attach such weighted words to the distinction implies some sort of intrinsic value to one over the other. As such I won't be comparing the styles of Chopin and Schubert today. No, today's rant is going to be about pop music, and by that I don't mean 'popular music', I mean 'pop music' and there is a distinction.
When I became a teenager, I hated pop music. 'That's not so odd' you might think, but that's because you, like me, know what 'pop music' means now. It does not mean 'popular' music, it means music that's created and marketed towards the impressionable and the young. It is lowest common denominator music, typical and unchanging. It's boybands and girl groups and individuals who are pushed out onto television with no other goal than the selling of records, in short; it's all about money.
Back in the day (whenever 'the day' was; it seems to be an ever-shifting date that exists nowhere and everywhere at the same time and you can fuck off with your philosophical cats), pop music meant little more than Rock & Roll, the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who etc. then later, in America, it was Motown; Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and the whole gang.
Except Britain didn't have a soul and funk influence from within. No they were still trying to cling onto the Rock & Roll of the Sixties. The only problem being that the musicians that made that music (if they had managed not to die through their own excesses) moved on without them, far away from the wide appeal of their early music and into the realm of experimentation or, if we're talking about Pink Floyd, outright pretension. Now there's nothing intrinsically bad about that, but the repercussions, with regards to pop music, were great. Without the Rock & Roll the British public (in general of course; there's always going to be groups of people that like the esoteric) were poised to receive the corporate products of pop music; the Osmonds, the David Cassidys and the Bobby Shermans of the world. The wildly popular, but tame and hollow music that, much as all pop music seemed to until my mid-teens, wanted nothing more than to make money for the company that produced it.
Punk did its part, trying to rebel against the mediocrity of Seventies pop music as well as the bloated self-importance of prog rock. They even denounced their supposedly sacrosanct predecessors, "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977!" the Clash shouted in the same year the 'King of Rock & Roll' died. But even Punk didn't last; it was popular for, at best, a few years before sinking into mainstream obscurity.
It did achieve something lasting though; in being a simple music that you didn't need a lot of ability to play (that means you did still need some ability, I mean, put it this way; I'd never have made it as a punk) it opened up the possibilities of music to a new generation, a generation that the synthesiser had just been waiting for. Listen to Donna Summer's 1977 hit 'I Feel Love' and if you're like me; you'll agree that it is one of the greatest songs of all time. Well others agreed, and by the end of the Seventies electronic music was ready, willing and able to deliver a new form of pop music that wasn't going to make you want to drive a hot compass into your ear and then seal up the wound with raw sewage.
Taking cues from German social-outcasts Kraftwerk and the shiny glamour of disco and David Bowie-style glam rock; electronic music was sublime. Gary Numan, the Human League, Ultravox, it was all great and it all did it with a DIY punk ethic. More often than not, these musicians were not trained, they had to program the synthesisers, which wasn't simple, but it was still a lot easier than learning to play the guitar only to find that that twat from across the street can already cover Purple Haze perfectly and he started three months after you.
But the grimy world of the music industry just couldn't leave it alone. It was popular, and as such a high-potential money-earner, which in turn meant they could churn out a diluted form of the original music with all the soul taken out of it because the lead singer would get teenage girls in a bit of a lather. This kind of thinking is responsible for the Eighties shite of Kajagoogoo and Howard Jones. That should be a capital offence.
But the Eighties weren't done in providing us with musical hate figures. The Triumvirate of Crap were just around the corner; Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman.
Stock, Aitken and Waterman were a trio of songwriters and producers that were responsible for hits by Rick Astley, Banarama and Mel & Kim amongst others. You know I could just leave it there and you'd know that they are bad, bad people. Their only redeeming feature, as I see it, is they also gave Kylie Minogue her first hits. Not that I'm a fan of Kylie's music, more I'm a fan of her...um…well let's move on shall we?
