What You Wish Pop Sounded Like
 

I think about this fairly often. There's a lot of pop out there that just doesn't do it for me, but every so often I hear something that's catchy and poppy yet still interesting and I think, "This is what pop should be like." What are some of your picks? They can be songs that are actually popular or not.

Here's one that I've thought this about for years:

Health—"Die Slow"

First thing that comes to mind is http://www.musicbanter.com/pop/82565-kitty.html. Björk and The Knife would be solid choices as well.

Great song Janz.

I have this with the first Goldfrapp album.
There's something really classy and mysterious about it. Every song has a great melody and the whole sound and production is just amazing.

Awesome^

Goldfrapp - Ooh La La


I think we are all in the same ballpark here.

Their later albums are probably good in their own right (not my style, so I can't really judge), but I find nothing in them of what I adore about Felt Mountain.

Your video is blocked in US btw.

Too bad. :(

The video is Felt Mountain in its glorious entirety.

idk I really love a lot of pop music these days. wouldn't really change any of it. songs ive come to love a lot on the recent road trip







and oh god especially



ya all good dance party tunes

Overload's also great.

I don't really have a wish that pop would sound like any particular thing at all. After all, there's a huge variety of pop out there, so there's bound to be some stuff I like and some stuff I don't.

My beef with pop is, not what it is or isn't, but what is popular. Let's just say I would have a higher regard for humanity (or, at least their musical tastes ;) ) if the most popular music out there was complex and challenging, musically. Instead, the most popular stuff tends to be pretty simple (maybe even simplistic) musically.

In my fantasy world Centipede Hz would still be on the charts, like Adele's or the Imagine Dragon's 2011/12 albums still are. And the video below would have, like, 337 million views instead of 337K.



Instead, we get the following video with over 215 million views after just 4 months!



Now, don't get me wrong, I think Taylor Swift has a lot of talent, and her songs are decent. But they're still rather conventional, which is a bit disappointing.

Great album in my top 10

and yeah there is a lot of amazing pop..

Bjork
The Knife
Goldfrapp
Fever ray
FKA Twigs
Perfume Genius
Grimes' earlier stuff

couple of examples

lol no thanks.

ill take simple pop over animal collective 10 times out of 10. they just aren't good. flaccid experimental if you will.

I didn't even necessarily mean Animal Collective in particular, was just using them as an example. Any reasonably complex pop music would do. And I don't consider Taylor Swift or the Imagine Dragons to be reasonably complex.

Is complexity really the only thing you look for in music? Something can be complex and still be ****e (ie Genesis, several Yes records, pretty much most prog bands) and something can be simple and brilliant (see Velvet Underground, Renaldo and the Loaf).

No, it's not the only thing. There are plenty of simple songs I like, and there is plenty of complex music that is crap. However, ability to appreciate complex music indicates to me that the listener has more sophisticated musical tastes (generally) - and that, in turn, tells me the listener will tend to have a wee bit more gray matter between the ears. Basically, I use musical tastes as a sort of social barometer (though by no means the only one). A population in which, say, Schoenberg or Coltrane, was the most popular musical artist, is probably going to be a nicer population to live amongst, than a population in which, say, Johnny Cash or Fats Domino, were the most popular artists.

And it's not that Johnny Cash and Fats Domino don't have their own virtues (I actually like both), but their music doesn't tend to be very complex. Not much gray matter needed to appreciate it. If society's most popular stuff was also the most simple, to me that reflects on society.

Well at least I'm not that pretentious.

ya id bet the exact opposite would be true

"DriveYourCar" would like to see more complex, challenging music in the pop charts, but I'm happy to look elsewhere for that kind of music. For me, pop should stay simple.

Firstly, it's a chance for sophisticated discerning listeners (like what we is on MB) to loosen up once in a while. On stage one time, Zappa was explaining how he'd rearranged The Black Page, which was too complicated for many people, and he ended his introduction like this :"Get down with your bad self and enjoy the easy New York teenage version..." Well, imo pop music should be an opportunity for us to get down with our bad selves.

More importantly though, pop music is the route by which children begin to fall in love with music. They don't usually want anything too fancy or harsh, so good pop should include plenty of songs that are happy and harmless. This song did it for me when I was eight years old and spent my birthday money on Little Eva's single:-

...."Chugga chugga motion like a railroad train" - That's what we need more of in pop!!

Well, I guess it depends on what kind of people you prefer to be around! :laughing:

Imo, even though I love the guy's music, Schoenberg was kind of close minded for such an innovator. I wouldn't be surprised if that was passed on to at least some of his fans (although it didn't seem to affect Cage).

Ya not dweebs thanks

hmmm, I'll go with anything that has the pop artists composing their own music, instead of sampling beats and twiddling with knobs

What if it's so seamless that it sounds like a full band even though it's what you described? Would finding out that it's a person using samples and electronics make you dislike the piece that you previously loved?

No, a good song is a good song, I'm just sick of all the talentless R&B and EDM bull$hit that rules our top 40 world.

