“Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974, it’s a scientific fact.”
– Homer Simpson
Everyone of a certain age is going to be nostalgic for the music of their youth. But even so, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that mainstream pop and rock has devolved significantly in the past 20-30 years. Can anyone honestly say that Nickleback are as good as Led Zeppelin, or Justin Beiber is in the same league as Abba?
Now a team of scientists gave gone and proved it.
The combination of turning up the volume when recording the songs mixing with fewer varieties of notes and chords makes today’s musical appetite for creativity a shrinking lot. Joan Serra, who headed up the team of researchers at the Spanish National Research Council, told Reuters that you could call this trend a “homogenization†of today’s popular music. “In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations — roughly speaking, chords plus melodies — have consistently diminished in the last 50 years.â€
To further this sameness, our timbre — the term used to explain the same note sounding different on varying instruments — palette has also shrunk substantially, giving us an even greater reduction in the variety of sounds (and instruments) we hear, according to the evaluation released in the journal Scientific Reports.
Yes, it just proves what we’ve known all along. It’s the obvious end result of the focus-group driven approach taken by the corporate end of the music industry. Anything that a substantial minority of potential buyers might not like has to be removed. Any kind of instrumental solo? Throw them out! Interesting chord progressions? Debbie won’t like it! And don’t even suggest time signatures that can’t be danced to.
Debbie, by the way, is “The Archetypical Imaginary Pop Music Consumer & Ultimate Arbiter of Musical Taste for the Entire Nation“, as described by the late, great Frank Zappa way back in 1984. And things have got far worse since then.
It’s pure sausage factory. Yes, there is an enormous variety of vastly superior and more adventurous music out there, but almost all of it is completely off the radar screen of those who take all their cues from the mass media.
I suppose you could say that those who are willing to be spoon-fed rather than seek out good music for themselves deserve the thin gruel they get. But I can help feel that we all suffer from such an impoverished mainstream cultural landscape, where almost everyone who actually cares about music has opted out of the mainstream altogether.
What do you think?