The Inventor Of Modern Pop

[koganbot]

Moggy on MJ (Kids These Days): Except that this morning I've been listening to a 1Xtra tribute show and have realised a) my woeful lack of any kind of knowledge of his back-catalogue beyond a few very big hits and b) exactly how incredibly world-formingly important he was. It sounds pretty stupid but I had no idea that when people said he invented modern pop music, they actually meant he literally invented modern pop music.

Aptly enough, I was talking to my mother only a couple of hours before reading that, and she, having just heard some clips of Michael, said she couldn't hear in the music what was ever supposed to have been so innovative about it, so couldn't understand why he's considered to have invented modern pop music.

I said I was inclined to agree with her, since, while Michael synthesized elements in his work, you can't say that he invented any of its basic vocabulary.

Maybe this underestimates the inventive role of synthesis, but anyway, the story I would tell is this:

Michael reasserted the importance of gospel-based soul in the post-disco dancepop world (more the relatively smooth style of the gospel quartets and balladeers than that of the shouters and stompers, though his truncated yelps certainly drew on the latter), but he didn't create musical vocabulary in the way that, say, James Brown or Sly Stone or Miles Davis can be said to have created musical vocabulary. And postdisco dance music already used a whole hunk of gospel-based soul anyway, albeit more from the diva-shouter side (diva-shouter being another synthesis). The forward motion of music at the time of Thriller didn't seem to be Thriller but hip-hop and dancehall and electrofunk and techno and club music (other motions either had nothing to do with Michael, e.g. hair metal going glitter, or were so ongoingly pervasive that Thriller and Off The Wall can hardly have been said to be stimulating them or leading them: e.g., the integration of soul stylizations into countrypolitan and into Italianate and showbiz showoff pop and the integration of those types of music into soul/r&b; or e.g. the hard-rock guitar on "Beat It," which would only have been surprising to people who'd solidly ignored '70s funk). The actual task of working soul/r&b into that forward motion was undertaken by Prince in regard to synthpop and by Teddy Riley and the New Edition alums in regard to hip-hop. When Michael himself started working with Riley, he was playing catch up.

As I said, maybe this underestimates the role of his synthesis in "invention," and maybe without Michael having gone mega, r&b wouldn't be so pre-eminent today, but that's the work of a lot of hands, without Michael's necessarily being dominant.

Comments

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Another odd thing about considering Prince the primary r&b + synthpop guy, of course, is that r&b and synth-pop had obviously also been merged all through the disco era, especially in Europe, since 1975 ("Fly Robin Fly" by Silver Convention) at least, only the synth-pop in question then was Kraftwerk rather than, say, Duran Duran or Soft Cell.

[koganbot]

Replying to a whole bunch of this at once: yes, disco vocals were saturated in soul-gospel which is why postdisco was too, I meant to say that, though disco (like postdisco) leaned more towards shouters than towards smoothies; but yes there were more smoothies than just Michael. I do think that Michael steers the way towards Bel Biv Devoe et al. more than Luther does, and I really wonder if without Thriller's going mega a bunch of other stuff from new jack swing to Backstreet Boys to R. Kelly to The-Dream takes the same form; the ongoing motion in countrypolitan etc. at the time of Thriller obviously is already going on, so yes of course stretches back into the '70s (and '60s). Glitter into metal is equally ongoing (though I suppose you're right that glammetal and hair metal are generally synonymous). Actually the term r&b was long out of favor, in the '60s had given way to "soul" and in the '70s to "funk" and "disco" and simply "black," so when Christgau was writing it was starting to return as a general catch-all phrase (strangely, though this is unrelated, so was "bohemian," which had clearly been relegated to the '50s and earlier, or so I thought, and then in the early '80s or so also returned as a catch-all now that "hippies," "freaks," "punks," etc. were too specialized).

Anyway, you seem to more than agree with me that Michael can't be said to have invented modern pop.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Okay, had somehow missed what you meant by "ongoingly"; that makes sense now. Somehow also missed that you'd mentioned New Edition, who in fact were not preceded by New Edition no matter what I imply above. Have to give the disco smoothies vs. shouters ratio more thought; occurs to me, though, that the r&b '80s may well have been more dominated by smoothies (see Debarge etc), though that may well be the MJ i influence at work too. Also occurs to me that certain early '80s pretty-haired AOR bands (like say Night Ranger or Prism) might be considered hair-metal before it grew a glam influence, though I'd be surprised if anybody actually called them that at the time.

And yeah, I definitely don't think that any one person could have invented modern pop. Though I may also be more skeptical than you are that there's even such a thing as "modern pop," which somehow for me implies a sea change in pop music that I'm not convinced ever happened; pop music has been changing all along, and it's not like there was a time in the recent past that pop didn't exist. So the idea of "modern" vs. "pre-modern" pop eras really doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Also probably worth mentioning though that, without Michael Jackson, there would be no New Edition, since the Jackson Five were clearly and blatantly New Edition's template, just like New Edition were clearly the template for New Kids on The Block (and therefore indirectly the Backstreet Boys and *N Sync) later.

Also, not sure how Jam/Lewis (as pervasive in the '80s as Teddy Riley, I would guess) fit into all this, but I was reading an essay by Steve Perry (not the Journey guy) in an old Simon Frith edited collection recently where he said that, of Minnesota's significant stable of '80s r&b stars, only Alexander O'Neal (from Natchez, Mississippi) was sonically or biographically rooted in soul of the deep South. (Which somehow connects with the smoothies-displacing-shouters formulation too, I'd think.)

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

And actually, all this talk about the innovations of New Edition is making me wonder about the other notabale pre-New-Jack mid '80s r&b band who were supposedly merging hip-hip with soul-vocal-group styles (albeit a couple years behind N.E., plus unlike N.E. they never eventually subdivided into several big solo careers) -- namely, Force MDs, who I haven't heard in years, and don't think I ever listened to any entire album by, even back then. (Could also be easily argued that early/mid-'80s pre-New-Jacks like Oran "Juice" Jones and Richard "Dimples" Fields and maybe even Ray Parker Jr. were drawing on hip-hop -- at least for its attitude, and for talking if not actually rapping -- and mixing it into falsetto soul and doo-wop and self-contained funk-band styles from the '50s through '70s.) (Which is not to say nobody talked before rap, obviously.)