Pop Music Popularity

The Nostalgia Chick's most recent video review is about the recent trend (where recent is defined as since 1998 -gosh culture moves fast these days...) in Blonde Bombshell Pop-rockers. I don't actually recommend this video unless you're really interested in reliving and thinking about why Brittney Spears, Christina Aguillera, Jessica Simpson (she had straight hair once?!), Lady Gaga, and Kesha (and I'm not justifying her existence with a $ on the s, regardless of what her passport says) were popular to the degrees that they were.

But there was one line in the review that struck me. Back when Lady Gaga was Stefani Germanotta -she was a very talented musician. Lady Gaga... is not. -A brief aside, I must be totally tone deaf because, style aside, I can't tell why Lady Gaga's singing is worse than Stefani Germanotta's- And this is why she's successfull. The Nostaliga Chick chalks this up to "image" when dealing with teenagers.

Now, I rather enjoy a little pop music. I'm not a huge fan, but I have been known to walk the halls of the University humming "Poker Face" (I think if I sang the words they'd fire me...) and I once recited the lyrics to "Pour Some Sugar On Me" in class by way of referencing the T-Mobil Commercial to make a totally unrelated point. Also as a college student I enjoyed "Hey Ya" probably far more than was healthy. Once I liked the Black Eyed Peas for reasons I'd like to not remember. And the Black Eyed Peas aside, I've never felt particularly embarrassed by enjoying this music. Maybe it was because I also had loaded up in my car several CDs of classical music. I'll kill hours driving across Missouri listening to Beethoven's symphonies (5, 4th movement in particular gets a lot of play). Granted, I wouldn't try to analyze pop music very hard -a rule I'm about to break.

When I catch myself singing in the shower, dancing around the apartment, and generally having a happy-go-lucky time acting like a moron -and this includes the times I danced from the Computer Lab to my Office in full view of the entire department while humming "Weapon of Choice" and "Never Gonna Give You Up" I was not looking for music with any particular aesthetic quality. The music was fun, easy to sing, and you could dance to it.





I hum the 5th Symphony from time to time, also "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" and "Fugue in G-Minor." When seasonally appropriate I'll hum or sing Chanticleer's arrangement of Franz Beible's "Ave Maria" or any of a number of great pieces of music. I do all of them badly -I don't have the range for "Ave Maria," the mouths for "Fugue" or the tongue of "Nachtumusic." In any case, these are hardly "fun" pieces of music. Beautiful, yes -like the kind of thing you see in a museum. But pop music strikes me more as the paintings you adorn your bedroom with if you aren't insanely rich.






Pop music is a more participatory genre. Great music is something written for skilled musicians to perform in an appropriate venue for an audience. The audience claps at the end of Bach's Concertos, they clap with "Hey Ya."

And to cap my point: can you imagine this happening

With classical music?