Pop Fakers

A while back some people might have remembered when Ashlee Simpson lip synched the wrong song on the TV show "Saturday Night Live". This was in front of a US national audience. That was just the tip of the iceberg... Most or close to all of you readers out there in the blogosphere would have heard the line "Pop music is crap, it's nothing but music created by a big record company rather than an individual", or some line similar to that. What do you think? Is pop music today different than it was in the 1960's? If so, what makes it so different today? First of all, what is pop music? I found a good definition of pop music Here "In general, pop music features simple, memorable melodies with catchy, sing-along choruses. Pop songs often have a hook, one or more musical ideas repeated to "hook" a listener's interest. A hook can be any part of the song, musical, rhythmic, vocal, or as is most often the case, a mixture of all of them. Pop music is usually instantly accessible to anyone who is culturally inclined to take part, even the musical novice." So that means pop music needs some sort of subversive gimmick to get you subconsciously addicted to the song. Sounds like propoganda to me. But it makes sense though, as if anyone actually wanted to listen to the "Crazy Frog (Axel F Remix)" because it was critically the best piece of music written. No, people bought the albums beacuse the frog sounded familiar and found that a frog trying to sing was a wonderful novelty and gimmick. I can hear those peole buying the records now, saying "What a marvellous talented frog! Tally ho! Let's purchase the single". (True story, Justin works at CC records and sells this crap everyday.) But have you ever heard the Crazy Frog Song acoustic version? I don't think so. You don't see that godamn frog working the small pubs and bars doing the small gigs when he first started out. He (or IT) is an electronic 'artist'. Much similar to some home DJs thinking that the samples they cut (which are from REAL pieces of music) and then mixed into their own song think that they are genuis. Take Dance music for example, where's the talent involved in that? Anybody that had at least mediocre skills could creat a new dancehall hit. Those clubbers can take any crap for music....as long as they "can dance to it". As long as they can simulate fornication on the dancefloor, they are happy. That's not music! That's fuck music! Not fuck music, as in, Marvin Gaye, Barry White and Luther Vandross fuck music. I'm talking about music that just goes: boom, boom, boom, bam! It's come to the point where music isn't popular for the pure listening experience. It's now all looks. People buy albums because they see a supermodel on the CD cover or on the video clip. Of course, it helps if a singer/songwriter is good looking, it's part of the job. But if the person sells records just on the looks, but he/she can't write or sing, then that's just wrong. The history of music has plenty examples of the eye-candy "musicians". This type of 'artists' can't write their own songs and it's almost a given that they can't sing for shite live. So professional writers write the song for them and the actual artist can record his/her CD in the studio where it can be manipulated to sound better by a sound engineer. Then when it comes concert time, they just play a pre-recorded backing music that the artist can lip sync to. In their own defence, artists that lip sync such as Britney Spears claim that it's impossible to sing and dance at the same time. Well, isn't that the reason why she gets paid? Here's another example: Mili Vanilli... "Milli Vanilli ("milli" is a word meaning "national" in Turkish, picked up by the artists while visiting Turkey on one of its national days) was a duo, Fabrice Morvan and Rob Pilatus, formed in Germany in the mid-1980s. They are notorious for being the only group to have their Grammy Award stripped from them after it was revealed that they had not been involved in the creation of their breakthrough album, Girl You Know It's True and did not sing in concert. Their photos were pictured on the album cover and they lip-synced in concert. They have since been used as an example of utter shallowness in music, though they were hardly unique at the time. Other bands, including C&C Music Factory and Black Box, were also fronted by lip-syncers." Lest we forget...Boy/Chick Bands Don't we all remember the Backstreet Boys, Human Nature, N*SYNC, New Kids on the Block, THE SPICE GIRLS, m2m and the list goes on. All part of the great record company backed pop producing machine that has no musical talent but gimmicks and at the time, good looking individuals. Was it music? Or a big whinge fest where they can whinge about their whingy lives and whinge on the backing of a quite whingy track. So has pop music just turned all commercial now? Compare this to the 60's where pop music was defined by real artists that could play their own instruments (maybe the Monkees are excepted) like Hendrix, the Beatles and other great bands of the time. But it's all gone downhill, ever since Mili Vanilli and Wham! came along. Now we're seeing today are pretty looks for a poor old and underpaid writer working in the background. Bring on the Macarena. Related Links Launch.com Pop video clip downloads Popjustice.com Pop in the UK