Should pop be stopped?
Apparently, the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton has been in a spot of bother this week. I don’t much care what for; as with most news, chances are it’ll be forgotten by next week anyway which is why as a rule I generally avoid such stories.
However, I hadn’t heard of him previously, so I took it upon myself to become familiar with some of his thoughts. This was made easier by the fact that he has written much about music, the subject of my Bachelor’s degree.
While I have not had the time to purchase or read his books, so I would advise to take everything I say here with a pinch of salt, I was intrigued by an article he wrote for the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34801885) disparaging pop music. There was much I initially disagreed with — my “edgier” friends would confirm that I am a massive fan of what they consider “mainstream” pop — however it was certainly an exciting challenge to my preconceptions, and led me to consider how they were first formed.
His first point was striking: music has become a “background to consuming things”. I guess it was more likely to be a point put forward by someone of an older generation really; as much of my life as I can remember music has been commonplace in shops, cafes, bars, restaurants and even offices. My generation have never known anything different, but I agree this does not excuse the failure to notice and rectify this. I have privately expressed my annoyance to my girlfriend — who sees music from the other extreme as nothing but background — for not seeing music as something to be enjoyed by itself, but I did not see that I, frequenter of coffee and book shops, have been contributing to this denigration myself.
I think Scruton’s point is that because music is now played in consumer environments, music is now composed to suit such environments, or “to not really be there”. I did consider how opera in the past was sometimes just an event for high society folk to be seen attending, to signal culture, and some cared so little for the performance that they would repeatedly attend the same operas just to socialise and show off that they had the means to attend them. Perhaps the role of the music in this instance is similar to background music of today, in that it is not the focus of the outing. However, even if the audience was indifferent, their listening skills were at least not being degraded by unsophisticated music, as Scruton claims ours are being today.
It appears to me to be an example of the signal/noise issue that appears in so many areas of modern life. With constant bombardment, how are we to differentiate great music of lasting value from the unsophisticated and unimportant? How do we separate the signal from the noise? As for why this might be, Scruton rightly suggests the emergence of recorded music, however he believes the human ear has changed following this advance in technology. On this I disagree — while great composers have been more inclined to explore and challenge it, there has long been a focus on sounds the human ear finds more agreeable, e.g. tonality and stepwise movement. More plausible to me is the hypothesis that a change in incentive structure has resulted in — as Scruton agrees — stripping music down to these bare essentials and amplifying their effects.
Composers used to be funded by patrons, generally aristocrats uninterested in return on investment but responding to the incentives of social status and, of course, pleasure. During such times they retained artistic freedom to a great extent; at worst, the quantity of their output was inflated by the existence of the patron. Today, being managed by a record label looking for a return and a royalty fee structure means the incentive is — as with most commercial products — to catch trends and maximise profits. What form might this take? Think about how the orchestra, growing for three centuries until the twentieth, when recorded music became widely available, became the band and, more recently, the laptop producer. Fewer people to pay, certainly, far quicker to produce and easier to “perform” live, too.
I fear it may be the case that music has become too commoditized as part of a wider trend. Things are being made more “efficient”, they are being stripped to bare essentials and the “active compounds” — to borrow, very deliberately, from narcotic terminology — concentrated to play all sorts of tricks on our minds and encourage addiction. Scruton makes this point with a compelling analogy to pornography, and the examples of music’s active compounds I have heard him give are drums accenting beats 1 and 3 and stock harmonies (for an my brothers’ and my own favourite example of this, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ).
I can’t help but wonder if this effect is inevitable across all areas where computers have become involved. I posit that the reduction of information to numbers — thus conflating it with mathematics — leads to a belief that there is an optimal solution. Perhaps the most disturbing area in which we find this is friendship (looking at you Facebook), where we can now hide our weaknesses and the banalities of our daily lives from the world, even do away with aspects of communication such as body language and tone of voice, so that we present the optimal version of ourselves to others, but lose some humanity in the process.
