Quote:
Originally Posted by Stu
Everything you've said here refers to chart music created to rake in as much sales for record companies as possible. There are vast amounts of bands out there that have made the creation of a GENUINELY GREAT pop songs an art form.
Let's take the most obvious example - the Beatles. Throughout their recording career they wrote some truly exceptional 3-minute bursts of pop music that expertly made use of melody, hooks, lyricism etc to maximise listener engagement. Songs such as Help! utilised various components essential to a great pop music and they're rightly remembered as one of the greatest bands of all time.
Not all pop music is top 40 fare. You have bands like The Smiths who essentially made a living off pop songs. They just constructed them in a way that communicated with their audience.
Their is a real craft in writing great pop songs, Rebecca Black's Friday is not an example of a great pop song...
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Good point. Beatles actually were quite complex at points(by pop standards), and played with time signatures in bits('Happiness is a Warm Gun').
Then again, it's not an issue of quality, it's an issue of simplicity. Since Beatles were kind of used to define what 'pop' is it's hard to say that the entire body of their work was entirely relegated to that definition.
Even then they were vastly more simple than say Ornette Coleman. So really since 'how much simple is simple' is an impossible debate I'll just concede to pop music being incredibly simplistic compared to the whole spectrum.