That’s a really interesting phenomenon, if the article was awfully fluffy. I wish the writer would go into why we can’t produce anything like ccr today, and what we can do about it. I think what I...
That’s a really interesting phenomenon, if the article was awfully fluffy. I wish the writer would go into why we can’t produce anything like ccr today, and what we can do about it.
I think what I miss the most about new popular music is that it isn’t ever just fun. It’s also rarely sorrowful. It seems more often angry or sexy. Thinking about it right now, the only artist i can think of is bruno mars.
There's incredible soulful music out there. Sufjan Stevens' album Carrie & Lowell, which explores his feelings about his late estranged mother who abandoned him, is an incredibly beautiful, sad...
There's incredible soulful music out there. Sufjan Stevens' album Carrie & Lowell, which explores his feelings about his late estranged mother who abandoned him, is an incredibly beautiful, sad album.
I think the reason why there isn't CCR today is due to sociocultural fragmentation. There's more music than ever, and everyone is listening to ten thousand times more niche genres — it's getting more difficult for artists to command national or global attention. Attention is super scarce these days.
When I listen to what I consider "good music" I can pick an instrument and follow it through the whole tr a ck and have a "good time". The hallmark of a good to great track is when I can pair off...
When I listen to what I consider "good music" I can pick an instrument and follow it through the whole tr a ck and have a "good time". The hallmark of a good to great track is when I can pair off or combine elements/insturmente and get even more entertainment/ enjoyment. There is a cohesiveness and musicality that modern tracks seem to lack that the good stuff today and, almost as a rule, virtually all of the older stuff has... at least to my ear/brain combo.
Now I am off to listen to John Fogerty's masterpiece album Blue Moon Swamp
Happen to come from "musical family"? I chalk mine up to my dad being a guitar pianist of sorts (small hands so he'd never dare claim to be). My sister plays anything with a reed and has dabbled...
Happen to come from "musical family"? I chalk mine up to my dad being a guitar pianist of sorts (small hands so he'd never dare claim to be). My sister plays anything with a reed and has dabbled with a bass guitar. I am partial to percussion but mostly just a listener. Hearing every one kind of doing their own thing I feel created that method of enjoying music.
Probably not saying anything everyone else already knows, but my armchair musician/production explanation is that popular music today is engineered to emotionally manipulate you on multiple...
Probably not saying anything everyone else already knows, but my armchair musician/production explanation is that popular music today is engineered to emotionally manipulate you on multiple fronts, which wasn't nearly as widespread before the 90's-2000's, at least from a purposeful marketing perspective. I don't mean that in a conspiratorial way at all, but most pop music now has to check certain boxes or they just won't get streams and radio play.
Obviously there are exceptions, but most hit songs need a very rigid verse/chorus structure, simple/catchy rhyming schemes, and are edited to pin point perfection in both timing and tune. This even reaches more niche genres like metal. You'd have a very tough time finding a band worth their salts who doesn't use a decent amount of time and tune correction. It sounds "good", but also you lost a lot of character/feel/soul/whatever by doing this.
Also, recording was a lot different back then, both in quality and process. People still work with tape today, but it is extremely expensive and I'd be willing to bet there are very few record labels that would justify the cost when its so cheap to record digitally. But the point is, analog recording gives music a lot more character because its a limited resource in a studio and artists would generally not always get the "best" take, but was a much more organic feel. Not to mention, tape just sounds cooler in a lot of cases. That's not to say digital is inferior, in anyway, its just different.
My prediction is that the tide might be turning though, as we are seeing more and more "old" music coming back because of TikTok. You can even see it with younger artists like Billie Eilish who do a lot of things you normally wouldn't see in pop songs from the past 20 years, probably thanks to an interest in older music, which tended to have more interesting and inventive arrangements.
tl:dr as most people know, most popular music today needs to be perfect, it didn't have to be perfect back then. I think this is already changing, and I'd be willing to bet in a few years we are going to see some really interesting music come out from younger artists.
Pop music has always been this way, it's just that the requirements have changed. Pop, from the companies' point of view, is a game about sounding the same as everyone else but just different...
Pop music has always been this way, it's just that the requirements have changed. Pop, from the companies' point of view, is a game about sounding the same as everyone else but just different enough to stand out.
I agree with you, but I guess my point is less about all pop music sounding the same and more about how it has become more creativly bankrupt over time. I try to avoid being a "music was better...
I agree with you, but I guess my point is less about all pop music sounding the same and more about how it has become more creativly bankrupt over time. I try to avoid being a "music was better back in the day" type person, and listen to a lot of modern artists, but overall music has gotten more simplistic over time (noting I didn't take much time to look through the actual studies linked here, but it is something I've seen claimed with data to back it up.)
Pop music has always been creatively bankrupt, too! At least as long as music has been called pop. There has always been trash mountains of disposable pop songs with very little actual work put...
Pop music has always been creatively bankrupt, too! At least as long as music has been called pop. There has always been trash mountains of disposable pop songs with very little actual work put into them, even by very popular artists. In the 90s there is a band called They Eat Their Own who came out with a single album. They were famous temporarily for one song called Like a Drug, which was arguably the only "good" song on that album; the rest of them were pretty simplistic and had obviously not had the same level of development and production quality as that one song, and as a result even the few people who can remember Like a Drug do not remember any other song they recorded.
But keep in mind that at the very least the songs are original. In the past, performers would make quite a lot of money by performing arrangements or straight covers of previously released songs. Dancing in the Street Is a pretty big example because it has been covered so many times by so many people, probably most famously by David Bowie and Mick Jagger, but it was also performed by big names like The Mamas and The Papas, The Grateful Dead, and Van Halen. A number of these covers were very high in the sales charts. Covers still happen, of course, but they seem to be a lot less common and popular.