Stock Aitken Waterman or 'SAW' were roundly criticised in their heyday, and again by me now, for their repetitiveness, not their ability to create hit songs again and again, that at least has to require some skill, even if it is a bad skill to have. No it was the repetitiveness of their songs, they all follow the same song structure, which is fine if you can get away with it (which they did) but the same song structure was used for any artist they worked with. I'm amazed that people fell for it, it's almost inconceivable to me. Anyway, SAW serve (in my mind at least) as the real starting point for truly shit pop music. They worked with the record company Fanfare Records, creating hits that kept the company afloat. One of the partners in Fanfare Records was none other than the absolute shining emperor of pop tripe, Simon fucking Cowell.
But we'll come back to the nipple-high-trouser-lined twat later. When SAW finally (and mercifully) started to become obsolete in the early Nineties, a number of music managers created fully artificial groups with whom they wanted to have a series of hits as SAW did, but with just the one group (by 'artificial' I mean each member was chosen individually from the rest, usually for purely aesthetic reasons. Occasionally they would also have some talent, but it wasn't required). Nigel Martin-Smith created Take That, Louis Walsh created Boyzone in response, and Bob and Chris Herbert created the Spice Girls as a female alternative to both.
Now, you may expect me to, at this point, rail on them for the low quality of their music. But that's hard to do, as most of their songs were covers of earlier artists that, while they aren't to my taste, can't be called bad songs. Or alternatively they're written by professional songwriters, not the same kind as SAW but ones that actually differentiate each song they write. No, my problem is the commercialism of it, I mean, obviously, a record company wants and needs to make money, but with the boy bands and the girl groups it was all about making money, there was no creativity at all, pop music was stagnant. The whole marketing element is almost depressing; the 'boy band' as a marketing product is so transparent it's almost insulting; get a bunch of good looking guys to sing old love songs and get them onto kids' TV, gee, I wonder who the market was.
The corruption of 'pop music' was complete, and until around the early-to-mid 2000s it remained that way with Simon Cowell as the orchestrator behind its continued relevance. Cowell in fact furthered the reach of pop stagnation, bringing television shows to chart success (Robson & Gerome, the Teletubbies and Mr Blobby, and they're just the ones off the top of my head) and then reversing the trend and using television to create his next successes.
I can scarcely believe how he's managed to get away with it, through Pop Idol and X Factor Cowell has actually shown us the formulaic pop process at its core, yet he still makes millions and people eat it right up.
The only thing that keeps me from giving up hope is the influence of American pop music, that's right; America is a force for good when it comes to modern pop music.
In recent years there has been a small, but growing, number of British acts that achieve pop success without Cowell and his ilk. Their musical influences come from across the Atlantic, not from the desk of Stock, Aitken and Waterman. You see; American pop music evolved differently to British pop music. America had Motown which launched a multitude of careers and brought soul and funk into the mainstream consciousness. And it's that Motown influence that became the driving force behind pop music in America.
Of all the artists that began on Motown, Stevie Wonder is perhaps the one that has had the longest-lasting success. His particular style of soul and funk influenced music had such an impression on Joe Jackson (the overbearing, possibly abusive father of the Jacksons) that he made his children in the Jackson 5 cover Stevie's songs. The young Michael Jackson soon found success due to his charm, good looks and amazing talent. So that when he became the 'King of Pop' he had an ingrained style that echoed parts of Stevie Wonder's music.
Michael Jackson was truly great back at his Eighties zenith, and his enormous success was bound to engender followers. Now I'm not saying Michael Jackson is responsible for all of modern American pop music, but you'd have to be a special kind of moron to suggest he wasn't a massive part of it. Artists that followed in Jackson's pop footsteps include Usher, Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé Knowles. To the closed-minded theirs might sound like the most awful and generic sounding music ever. But they actually incorporate a long and varied history of differing musical styles; there's a heavy contemporary R&B influence on their work of course, but they also utilise elements of hip-hop, Michael Jackson's brand of disco-influenced pop, Stevie Wonder's funk and the soul of Motown. Pop music in America doesn't mean what it means in the UK, it doesn't mean generic shite marketed towards teen girls because America already got through that phase. The Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC anyone?
The success of these artists in America has ensured a large following in Britain, and it's a fantastically broad definition of pop music that exists today. Much more broad than it ever was with Rock & Roll.
However, Lady Gaga is still shit.
