The Pop of Today Vs Pop Of Yesterday

Neapolitan · 01-28-2014, 01:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by galt54

Well, I will never reach omniscience. And I am too smart to worry my head about that fact. The best procedure is to think in principles.

On the basis of rational principles, I say that it makes sense that people whose minds were crippled by modern education would only be able to achieve less in all fields, including songwriting, than in earlier years. So my impression that there is less good pop music around today than in former years makes eminent sense.

Also, I know on the basis of rational principles that it does not make sense to hypothesize that there might be a lot of good pop artists out there who have been neglected by the commercial music industry. For music industry executives who neglected anything as good as, or better than, The Beatles would be guilty of leaving an awful lot of money on the table for no good reason. And why would they do that?

The Rock bands that immediately follow the Beatles weren't exactly Pop groups. It seems the music industry ignore these underground Rock bands, but maybe that only pertains to the Top 40 format. The industry made plenty of money on a lot of non Top 40 bands through selling albums and also with concert revenues as well. They were bands still part of the recording industry but were not bands on the Pop charts. As far as musicianship they were better than the Beatles. The Beatles were good for what they did, but they were not better than musicians found in most hard Rock and Prog Rock. The Beatles of course had more hits, but that doesn't mean they were better underground bands that didn't have any Top 40 hits.

The Beatles went from a unknown scruffy pub band to a Pop band for screaming girls back to experimental and underground music. There is two sides to their music. The Pop songs and the rest of their catalogue. Besides being on the charts, The Beatles seemed to be on the vanguard of underground. But most of Rock went that way underground during the late 60s. I'm not saying the Beatles lead the way or split music into Pop and underground. There has always been a divide between very popular music which was tracked on the Pop charts and an underground of less familiar music to the public as a whole, which was the case even in the Jazz era. And when speaking of underground Rock music of the late '60s, '70s Jazz had a far reaching influence. The Beatles really didn't delve into Blues or Jazz like hard Rock & Prog bands did. Rock music didn't get worse after the Beatles, to many it improved and got more sophisticated with things the Beatles didn't bother with or couldn't.

Sometimes I go back and forth whether the bands that were in the Pop charts after the Beatles were for the most part industry's choice and were not always as good as the Beatles. I do & don't agree depending on the band/artist and what type of music etc.

It seems as an apple or orange comparison when talking about The Beatles that a fan knows everything about versus a bunch of groups that a (Beatles) fan knows very little about them. Is the Beatle fan comparing #1 hits or non-singles of The Beatles to a song on the Top 40 chart? How can one say The Beatles are better than so-and-so when all they heard is that one hit?