I am disappointed in myself for not recognising this in music. Worse, I even considered catchiness a virtue: the mark of a good melody. It had never occurred to me before that this could be the result of addiction. Even if it is not, perhaps it still is not so virtuous. Most would agree that great music should command attention, but with much pop music today I could get by never listening to them again! They are so short, repetitive and catchy that I just remember them and can replicate them at will in my head. I don’t need to give them my attention more than once. A far cry from times when music had to be sat and listened to.Sometimes, I may not remember all the lyrics, but lyrics from other songs might easily be transplanted in place to give the same meaning. I am reminded of Nassim Taleb’s aphorism that great conversations are those which cannot be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations. Certainly, we should hold music to the same standard.
Scruton also points out that catchiness can be achieved without sophistication, using the example of how Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” is mostly sung on one note. It is, quite literally in this case, robotic. But does this signal a wider trend, that we are losing the humanity from music?
I can imagine someone of a more mathematical mind than mine seeing the ornate melodies and thematic development of Bach being inefficient, sub-optimal. But I would argue it is these elements that make his music great. Without knowing entirely what they were, he included in his music elements that were of universal appeal, and could be heard despite human tendencies to impose rules and strictures and to overdevelop. Therefore, his music could be considered a triumph over his own humanity and is right to be celebrated. Similarly, a great musicians live performance will never have the precision in terms of pitch or rhythm as a computer, but they triumph over these limitations. If we remove these natural, human weaknesses, what is left to celebrate?
While I have acknowledged the incentives for addictive, inelegant music, I am unsure whether the outcome has been so deliberate. Professor Scruton also notes the absence of musicians in the modern composition process as a culprit, but I would propose that the collaborative nature of much modern pop might also contribute. Perhaps the outcome of having many songwriters and producers working on a single record is a watered-down product that everyone is happy with. In politics, we put such structures in place to filter out the extreme views and reach compromise. But is this really how we should also be producing our art?
I used to take the view that music was simply a matter of personal taste. But for the reasons above I cannot avoid that “taste” may in fact be a product of marketing and environmental conditioning, and that distinctions in quality and value can and should be made. A clear hierarchy though, such as classical over pop, is not so simple to establish. Not all music considered popular is suitable to be played in cafes and shops, and to be fair the Professor does actually give the example of Metallica as a band with something to say. Some classical music in the twentieth century also went in the opposite direction to pop, by removing the elements that are pleasing to humans such as tonality and repetition. The often horrendous results might also be considered inferior.
Interestingly, there were also experiments with removing musicians from the compositional process in classical music too, such as with aleatoric (chance) music. This made me think: research into computer composition — which my girlfriend almost chose as the area for her PhD — is apparently getting closer to passing a sort of musical Turing test, but I wonder if we have made the test too easy by making music sound increasingly less human.
Do I think pop is bad? No. But I do believe, on reflection, perhaps it is best to remove ourselves from it from time to time, to take a step back from the noise to improve our critical faculties and recognise what is beautiful and valuable. I already incorporate this in other areas of my life, such as by fasting, which actually led to an interest in cooking and the quality of food, resulting in my broad diet becoming far more healthy and nutritious. However, I had never thought of applying it to music.
Even if they don’t fast, people take this kind of break elsewhere. People my age think nothing of going across the world to marvel at the ornate architecture of sites like Angkor Wat or Rome. I imagine they can easily appreciate their beauty compared to, say, a block of concrete flats back home. They admire the skill and determination of the historic people to carve thousands of statues and ornaments and build such grandiose structures. But would they take this kind of a break with music? If I asked my friends today whether they would consider listening only to Bach or Beethoven for a month, sitting down and with no distractions, they would think I am mad.
But, regardless of convincing others, this awakening has led me to form some steps I will take to increase my appreciation. There are simple heuristics that can be followed:
- Avoid coffee shops, restaurants, bars, shops and workplaces which play music.
- Where they cannot be avoided, make a mental note of the songs and artists played, or the characteristics of the music, so that I can avoid listening to them in my private time.
- Avoid using any music as a background for study, reading or other activities at home.
- Restrict pop music by time, perhaps once or twice a week, similar to cheat day on a diet, or responsible drinking.
- When I feel compelled to listen to pop music, perform it myself. Or at least restrict listening to songs unsuitable for shops, cafes and restaurants.
