The Good, The Bad And The Ineffective

I've recently gotten into a very heated debate with one of my friends, let's call him Maestro, concerning music and i'm going to try my best to summarise the conclusion of this debate into this post. It all began when Maestro pointed out to me that music today is, in his opinion, rubbish. This is something i hear from a lot of people and it always bothers me. I am of the opinion that regardless of your tastes, there are always people that do 'good' music. They aren't always in the pop charts, but they exist, provided you have a heart to search for them.

Now, Maestro couldn't disagree with this, but his own point was that modern pop music, the music that we have constantly shoved down our throats is of a lower quality than in eras past. He said that there is less creativity, less originality and far less musicality and integrity. This is, again, something i take issue with, not least of all because i am of the opinion that people need to stop looking back to the past with such rose tinted spectacles. People often seem to forget that for as long as music has been produced, it has been an industry, there has been money to make and to lose. The way in which we consume music has changed drastically, especially in our lifetime, but the reasons for creating it have not.

Motown acts as the perfect example of what i am talking about. I've noticed that people often treat Motown, Stax and 60s music in general with a reverence befitting a sacred book. Don't ever get it twisted, i absolutely adore Motown music, it is an inspiration and there have been times in my life where i have found myself listening to nothing but. However, we mustn't forget that it was a business. Berry Gordy applied the same principles that he had picked up from working on the car assembly line at Ford to the way he ran his label. There was a tried and tested team of musicians, writing for tried and tested artists, to recreate the tried and tested sound that seemed to be a hit with the American public of that time. We often compare artists of today to artists of that era, looking disfavourably on the musicians of our time, but we shouldn't forget that most of our musical idols were in much the same position as the pop stars of today: They had a team of songwriters, writing there hits for them and they were just as likely to change their sound for the sake of popularity as any band or musician is today.

This, Maestro agreed was true, but he countered saying that though the form of pop music stays the same - a business, like any other, subject to supply and demand - the substance has slowly gotten worse. His point remained, musicality had been lost. In a terrible and vicious cycle, the public had become musically stupid and the artists had degraded their musical integrity to accommodate this. This was a fair point. I looked at the Black Eyed Peas' latest single, 'The Time' and had a hard time trying to compare it in terms of 'musical integrity' to The Beatles' 'I Feel Fine'. However, i believe that you appreciate music on different levels, for different reasons. These levels don't necessarily sit stacked on top of one another with each descending level having less significance than the one before it. Rather, you have different levels existing side by side, different, but equal.

I was once told by another friend that, ultimately, the only way to judge music is to strip it of its context and class it as either 'good', or 'bad'. Whilst i could sympathise with this friend's sentiment i had to disagree. The terms 'good' and 'bad' are subjective and mean very little. They have no substance to them. Instead, i prefer to look at music in terms of what is 'effective' and 'ineffective'. I am of the opinion that music must be taken for what it is and if a song is crafted to convey a pure and majestic beauty and then does that, it validates itself in the same way that a song that is created to get people moving on the dance floor does if it fulfills that purpose. When i hear Soulja Boy's 'Crank That', there is nothing that will stop me from getting to the middle of the floor and when i hear Chopin's 'Étude Op. 10, No. 3' i simply sit and let its beauty wash over me. I listen to them for entirely different but equal reasons.

This wasn't the end of our discussion, but from that point on we tended to simply go over the same ground repeatedly, neither one of us producing any profound argument-winning point. In the end we decided to label him a pessimist, at least in part, despairing for the state of pop music and the minds of those who consume it, and me, an optimist, a man of the belief that for the most part, people enjoy mindless pop music on the level it is meant to be enjoyed but are fully capable of enjoying Debussy on an entirely different level...

That's not being overly optimistic, is it?