Category: Music

An interesting journey fueled by our commenters

I just got done with an interesting journey this morning and yesterday, fueled by commenters on the post below. I’ll go through the links one by one, and urge you to follow my path for your own entertainment. Otherwise, I will summarize.

440 vs 435: Tyrone took us to this link. His comment was in part

“Separating emotion from critical function is the mandate of all pop culture, corporate division. “

That’s an important insight. I have long avoided advertising in all forms for that very reason, that the object of advertising is to distract us with one message while subtly inserting another. Of course, most often that “other” message is simply “buy this product.” The larger point is, however, that advertising is never straightforward. As one young ad executive told me once in a candid moment, the purpose of advertising is to get us to change our behavior. TV has long been the best medium for dispensing this message and altering our behaviors, as we are in a mild hypnotic state while watching.

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Why is modern music so awful?

I had fun with this video. At twenty minutes in length it asks for more of your time than you are likely willing to give, so if that is the case, jump ahead to minute 7:00 where Thoughty2 discusses modern songwriting. He credits most of the big hits of our era to two men, a Swede named Max Martin, and American Lukasz Gottwald, or Dr. Luke. Sure enough, a quick search shows that these two men are acknowledged to be behind many hundreds of songs.

Thoughty2 talks about many other aspects of our modern music scene, why the tunes and lyrics seem so mediocre, why LOUDNESS drowns out lack of quality. Last year my wife and I were in a station on a mountain side in Switzerland waiting for a tram. We had about forty minutes before it arrived. Even though we were the only people there, loudspeakers were blaring popular tunes. It was horrible! I now consider it to have been a near-death experience (NDE). I had to leave the building.

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