![]() ![]() But in any case, why should we expect that everyone will agree that A is good while B is bad? Who is to be the impartial arbiter? I suspect that you and I might take opposite views on the merits of most of the names you have quoted. This is surely an excessively simple classification. ![]() It is frequently said that there are only two kinds of music, good and bad. Only two kinds of music, good and bad, etc., etc. I think we've discussed this many times before, actually.Īnyway, fwiw, I like the following bands/singers from my junior high days (these have a nostalgic bias): Duran Duran, Prince, Billy Joel, Cyndi Lauper, The Eurythmics, The Cars, Michael Jackson's ThrillerĪnd I like the following bands/singers from more recent times (no nostalgic bias here): The Magnetic Fields, Muse, The Books, Rufus Wainwright, Radiohead, Bob Dylan (old and current), Phish, Stereolab, Tom Waits. They could (and some do) and it would be great. And there's no good reason why pop songwriters can't use similar methods. This is such a tremendous difference to me it's the difference between writing cute strictly rhyming poetry and writing a novel. Most of "classical" music, by contrast, is harmonically "through-composed": rather than being made of small repeated harmonic chunks, a typical piece consists of an ever-changing and -evolving long sequence (with some repetition, sure) of underlying harmonies. Even if they are an interesting sequence of chords, the lack of harmonic expression is astounding to me. A typical song has two or three sequences (one for verse, one for chorus, etc.) of four or eight chords. I think there's a lot of really fine "pop" writing I think that, for instance, at times Stephin Merritt's (of the Magnetic Fields) songwriting instincts parallel Schubert's.īut what bugs me the most about "pop", by far, is the limited language of its harmonic progressions.
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