Well then it sounds like you should be more against the bull**** element than the process that was used to create it. There's a lot of horrible rock out there like Journey or Three Days Grace, and even though I prefer electronic artists like Actress or Oneohtrix Point Never, I'm not going to make an affront to acoustically based artists. I think that since there's such a diversity in songs/sounds, then there's infinitely more diversity in sampling since you can change the sound of the sample through several means like reverse effect, reverb, speed shift, flanger, phaser...the list is endless.

I find the whole anti-electronic vibe to be ignorant tbh. It doesn't give credit to the computer or processor as an instrument as it should be considered and that attitude takes away from the passion that electronic artists have when it comes to their music. What you can accomplish with electronics is massive, but if you've only heard lame techno or Skrillex, I can see why you'd think otherwise.

That was rather long rant lol,

Since all I did throughout a large part of the 90's was listen to electronic music, it would be wrong to label me anti electronic.

Nevertheless, if your going to make electronic music learn to play the keyboard, or at least how to compose arrangements, as opposed to just twiddling with knobs and matching a beat.

So many Electronic dance songs do not have choruses or bridges because there just sampling someone else's creativity, which is why most pop artists suck these days. Just imagine how good Rihanna and Kesha would be if they had just a quarter of the musical talent that Annie Lennox has.

That may be true in the pop realm, I honestly don't follow much so I'm not sure how much water that statement holds. I just know that there are so many current electronic artists that would be a better alternative to the pop that I have heard than most current non-electronic artists. 'Just twiddling with knobs' is harder than a lot of people give credit for. I'm a musician, and making something using samples and effects is something that I've tried and failed at many times.

Dissenting against a style or group of artists in popular music is one thing, but when you go about making the argument about the instrumentation and composition instead of the music itself is where you start to lose me.

guy with guitar avatar complains about the state of electtronic music more at 11 jim

As much as I love electronic music, there are great limitations on one's artistic creativity if they have to rely on sampling someone else's music, as opposed to creating their own.

If I play a brass or string instrument (Saxophone, guitar ect) I can go anywhere I want on the musical scale. I can make any arrangement of chords I want, to convey the feeling I'm going after.

If I'm relying on my sampler or the arpeggio in my synthesizer than I'm really limited on what I can do. I can sample a beat from another artist and loope it, but normally I can't make a chorus or a bridge. I'm creatively restricted.

If your say Portishead, and in addition to sampling you can compose your own songs and play instruments than you get the best of both worlds, but if your just your standard trance or house dj, chances are that the majority of your work is going to sound pretty boring & monotonous

who are you actually talking about? the "sampling a whole song" is the largest strawman casting its shadow over pop music ive ever heard.

Anyways Frownland I wish you the best on your own creative endeavors.

Its been a long time since I created my own electronic music, but I held on to my synth after all these years in case I want to take another crack at it. Hopefully software like Cubase has become a lot more user friendly from when I had to lug away at it.

All those things you're complaining about are good for what they are used for; doing ecstasy and grinding on each other in clubs. I don't see why it has to be technical or full of talent to be considered good music. Music isn't a talent contest, except to those looking to prove their superiority.

Well there is already so so so much music out there that you could take samples and create pretty much anything. In fact, doing something like that through samples could be more difficult than composing something and playing it yourself because you have to do a lot of research or have a lot of knowledge to find those sounds that you want. Talking against samples or electronics as if they're not capable of doing anything apart from what you've heard in top 40 stuff, it's kind of like saying that you don't like the guitar because you don't like what George Harrison played. I don't think that those limitations really exist, because the end result is all that matters and I know examples from both electric and acoustic acts that have good and bad outcomes.

Tl;dr it's not the instrument, it's the artist.

Fowns, I have to wonder if you have been reading anything I wrote, outside of the sampling? :)

1. I love electronic music, in the 90's I probably listened to more electronic based music than I did rock or rap.

2. I have made electronic music, and yes sampling can be challenging, but I find that having to learn how to play an instrument really well is more difficult.

3. From my own experience of making electronic music, I can say first hand that you have much more creative freedom if you can play your own instrument, because you can play whatever note you like in whatever arrangement. Your not tied down to the sample or the arpeggio beat in your synth.

(One of my most frustrating experiences in trying to make electronic music was that I would find this really wicked synth beat in my arpeggio bank, but I couldn't build on it, no matter how hard we tried it was near impossible to make a chorus or bridge that would match the sounds beat and tempo, so we were stuck with being forced to build around this one beat, which is pretty much what most Dj's do. Its like having the verse through a whole song. We were using Cubase VST 3.5 at the time, so maybe the technology has advanced, but it doesn't appear to have.

4. I think some of the confusion here may lie in the fact that the acronym EDM has been hijacked by $hit artists and dj's, (Skrillex, Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia) it no longer means Leftfield, Burial or Underworld)

You can sample single notes and combine them all together.

And there are slicers that slice up samples so you can recombine them note by note.

Didn't know they could do that but that just further proves the point. Thanks Grindy.

At least FL Studio has the slicer. It's used for cutting up drum loops, but I use it to sample and cut up melody as well. It's not very clean, but one can work around that.
I'm pretty sure there are also more sophisticated programms made for exactly that purpose.