The Elephant In The Room

[koganbot]

Posted this on a Freaky Trigger comment thread:

The elephants in the room of popular music, the ones who not only don't get talked about by critics and who (as far as I know) don’t get paid attention to on news or entertainment sites either, but who also get undercounted on Billboard and are mostly excluded from the Brit singles chart and therefore Popular, include what was historically called "easy listening" or "beautiful music," as well as smooth jazz, quiet storm, lite rock, adult contemporary, urban AC, and oldies. Music liked by the audiences [for such genres and formats] will always get undercounted because their listening is less concentrated on specific tracks and less concentrated on recently released ones but also because these audiences are less likely to buy the music directly, whether on a single or an album. They're nonetheless consumers, and presumably respond to what gets advertised on radio and TV (and now on YouTube?).

But I’m guessing these audiences download a lot that in the old days they'd never have purchased in physical form, and that there's been a change in e.g. the way people listen on the job from, in days of yore, hearing a radio station piped into an entire office to, nowadays, listening to their individual iPods and such. I emphasize that these are guesses.

Ref. to "Popular" is to Tom Ewing's project over the last decade of blurbing and shepherding a discussion on every track to hit number 1 on the British singles chart from 1952 to the present — hence also my reference to the Brit singles chart.

The phrase "elephant in the room" usually refers to something that everyone affected by knows is there — a mother's drug addiction, for instance — but that, owing to e.g. family members' desire to sustain their habitual ways of working around the problem and getting through the day without too much pain, no one is willing to talk about. Whereas (1) "adult contemporary" and ilk are only a problem for someone, if there is such a person, who takes all of Anglo-American popular music as a good hunk of their remit and (2) such genres, though big enough, are generally barely attended to by those who don't deliberately tune to the stations, so are in effect invisible, and so discussion is simply not generated rather than being psychologically suppressed.

I myself don't feel a great imperative to try and take the measure of e.g. Jason Mraz and Michael Bublé; they're part of the general environment of the music I do care about, so I'd rather have knowledge than not have knowledge. But the world is full of other relevant stuff, such as the economics and sociology of music, music theory, J-pop, and so forth, that I'm also not paying enough attention to, and that I'm more interested in. So Mraz, Bublé, et al. will continue to get short shrift from me.*

Btw, the elephant in my own headspace is that I wrote those four Freaky Trigger comments in a feeling of real petulance, which I put massive effort into suppressing since I didn't want to (or I'm not yet ready to) inflict it onto Tom and co. Last April Mark Sinker, without knowing it, in effect asked me what my relationship should be to my old ilX/Freaky Trigger/"Poptimists"** world and its Tumblr offshoots. Am I in or out? I think the answer is that triage is telling me that I'm out but this doesn't mean I shouldn't intervene now and then to tell them why I'm out. But the question is still open.

"Jason Mraz - I'm Yours (Official Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

*About five years ago I was at a karaoke bar and the master of ceremonies briefly stepped in to do a competent job on a Michael Bublé tune, and I appreciated the competence and therefore Bublé. Otherwise I've considered Bublé a snore; but then I've not put the effort in to find out whether I'm mistaken.

**"Poptimists" is a reference to the now mostly moribund lj community (poptimists), which I was once an active part of, not to the supposed rockcrit perspective. I don't consider myself a "poptimist" in the latter sense. I'm like Lex in that regard, though he made a point of breaking with the community, too.

Comments

I'm posting this so that your own comment can be a reply and won't get lost among the spam

[koganbot]

My favorite fact about the U.S. "Adult Contemporary" chart is that from June 6 to December 12, 2009, the number 1 spot was held by females under the age of 21. What happened in mid December wasn't that the top song was displaced, but that Taylor Swift had her 21st birthday.

(Of course, I do think and write about Taylor, despite her being on the AC chart. But she has appeared on other genre charts, as well.)

Re: I'm posting this so that your own comment can be a reply and won't get lost among the spam

[koganbot]

[UPDATE: Whatever the elephant in the room is, I hope it can do arithmetic better than I can. From June 6 to December 12, 2009, the number one spot on the U.S. adult contemporary singles chart was held by teenagers. On December 13, 2009, Taylor Swift, born Dec. 13, 1989, turned 20. "You Belong With Me" held on at number one through the week of January 23, 2010; on January 30 it was displaced by Michael Bublé's "Haven't Met You Yet," the week after by Colbie Caillat's "Fallin' For You," then "You Belong With Me" returned for a final week on top. Back in 2009, prior to "You Belong With Me," the top song on AC was 16-year-old Miley Cyrus's "The Climb" (week of July 18–week of October 24), before that Taylor Swift's "Love Story" (week of June 6–week of July 11).]

