A Letter to the Music Snob

I love music, I consider myself a music man. I play the electric guitar, I used to dabble in drums and vocal lessons and I took piano for a few years. In other words, stick me with a bassist and you have a one man band... and a bassist (let's face it this sums up the sentiment of the general public toward's bassists anyway). I find myself constantly on the verge of being a pompous stuck-up intellectual when I say things like "I hate (insert pop song here)." And it gets me thinking about the general consensus by many music-lovers that music today has dumbed down for the masses. Has it really? Join me as I dive into the rabbit hole and explore the diversity of music to illustrate how pop is it's own type of good.

This article is really just a way to make my case against those who turn their nose against generic pop and label it with one brush stroke as "TRASH". I despise the fact that somehow musicianship suddenly became the main priority in music when really music is so much more than that. This topic has been argued against many times and in many better ways, so this is my personal attempt and my perspective, a creator is only as unique as he believes. Before I begin, the general hate is directed at today's pop scene, so let's throw all other genres who have their own solid fanbases out the window because frankly it would be exhausting to cover all those bases. I do not want to argue the merit of Mongolian throat singing (here) to Indian Cartonic music (here ya go).

The first and weakest argument is how music these days require less skill and there's a whole host of things wrong with that sentiment. It is hard to put a measure on skill and so obviously the argument is already too vague. Generally, we think of instrumental virtuosity (my favourite example of this is Paul Gilbert's Technical Difficulties), vocal virtuosity (Queen of the Night Aria where she sounds closer to a well-tuned flute than herself) or lyrical virtuosity (check out Eminem's second verse on Infinite) but there's so much more. One of the most overlooked and under-appreciated ways to be a virtuoso is in producing. A good producer makes or breaks a song (check out the thinking behind John Mayer's New Light). I believe the producers and DJ's of this world who spend years training their ear to produce the most impactful beat deserve just as much credit as the drummer who spent years perfecting their technique. Who is to say that Noisia, when making his Machine Gun 16 bit Remix, required any less skill than Jake Shimabukuro when he performed his epic rendition of While My Guitar Gently Weeps on the ukulele? The skill in pop may not lie in your traditional musicianship, but nobody can deny the skill of the producers of the pop industry who churn out palatable song after palatable song, each one sounding like a million bucks.

And now I get to the main crux of the argument, a difficult song does not in any way make a good song. The great Miles Davis said "it's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play." The ultimate skill is really in the writing. It takes an incredible knack to write a hit, to understand what the average person will consider, as the cool kids say these days, a bop. This is why an incredibly difficult song like this one by Behold the Arctopus is pretty much universally accepted to be ugly, while Khalid's 3 chord Young Dumb & Broke is at the very least pleasant to listen to if not a great song.

Perhaps musicians are bored with pop. I feel people who have been musically trained experience music very differently compared to those who have not (this is in no way implying we are better). Us musicians forget sometimes that a lot of the music we love are songs written by musicians, for musicians. For example, Jacob Collier's Grammy Winning arrangement of You and I is to my ears, beautiful. But it takes knowledge on music theory to fully appreciate the work he's put into it and to anyone taking the song at face value, there's a lot of dissonance and is quite frankly, kinda boring. It doesn't have a rhythm, the melody changes too much every repetition to really be clear on what's going on, it's really slow and meandering and by the end it gets really weird with the chords. These are all legitimate criticisms. I like to use the analogy of a chess game between grandmasters that only people who enjoy chess theory can fully appreciate the genius of. To your average guy it's probably really boring to watch. In the same vein, your average music listener is understanding and appreciating very different things in music versus your highly trained musician. Music snobs need to understand that pop caters to a very different crowd than jazz or progressive metal and therefore a good pop song should be evaluated by different yard sticks to decide whether it's "good" or not.

The second and much stronger argument is that pop is heartless. In other words the emotional content of pop music is generic, trashy or just non-existent. This is a far better argument and one that I partially agree with. To define a good song as one that impacts you is a good criteria if any, making virtuosity completely irrelevant. I'm not ashamed to admit that i've teared up while listening to Tim Minchin's heartfelt performance of Dark Side and laughed at Hovey Benjamin's stoic Send Bobs and I regard both songs as equally good. It's also clear to see that many pop songs lack depth and often times a lot more. Take Far East Movement's Like A G6, for example. But I would argue that again that there is more to pop than that. Even the trashiest of pop songs have a groove and it gets us dancing. The pompous jazz lover in you may roll your eyes at the thought of clubbing music being considered good but it's good at what it does. To some people out there, Like A G6 may resonate with them on an emotional level more than Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody (need I link to this?) and that's perfectly valid to me. To some people a song that gets their hips shaking is far better than a song that gets their hearts melancholic over love.

I do however want to discuss my gripe with today's pop music. Setting aside whether or not there is emotional content within today's pop songs, I am very displeased with the morals many of these songs are projecting, particularly the start of artists flexing making it into the pop genre. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always found flexing to be exclusively part of the rap game. It makes sense because hip-hop and rap was born out of the rap battle scene, so it's natural that things like diss-tracks exist. It would be ridiculous if Sam Smith released a melodious ballad that completely trashed Adele (but I'd love to see it happen). In the same way, flexing has very much been a feature of the rap game. We only hear rappers going on about wealth, girls and the relative level to which they keep things quote-unqoute "real". But this vibe has been leaking into the pop scene. Recently, Ariana releases 7 Rings, a song basically flaunting her wealth. In the context of rap, the flex is directed at other rappers. It's a rap game because there are winners and there are losers and everyone is in a competition. But in pop, the flex is really not directed at anybody but the fans and to me that's insane. At what point did society deem excessive to be an quality we want in our idols? What message does 7 Rings have other than "I'm richer than you and my life is better than yours"? Not to be that guy who worries unnecessarily about what values the media is teaching the children but, what values is this song teaching children? I pray that there is some irony that is lost on me and that the true intention of songs like these aren't to flex on the fans because if it is, then the values embedded in the pop industry are more skewed than I thought.

To end it all off, my penultimate view to end all views is this: music is good if you think it is. If you Socratic question your line of thinking about why pop is bad and another genre is good, you'll find that there is no basis by which to judge all music by. Music, is a subjective experience and therefore any opinion on it is just that, opinion and it can never be objective, provable fact. What determines whether we like or dislike a song is a mystery x factor and every breath spent trying to justify a song's worth is a breath wasted. Hate on pop music all you want, but understand that it brings more impact to more listeners than the operas and caprices that we hold on such high pedestals ever will. And that makes it good. What better way to judge the greatness of a song if not by it's impact? If a trashy song falls short by every musical measure and yet makes the whole world dance, then crown it the greatest song ever written.