The Elephant In The Room
Nov. 21st, 2013 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotPosted this on a Freaky Trigger comment thread:
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.
*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 (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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.
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?).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.
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.
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.
*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.
BGM
Date: 2013-11-23 12:42 pm (UTC)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.