[askbask.livejournal.com]

I guess I have a relationship with that scene through artists I care about having a relationship. Especially Mraz. I don't know how many times I've seen artists cover Mraz, even if I find myself skipping ahead when I can.

Also k-pop artists have a very deep love for some 'cafe pop' or MOR singer songwriter stuff I don't understand. Like 'Officially Missing You' which must have been in the top 10 here with like 3-4 different versions, not to mention other cover versions.

[koganbot]

I think if I were to spend the time, I'd start historically, going back to, say, artists like Isaac Hayes who drew from "beautiful music" without being it; so I'd want to find out whom he drew on, and give them a shot.

In general, when it comes to easy listening, where to start? Mantovani? Ray Conniff? (Okay, just listened to a Conniff track that was dreadful; but I have the vague impression that some interesting Latino musicians think he's tops.)

Or I might go to country slush: Kenny Rogers, whom I'm sure I underrated. Might want to try his duets with Dottie West.

The AC stations and smooth jazz stations play plenty of good material, much of which wasn't designed specifically for them. I remember Anthony Miccio on Rolling Teenpop 2006 talking about how Evanescence crossed over to AC, not just with pretty stuff like "My Immortal" but via the crunchy "Bring Me To Life," too.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

And you very much find it in reggae also.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Something like this phenom seems to be pretty common in all kinds of pop musics, from all over the world: it was a pretty useful corrective, when writing about Ghana or Nigeria in the 1980s, to have respectfully to acknowledge that Gentleman Jim Reeves was as important there, if not necessarily more important, than James Brown or Michael Jackson (not to mention locally significant figures old and new). I can honestly say that I'd *never* encountered discussion of Reeves in US or UK rockwrite at that date, in many years of close reading. I knew who he was in the sense that I knew his face from record sleeves in second-hand shops, and best-ofs in the oldsters sections in UK record shops.

[koganbot]

John Morthland in his Best Of Country Music blurbs six Reeves albums — all compilations — which are six more than Kenny Rogers gets.* Morthland probably gives us a reasonably good representation of the sorts of country music that rock critics were likely to like in 1984. But though five of the six Reeves blurbs are substantial (i.e., several sentences), Morthland doesn't really have much to say about the music beyond the adjective "mellifluous" and the quoted description "a touch of velvet," with references to "grainy" and "honky-tonk" and "hard-core country" on the one hand and "countrypolitan" and "schmaltz" and the "Nashville sound" on the other, the latter predominating and not presented by Morthland as too inviting. Morthland does mention (twenty years after Reeves' death) "the Reeves' cult — if a following as large as his can be thus described." And a few sentences later: "his mind-boggling popularity, which continues to grow to this day," presumably referring to the U.S. more than to Africa.

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Was Reeves as or more important than James Brown in Ghana and Nigeria or merely more often cited and praised? I'm thinking that Brown's musical structures could be in effect even for people who don't think much about his music (just as the Yardbirds' can be in effect for punks and indie people who've barely listened to them).

*If the index is correct, the single mention of Rogers is to note that The Smithsonian Collection Of Classic Country Music entirely ducks (my word) the sort of music Rogers and ilk made.

[koganbot]

(But if I'd been online today between the time when Tom announced the Pop World Cup 2014 and the time — twelve minutes later — when all 32 spots were taken, I'd have been back in. Doubt that even if I'd been awake I'd have beaten Iain to South Korea, but I long had the alternate dream of managing the USA and making my entries exclusively songs in some language other than English.)(But wait, didn't Lex manage the USA once before, or was that in some other competition? A bunch of other blokes are on the waiting list anyway, hence ahead of me, so I'll not make an issue of this.)

[askbask.livejournal.com]

I fantasized last time the cup was around about managing the Korean team, this time I'd like the Japanese for the better chances of taking people by surprise with selections, although I would probably have picked some of the songs the man in charge now will pick.

[koganbot]

Patrick actually lives in Japan, doesn't he?

[askbask.livejournal.com]

Yep that does give him an advantage.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I consume lots of the coffee shop sort of music myself. In the past I usually got my fix from the Asian pop scene -- I don't have to pay attention to Japanese lyrics if I don't want to, whereas I hear the lyrics in a Jason Mraz song whether I like it or not. Nowadays I usually queue up a Songza playlist.

I remember Nick Hornby noting in the intro to one of his books that he didn't listen to classical because it turned into air freshener, for him, and he thought that was no decent way to treat good music. Personally, I think air freshener is one of the key uses of music; the reason I don't listen to classical myself is because it doesn't make the room smell the way I want it to.

