Meditation for April 3rd, 2016
You Can Sing Along
Pop music has helped people have a good time for a hundred years now. We still sing songs from decades past and it doesn’t take long to learn the words to a new pop song. Popular music brings us comfort when life is hard and accents an already great day. We can sing along, dance or just have it in the background. We can wax poetic with out critiques with artists and their songs.
Music just sucks now. In fact you have been just listening to the same song over and over again with different words. Louie Louie by the Kingsmen is the exact same song as Blank Space by Taylor Swift. There are only three changes in the song so the Kinsmen couldn’t sue Swift for copyright infringement.
Why does music suck now? It’s because of a few things. One is you want music that is safe and that you and all your friends can sing along and also says, “Remember this song?” This is a weird thing to say considering you have heard Love Shack by the B-52s 54,894 times – not counting partial hearings of the song. The second problem is that music education has been drastically cut since the 80s, so younger people have no real educated ear when it comes to music, so they’ll listen to anything the record industry splatter shits on them.
The timbre in songs has been slowly being reduced creating a more homogenized variety of music. This basically means that the eighteen-songwriter team working on one single Beyoncé song is using the same instruments to make the same tones song after song. To vary from that will kill Beyoncé’s career because you don’t like unsafe and comfortable songs. Don’t worry, a critic will make it sound like there is something interesting happening.
New music uses less pitch in their songs since the pop music factories of the late 50s. This means pop music uses the same chords in the same octave. In fact most pop songs use the same three chords: the ones from Louie Louie.
Now music is just loud. When it is played live it is just as loud as it possibly can go without making blood come bleeding out of your ears. This is to cover all the mediocrity of the songs being played. No one changes the volume of the instruments being played to create any kind of meaning or feeling anymore. Just play it loud and turn up that BASS! BASS! BASS!
During the cold war, American schools taught kids basic musical theory, how to play some songs on a recorder – urban flute, and study the history of music by attending the symphony. That has been cut because homeowners didn’t want to pay more for property tax and who cares if kids are musically educated as long as the football program is still competitive.
That means kids don’t know a good song if it bit them on the ass. As long as other kids listen to the same songs too. No one wants to sing a long by him or herself. So symphonies are losing funding, art music is dead and we have millionaires playing stripped down dumber versions of previously popular songs. No one is going to really take a chance and make anything new because no one wants to be uncomfortable.
Prayer
Apollo,
As you fly across the sky on your chariot,
Let me hear something new,
Actually new.
All of this sounds the same.
I actually can’t tell the difference between Drake and Chris Stapleton.
They sound the same.
Same drums,
And same monotone.
I want to hear something new!
I can’t get excited for the Cars and the Police anymore.
I can’t get pumped for Judas Priest and Black Sabbath anymore.
I just can’t jam to Beyoncé and Rhianna anymore.
I just can’t cut my wrists to New Order and Interpol anymore.
I can’t even tell the difference between Radiohead and Coldplay anymore.
Does it have to have guitars?
Bass?
Drums,
Or even worst, a drum machine?
Does it really have to be leather pants again?
Does the sax really have to be novel and ironic?
Please, Sun God.
I want to hear something that will actually blow my mind.
Instead of saying this sounds like that,
Or saying this is ska-metal-polka-surf rock . . . just like the Cramps,
Or that this isn’t just metal,
But a specific kind of metal that only a kid dressed as a leather daddy meets Sylvester Stallone’s character in Cobra would know.
I want a new sound.
Not an ode to the Clash album,
Not a concept album and the rapper is now going by a different name, but then becomes his old self later again after the third time they had retired,
Not a David Bowie stage,
Not a throwing hundreds out the window of a private jet video,
Not a slightly psychedelic version of the previous songs, but really, just the same.
Just something actually fresh.
Amen.
Craft
How to write a perfect pop song:
First off you should transpose happy music to bittersweet lyrics. Make sure the music is danceable and has a lot of head bobbing bounce to it, but make sure your lyrics touch the heartstrings.
Don’t bore us with witty lyrics. You don’t even have to do verses anymore, just choruses. Make that chorus short, sweet and sing alongable.
If you want the grinning ear to ear-bouncing head up and down and maybe some fist pumps into the air, use the chords CFGC.
If you want the same bouncing of the previous song, but a little hint of haunting emotional mix tape-y worthy sell, use chords CGFC.
If you want the staring out a window on a rainy day while your lover is gone far away and there is a fire in the fireplace and a cat on your lap and you want to die because you long for your lover’s touch, use chords CGAminorF.
If you want a more witty ironic twist to a ballad then you should use the chords Aminor FACG, but you gotta have the sick wicked smart lyrics.
If you want to pretend to be an art house pop band like Radiohead or MUSE or whatever else is different sounding but still safe, use the chords Aminor GFG. Be careful, it’s a coin toss on whether you can pull it off like Coldplay and Jack Johnson can.
Goal
Broaden your horizons. Delve into a different kind of music. Don’t just allow the status quo to be what you settle for.
It’s okay if you actually like simple music, it’s not your fault, and you don’t know any better.