My family likes classical music. It’s just the way we are. I grew up listening to all sorts of classical composers, from Strauss to Gershwin, and I got used to the musical style: complex themes, and variations on those themes, played with a symphony of different instrument types all carefully orchestrated to fit together perfectly.
Then I step outside of my house and I hear modern music. “Pop” music — i.e. what is on the top of the Billboard charts right now — is starkly different from classical. There’s vague background music, but that’s unimportant. The only important part of the song, it seems, is the singer. (Just listen to I Kissed A Girl, if you can stand it, for a good example of this.) The complexity of the music has dropped by many orders of magnitude.
I noticed this and thought “is this a real trend? Is music getting simpler?” So I looked back through some older music. Stuff like Hotel California, by The Eagles. Hotel California has anywhere between five and eight guitar parts alone, depending on which version you look at, plus percussion and a vocalist. The music is prominent, not just the vocals. If you look at other bands from “back in the day”, like The Beatles, they’re all similar: they have at least one or two guitar parts, bass, percussion, and some other stuff mixed in (The Beatles even used violins and cellos and stuff in some of their works). They’re more complex than modern pop music, but certainly not as complicated as a classical piece.
For most of the music I have heard, this trend holds true: music is decreasing in technical complexity as the vocals become the dominant part. Perhaps this is true only for the genres I have listened to or the bands I have chosen, but I think it’s rather compelling. What do you think? I’d be especially interested to see if there are any popular modern bands that buck the trend and go for musical complexity.
d00d, when i read this, something obvious jumps out at me.
we need to get you out of your bubble.
i mean, sure “i kissed a girl” is a horrible song, and a great representation of today’s pop culture, not only the music. but even when songs like that are going around, there are still songs written today that have much more complexity than the eagles or the beatles. remind me sometime during ac dec and i’ll get you some “hip” music from today that’ll make your head spin.
oh yeah, and even though you stereotype all modern bands as “i kissed a girl”, you’re still #1.
BTHO JOY FREEMYER
The point is that the Eagles and the Beatles were among the most popular bands of their time, and “I Kissed A Girl” is (or was, I haven’t checked) the most popular song in the US for a while.
There may well be plenty of bands with complex and interesting music. But have they achieved the popularity they could have in the past?
(This is not to say you’re wrong. I’m seriously asking, since I am definitely not hip to this kind of stuff.)
i wouldn’t say they’ve achieved the same following as pop music, but what some people today have done is gather a following in the crowd they sought. for instance, though you may hate any music that’s “screamo”, there are plenty of bands that have gathered enormous followings by playing their hearts out. one of the best examples of this is between the buried and me. i know you might not be able to sit through a whole song without wanting to kill yourself (or anybody around you), but they truly are great, sincere musicians. if you go outside of the whole “pop” scene, a lot of bands play for the music. so the complexities of Strauss and Gershwin, or Lennon and Walsh were never lost. and you would be surprised by the amount of people who are closet metal heads, if you’re still wondering about the popularity.
As a aside, Strauss (I assume you mean Johann) is generally considered to be one of the least sophisticated, complex composers of the whole classical genre. He is, so to speak, the “I Kissed A Girl” of his time; at one Strauss waltz premiere the audience forced the orchestra to play the piece over and over 19 times. (It’s a ten-minute work, roughly.) It’s “pops” stuff for mass consumption. Gershwin is more complex and more interesting – especially late Gershwin – but hardly the composer you’d best be using in your argument about a decline in musical complexity.
If you really want to prove to someone that pop has degenerated from some sort of classical Golden Age (a hard argument to make, btw) then go for some of the really vaunted masterworks: music that demonstrates some genuine genius in terms of formal architecture, almost mathematical rigor, and what they call the “argument” the music is making. Try listening to Brahms’ Symphony No 4; in the finale, the same eight-note melody is repeated over and over something like 40 times. (Remember this. The melody IS being repeated. You’ll have a hard time believing it while you listen to the music.) Bach is also a great jumping point (ie Art of Fugue), and I strongly recommend, as highly complex works that are also extremely accessible, the last 3-6 piano sonatas by Beethoven. (Not so much his symphonies, except 3 and 5.) Or check out the way that every theme in Mozart’s 41st Symphony makes a reappearance in the last minute or so of the finale.
Also, if you like the Beatles, check out the Panic at the Disco album “Pretty. Odd.” It takes an awful lot of cues from the Fab Four, especially the tracks “We’re So Starving” (Sgt. Pepper’s), “Nine in the Afternoon” (any Paul creation, or “All You Need is Love”) and “When the Day Met the Night.” There are also rough take-offs on “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane”…