BGM

[koganbot]

Classical music was originally wretched for me, since my well-meaning parents took me as a tyke to the University Of Connecticut's highly impressive concert series — Cleveland Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and the like — and since I could neither follow the musical development nor do anything else such as read or play while stuck in my seat, uncomfortable in jacket and tie, I was massively bored.

I think background music is a frequent — possibly the most frequent — use of music. Even in active settings — e.g. dancing, bar-hopping — music is part of events rather than the focus of an event. Heard in the background, music nonetheless provides mood and social markers, just as when the music is being more consciously attended to. And TV watching, while not fitting the usual connotation of "uses music as background," is of course a major part of many people's time, hence of their exposure to musical sound.

Simon Frith once pointed to a survey result where people said they valued certain magazines because the magazines were easy to put aside — one's reading could be interrupted without any loss. (Unfortunately I'm not finding the exact quote; I think it's somewhere in Performing Rites.) You can value some music because it fades from attention, but such considerations aren't yet a big part of critical discourse. House and such, and Brian Eno, have brought the idea of background music and chill-out music to a bit of respectability, but usually the discussion, if not the music itself, is in tony settings, rather than e.g. the run-of-the-mill department store.

I often use music to fall asleep to, but usually it's the exact same music that I "listen to" when I'm awake. For this purpose, the Sex Pistols and James Brown are as anodyne as Sketches Of Spain. Whereas classical music is extremely bad for falling asleep to, since I generally require a strong beat. The daytime faves of mine who do get short shrift in the Falling Asleep To category are Louis Armstrong and Fred Astaire, their best records dating from a time when recording didn't capture the full resonance of bass and drum, so the rhythm, while great, doesn't pound into you.

Gaon actually has a "background music" chart, though "background music" does not refer to a genre but — I believe — to how the Gaon people assume certain media are used.* And I don't know how Gaon compiles it (how can you tell if music on YouTube is being listened to intently or is playing in the background?). I think I once ran across a description/rationale, but I don't remember what it said. Google searches aren't quickly taking me to an explanation. The rankings aren't that different from their other charts. The stereotype for background music is that it's soothing and doesn't demand attention, but some high-beat, not-so-gentle songs do well on the chart: Miss A's "Hush" is currently number 6, and Trouble Maker's "Now (There Is No Tomorrow)"** is number 5 (where it also is on the Social Chart, which I believe (again this is a guess) measures mentions of a song in social media — which of course is an active use of the music; "Hush" is number 1 on the Social Chart).

In conclusion, I don't need "easy listening" for my easy listening.

[UPDATE: "[Joke Hermes] research on women's magazines suggested that many of their readers actually valued them for their insignificance, because they were 'easy to put down.'" Simon Frith, Performing Rites, p. 12. But I challenge the word "insignificance." Long post to come, any decade now.]

*An alternate guess would be that the chart somehow measures the popularity of instrumental b-sides, but I don't believe Gaon has the capacity to track this — and karaoke is a different chart.

**The highly unreliable Google Translate gives the translation for "내일은 없어" as "Tomorrow Is Not," which I like more than "There Is No Tomorrow." The "Not" at the end sharply cuts off the possibility of a tomorrow, tomorrowness being negated.

[koganbot]

Most of my awake listening accompanies reading, doing the dishes, and so forth; even when music is my supposed primary activity, I'm likely reading at the same time, or at least thinking or daydreaming or watching the video (which I usually do only half-attentively anyway). I rarely concentrate on what's playing. One reason I like to write about music is that needing to say something spurs me to be more attentive.

As a writer I demand that people actually think about music when they purport to be thinking about it, which I suppose runs counter to my frequent actual use of music — though it's not certain to me that having music in the background and absorbing the social markers and mood can't be considered part of thinking, even if in such "listening" I'm not immediately picking the music apart for how the mood was caused and the markers marked.

Matana Roberts

[koganbot]

Whom I listened to last night while drifting to sleep:

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Christmas Crayons

[davidfrazer.livejournal.com]

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Someone on reddit says:

People are saying this sounds like a rehashed Bar Bar Bar but it's actually much closer to Dancing Queen. People are saying it sounds like J-pop but actually this sort of disco-trot style is one of the most distinctly K-pop sounds there is. Are we all listening to the same song?

As well as disco-trot, anyone think it's got a bit of an Austral-Romanian vibe?

Re: Christmas Crayons

[koganbot]

What David embedded above:

"Lonely Christmas"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NFe61cf4C0

It does have a little bit of "We No Speak Americano"'s silent-film-era Austral oom-pah vibe.

