gianluca

Here's an essay on why I hate pop music I wrote not too long ago for a weblog. Are there any other people out there who think the same way?

WHY I HATE POP MUSIC

I hate pop music, I hate it passionately and I hate it more and more. I hate its childishly simplistic tunes, lyrics and song structure, its lack of musical invention and its formulaic nature. I hate the superficial lifestyle culture that is associated with pop music and the way it has become an unavoidable part of our Western culture. I hate the undeserved exposure and attention pop artists get in the media, as if there is any news value to the notion that pop singer X has divorced for the nth time or that pop singer Y has shaved her head completely bald. I hate the hype surrounding the release of a new album by supposedly “great” pop artists and bands, as if people are awaiting a new masterpiece in the vein of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion.

The older I get, the more I detest pop music in almost all of its subgenres (from mainstream pop and rock to metal to punk to funk to rap and hiphop to techno and dance to reggae/ska to whatever these different pop genres are labeled), which – like all expressions of popular culture – I see as a form of regressive, degenerate culture infantilizing Western society. Never before in the history of Western music, has popular culture dictated people’s conception, definition and taste of music to such a disproportionate extent. Although there has always been a distinction between music for the masses (or “popular music”) and a more sophisticated music for an elite (or “art music”), never before has popular music pushed art music to the cultural margins the way it does nowadays. Even the higher educated and more cultivated people (those who were traditionally more into art or classical music than the lower educated) seem to have lost interest in classical music, preferring the Rolling Stones over Beethoven. Classical music is dying a slow and silent death in a cultural ghetto; long live the stupidity and vulgarity of pop music!

Yes, pop music is simplistic, vulgar, shallow and uninteresting when compared to classical music. The musical talent of so-called great pop musicians is negligible compared to the talent of truly great classical musicans and the creativity involved in pop music compares to the creativity involved in classical music the way a Neanderthal compares to a highly developed modern human: Pop music has nothing of the melodic and harmonic invention, musical variety, structural and formal richness, intricate counterpoint and intellectual and emotional profoundness that makes classical music so great.

I wouldn’t hate pop music so much, if it didn’t have this enormous, widespread cultural influence (these days, even the most infantile pop “artists” with hardly any musical talent at all can become highly influential cultural icons whom everyone is talking about...), if it weren’t so omnipresent and if you could ignore it (which you can’t, because there’s pop music everywhere – on tv, in the supermarket, in restaurants, bars, clubs, shops, gyms, gas stations, airports, etc.). For 99% of the population, pop music is the only music that counts, the only music that exists. For these people, classical music is a museum piece that only exists if they happen to get exposed to it in some way.

Moreover, pop music promotes a way of listening that destroys the ability to appreciate classical music. Generally, you don’t listen to pop music for deep emotions, rich structure, intricate counterpoint, melodic and harmonic invention, etc. Most kids listen to pop music for superficial features, such as “a nice beat”, a singable tune or a lifestyle feeling that is expressed in the music. Listening is perhaps the wrong term here, for most pop music isn’t even actively listened to, it is merely passively consumed. Since pop music is so omnipresent, many people nowadays regard music as nothing but auditory wallpaper: something nice one can relax to and which doesn’t require a lot of attention, something that is passively heard while at the same time engaging in other activities such as reading a book or cooking. This way of listening promoted by pop music is detrimental to the appreciation of classical music. To really appreciate classical music, it is necessary to concentrate, listen actively and make an effort to grasp the deeper intellectual and emotional meaning of the music.

Being a composer of (contemporary) classical music, I am constantly reminded that this great long tradition of classical music, which has evolved for centuries from Machaut to Bach to Mozart and Beethoven to Wagner, Mahler, Schönberg up to 20th century modernism, has suddenly become a dying tradition that has no meaning anymore to most of the people in our culture – thanks to the emergence of pop music as THE dominant musical paradigm of our time – and it sometimes makes me really, really embittered.