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

also in the synthesis?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

a confident-sounding commentator on one of the now dozens of TV "tributes" i've caught a glimpse of -- don't recall who it was at all -- made a point i'd not really ever thought of (and don't really have the right knowledge to process) which is that the underlying structures and chord sequences of "off the wall" certainly and "thriller" maybe (by maybe i mean i forget if he was talking abt thriller or just OtW) are much more jazz than was the norm in pop at that time, black or white

i have no idea if this claim is true -- or what exactly s/he meant by it (there's the quincy jones backstory obviously, but i think the commentator meant something more concrete than "if quincy's involved it MUST be jazz")

james brown also often said that the centre of his music was jazz, rather than blues or gospel

Re: also in the synthesis?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

(obviously if what JB said was true, then the commentator would be wrong)

Re: also in the synthesis?

[koganbot]

Well, also, "jazz" used to have a broader meaning than it now has. E.g., if Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan are jazz, then why aren't the Drifters and Chuck Berry? JB's antagonism towards the blues is well known, but that doesn't make it clear what her was antagonistic towards. About half of what Charlie Parker recorded used a 12-bar chord progression, and so does James Brown's "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag," but neither feels like blues, or like each other.

And of course a lot of JB's live vamps of, say, "Prisoner Of Love" or "I Lost Someone," were totally based on gospel. But maybe he thinks the "core" is something else?

king of the eastern bop

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i wondered as i was writing the above if JB perhaps meant something closer to the element you discussed in death rock 2000 -- about the democracy of vocal-as-rhythm (in a context of everything-as-rhythm) in his version of funk? which is a quality of some kinds of jazz and not others (well the democracy is: the democratisation isn't a turning-of-everything-into-rhythm, and it only fitfully applies to vocals...) (so probably he didn't mean this)

it seems a curious and a suggestive thing for him to have said, but the writers who quote him saying it don't seem especially interested in following it up

Re: king of the eastern bop

[koganbot]

Early JB, possibly "Prisoner Of Love" is "jazz" in the sense that Nat King Cole is jazz (but JB not jazz as opposed to gospel, since obviously this from 1:40 to 3:10 is textbook gospel, minus God)(are you sure that "gospel" was part of what JB was disavowing as central to his music? or was it just "blues" - anyway the gospel vamps, which he could stretch to eight minutes, may be the root source of "Oh, let's get rid of everything else and turn it all into rhythm).

Re: king of the eastern bop

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

by "rather than" i didn't especially mean that *he* disavowed anything explicitly -- more that the thing he said was the centre wasn't what you'd perhaps expect him to say

so this:
james brown also often said that the centre of his music was jazz, rather than blues or gospel
means:
james brown also often said "the centre of my music is jazz", where you'd perhaps expect him to say blues or gospel -- but actually "centre" is my way of saying it, not his

on a quick skim i found this quote (from cynthia rose's book, Living in America: the Soul Sage of James Brown):
"My first influence was gospel, but my second influence is jazz. I do like some blues, but I don't really go too deep there. I probably only really like two or three blues artists. I have pretty big jazz feelings, though. I been right through that book."

Which maybe in fact does put gospel at the centre, but certainly then unexpectedly complicates that -- bcz what's the relationship of jazz to gospel? -- and I then oversimplified this in my memory, maybe? (Except I actually think it was another quote i'm remembering, which I haven't re-found: anyway, I still think this is an under-explored aspect... Rose does discuss it a little, for a paragraph, then moves elsewhere (it's a very short book, though full of fascinating stuff)

Re: king of the eastern bop

[koganbot]

Going back to MJ commentator, I wonder what a jazz chord sequence would be? (Not saying that there can't be such a thing; understanding chord sequences is not exactly my strength. Once JB went funk, a typical JB chord sequence would be I-IV-I. But the chords themselves would be ninths or elevenths or other exotica that you might indeed get from the jazz playbook.