I don't even know if this is relevant to the topic at hand.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

I find that BGM is a state of mind. At one moment, any one genre in my library can be conducive to good studying/working, at another, the same genre ruins my productivity because I find myself analyzing the music instead of my chosen task.

There's also something to be said for how people value soundtracks to various media.
Functionally, the "best" soundtrack is the one that brings the most value to the media it accompanies, but there are so many different mechanisms to do so. One is to seamlessly augment portrayed emotions, but more often, the portrayed atmosphere is ambivalent in its original form, and the "background" music is the defining factor.
Arguably, the functionally best soundtrack is the one you don't notice because it's inextricably tied to the source media, but all entries on "greatest" lists will be soundtracks that stand on their own, bringing value to the media it accompanies through its own intrinsic, independent value. As in, the soundtracks that merit buying.

This is complicated immensely in the video game industry, where background tracks are played on loop, and often seamlessly looping. Players may listen to the same track for hours on end, so a fully aggressive defining piece of music will quickly become grating, or worse, begin breaking the intended atmosphere, even serving as a trigger of the opposite emotion, due to irritation at oh my fuck it's that fucking song AGAIN.. So "greatest" video game soundtracks are both defining with intrinsic value, but also have the ability to comfortably fade into subtle enhancement. (My current obsession as the epitome of both sides is the No More Heroes OST, although if you don't want to hear ALL OF THE VARIATIONS on that main theme, you can get the greatest hits digest through just the boss themes.)

There's also something to be said about how soundtracks, (which may or may not be technically BGM, depending on how forward they are in the source media) due to the associations with the accompanying media, are arguably the most common avenue by which people are exposed to music they like in genres they do not frequent. A person with the most singular taste in music may have one or two tracks in their library in a completely unpredictable genre because they heard it on TV or in a movie once.

Re: I don't even know if this is relevant to the topic at hand.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

I would argue that anime and video game geeks will have more wildly varied music libraries, with listening trends more even spread across more genres, than most music geeks, (Wherein the former and the latter do not intersect) even when the former never takes any time to learn about the contexts and details of each genre the way the latter does. If my library was solely the works of Yoko Kanno, I might have a wider variety of styles than your average music critic. I have a music aficionado co-worker who I impressed by giving him a CD of the Bioshock Infinite covers, and I really want to share with him the joy that is the Ghost in the Shell soundtrack, especially what with Scott Matthew sounding to me like a Bowie impression.
The soundtrack for RWBY, (not technically an anime but aesthetically is one) which spans a good number of genres, was at one point more popular than the Hunger Games soundtrack on Itunes. (#1 in soundtracks on Itunes, is #4 for soundtracks on Billboard this week, was #25 for overall Itunes albums in the US and #1 in Canada)

And setting aside anime, arguably video games inspire the most baggage-less music development in genres "who not only don't get talked about by critics and who (as far as I know) don’t get paid attention to on news or entertainment sites either, but who also get undercounted on Billboard and are mostly excluded from the Brit singles chart and therefore Popular." What awareness is there of Overclocked Remix outside of geekdom? Only in video games music orchestral concerts can you find concert halls sold out packed by younger people for classical music composed within the last few decades. (The only other time that happens is for hugely recognizable movie themes, a la John Williams' career)

I guess what I'm trying to say with those last paragraphs is, geek-fandom-music (rooted in soundtrack) is another oft-ignored field when it comes to consideration by the non-geek-music music world? And its music develops in ways more in line with what is desired in said critic/news/entertainment circles than, say the development of Broadway music. (tl;dr of link is: "Sondheiiiiimmmmm!")

Re: I don't even know if this is relevant to the topic at hand.

[koganbot]

Of course this is all quite relevant. And, despite my relation to video games and anime consisting of a vast, impressive ignorance, I've nonetheless occasionally written about bits of music relating to bits of video-n-anime-games (the "Lam Suet" remix of "Crayon," something-or-other that Faye Wong did for Final Fantasy, something else by Scooter or someone, and some Russian cod-peasant tune as the theme of yet another video game). This leads me to believe that geekdom and video games and anime have enough cachet that the music that attaches to them is not going to end up in the category "We So Don't Pay Attention To This Stuff That We're Actually Hearing Quite A Lot Of That We Don't Even Notice That We Don't Write About It" in the way that AC does, but rather'll get written about by critics more and more as time goes on. But I really don't know. I assume there is some overlap between the Rockwrite and Fanfic and video-geek worlds that'll facilitate this overlap. I should find out if and how much skyecaptain and freakytigger and petronia have crossed into this overlap. I'll post a call for comment to these people and others.

I've long assumed that crunk takes its basic tonal sense from the romanticism of nineteenth and twentieth century "serious" music (rather than say from rhythm & blues, though of course there's no law stopping it from taking from both), but that this was owing to wanting to create the feel of suspense and horror movies — the composers of which were steeped in European romanticism. (Which isn't to say that I've done any research into what Jon, Banner, and Collipark were drawing from or getting at.)

Since critics are people, and people generally are exposed to TV sets and radios and the like, I think the critic is familiar with a huge variety of music, whether or not that variety gets into his or her library.

Another thought: "soundtrack" probably doesn't connote in people's mind quite what is going on — or even remotely what is going on — in TV commercials, almost all of which use music but the music very rarely coalesces into anything like a song or even a jingle. It's almost like: a rhythm, jumpy or not-so-jumpy depending; a daub of rock, or a daub of disco, or a daub of mood; perhaps followed by a wash of something. Back when I lived in San Francisco one of my roommates, a very good jazz musician, was once invited to play on a TV commercial. He said if you'd filmed the session it'd have made This Is Spinal Tap seem like Schindler's List in comparison.

Re: I don't even know if this is relevant to the topic at hand.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I think that geek fandom music (especially the folk-filk, pop-classical, post-Enya side of it, which is the AC side, as opposed to the electronica/Jpop sides which are respectively closer to their genre mainstreams) is critically ignored because there's little audience overlap. It's not that the critical types don't hear this stuff necessarily (everyone plays video games) but that the people who make this stuff the core of their listening care not about Kanye or Kylie or Arcade Fire. I mean, personally I have had an immense education from Yoko Kanno -- from mind-melting 90s techno epics to jazz-funk to Beatles pastiches that would make Noel Gallagher weep -- but that last sentence would mean hell-all to my D&D buddies, and to my music critic buddies she'd be, well, a talented pastichist and soundtrack composer.

Re: I don't even know if this is relevant to the topic at hand.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The other day I bought a remastered CD of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and the liner notes claim it introduced a generation to jazz.

[(Anonymous)]

This is making me think of the couple hundred weddings I DJ'd over the years, where background music (through cocktail hours and dinners) took up more than half of my playlist, and was (therefore) something I gave plenty of thought to (i.e., constantly adding songs to my "dinner playlist," trying to sustain a very particular type of energy during those moments, etc.). The key for me during cocktail hour and dinner (though there are variations even between those two segments) was to play a set of tunes which simultaneously were unobtrusive enough so that people could chat over them (light jazz, a la Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker), but just interesting, or unusual enough that every so often someone's ears would perk up and they might even come over and inquire about what I was playing (it's a good time to pull out familiar-but-not-overplayed oldies, Walter Egan's "Magnet and Steel" was a favourite, We Five's "You Were on My Mind"). While playing these sets, I would sometimes scan the room to see if the music was causing at least a minor physical sensation -- not dancing, but toe-tapping and head-nodding. Same time, you're slowly (very slowly -- it's one thing that made me incredibly sick of playing weddings after 15 or so years of doing them) trying to build up the momentum, slowly turning the tide from background to midground to foreground. Or rather, pre-foreground -- I'm talking about that moment before the dance officially commences, 8:30 or so, when dinner has ended but "the dance" hasn't officially begun. "Rock Your Baby" by George McRae and "Rock With You" by Michael Jackson are perfect for this moment (while some people are heading to the bar, others are milling about and chatting, some people just don't know what they're supposed to be doing right then). There's often a certain level of anxious energy in the room at this time -- an anxiousness to get on with the show, everyone's tired of sitting, and speeches, and food. Play "Rock Your Baby," even at a fairly hushed volume (though louder than during the dinner, of course), and there's a good chance a father and his young daughter will break into a little dance around their table, or a couple bridesmaids will comme and ask "what kind of music will you be playing tonight," etc.
scott

Confession

[koganbot]

Okay, it wasn't literally, actually, a real live elephant under the cut, or even a picture of one. But it was the real figurative elephant (as it were), the one that's been marauding through my mind, as opposed to the well-mannered, nonrogue elephant that was grazing peacefully atop my post.

(Mark once pulled such an elephant switch on one of his ilX threads, though the second ("real") elephant took a while to reveal itself, and I don't think the revelation was necessarily in Mark's plan when he began the thread. Fwiw, I hadn't gone into my post with the idea of introducing the real elephant down the line, though such a possibility was at least in the back of my mind; and of course the giant elephant itself was there right smack in the middle of my mind's living room, pawing restlessly at the floor.)