But the study in question was not actually about the music. It was about the lyrics. It would be much more difficult to analyze the actual music itself, and even then it would be hard to make any judgements about how repetitive or simplistic they are because the repetition and simplicity is part of what makes music enjoyable in the first place.
But even then, through just an analysis of the rhythm and pitch of melodies there was shown to be a significant decline in complexity over the decades since 1950. Maybe this melody simplification...
It would be much more difficult to analyze the actual music itself
But even then, through just an analysis of the rhythm and pitch of melodies there was shown to be a significant decline in complexity over the decades since 1950. Maybe this melody simplification just mirrors the same lyrical simplification, but it’s hard to argue that songs are maintaining their intricacies when they are becoming repetitive for the sake of a skinner-box-style dopamine rush of engineered sound.
Honestly I thought of Bruno Mars immediately when you mentioned the word 'sorrowful'. The last popular song I could think of that met that description was When I Was Your Man ("I should have...
Honestly I thought of Bruno Mars immediately when you mentioned the word 'sorrowful'. The last popular song I could think of that met that description was When I Was Your Man ("I should have bought you flowers...").
That song was released in 2012.
The only other one I can think of is Hozier's Take Me To Church, from 2015. And maybe some stuff by Adelle? But that stuff is even older, isn't it? There are some sorrowful songs that get popular but they seem to disappear from the zeitgeist pretty quickly. I completely missed Olivia Rodrigo's Driver's License (which is still a bit upbeat in spite of the subject matter), and I'm pretty sure there's a few Billie Eilish songs that would probably count, too.
But then again, I'm now officially "old", so all pop music bothers me to an extent. I think the new stuff is overproduced, and I don't like that all of them sound like they're being performed in some impossible fantasy stage. I miss live performances, and that's perhaps why I like King Gizzard so much.
You should be listening to Chappell Roan because she is all those things and more. The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is a near perfect pop album.
You should be listening to Chappell Roan because she is all those things and more. The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is a near perfect pop album.
I've always loved CCR, but I haven't been able to enjoy them as much since I learned that they're not actually from the south (they're from California) and John Fogerty's accent is an affectation....
I've always loved CCR, but I haven't been able to enjoy them as much since I learned that they're not actually from the south (they're from California) and John Fogerty's accent is an affectation. I always had them categorized as authentic southern americana, now it just feels like hollow appropriation. Even though the music is still technically great.
This is an interesting take. For me CCR has always been iconic of the 1967-1969 California era beginning with the summer of love in 1967 and ending with the Manson Family murders in 1969. Songs...
This is an interesting take. For me CCR has always been iconic of the 1967-1969 California era beginning with the summer of love in 1967 and ending with the Manson Family murders in 1969. Songs like Fortunate Son is straight up California anti-war hippie. Lookin' Out My Back Door is bumped by The Dude as he drives around LA in The Big Lebowski.
Also, Caifornia was the west for a long time. Home of spaghetti westerns, ranches, environmentalists like John Muir, landscape photographers like Ansel Adams. So yeah, while most Californians don't have an accent, I don't know why being from there disqualifies them from authentic americana.
Edit: my disappointment stems from how many covers they pumped out. They hit in 1969, and then flooded the market with music, a lot of filler covers. I still love the classics though.
From my perspective as a Californian, most of the center of the state is basically the south, for better or for worse. To say that California doesn't include that rural experience is to discount a...
From my perspective as a Californian, most of the center of the state is basically the south, for better or for worse. To say that California doesn't include that rural experience is to discount a significant part of the state that does often get overshadowed by the massive urban agglomerations with their culturally significant tech and entertainment industries.
I mean they are from outside Davis which like many others have said has quite a country vibe to it. I think it's a bit myopic to say that a band from California isn't a valid blue grass band...
I mean they are from outside Davis which like many others have said has quite a country vibe to it. I think it's a bit myopic to say that a band from California isn't a valid blue grass band because of where they are from. Many Californians from the central valley came across during the dust storms of the 1930's and were derogatorily called "Okies" up until the turn of the century. Their families all had roots in the south and plains states. My mom went to university in Fresno and all of her friends had twangy accents, because all of their families emigrated there during the 30s-40s. So to say that a band from California singing like that is "hollow appropriation" sounds to me like you might have a blind spot about the history of the state or diasporas in the US in general.
If Keith Urban can be a 'Country' singer despite being from Australia, what's stopping CCR from doing a Blues Rock bit? At least they're from America. The Beatles and the White Album? C'mon,...
If Keith Urban can be a 'Country' singer despite being from Australia, what's stopping CCR from doing a Blues Rock bit? At least they're from America. The Beatles and the White Album? C'mon, they're not even from the US! Many artists have a different voice or affectation when singing. Just because you don't swing the same way as Jake Shears means you shouldn't hit his high notes if you can?
Bluesy rock was one of the popular 'counter' genres of the era and CCR certainly coped the sound but any picture of them from Cosmo's they look dressed closer to Weezer than anything from the 'South'. It wasn't some dark secret they hid or anything.
I'm already suffering severely from the knowledge of CCR not being southern and now you casually drop this Keith Urban is an upside down man news on me? And the Beatles...not American?! I could've...
I'm already suffering severely from the knowledge of CCR not being southern and now you casually drop this Keith Urban is an upside down man news on me? And the Beatles...not American?! I could've swore with all the red, white, and blue! Why must you kick me while I'm down?
Obviously, it's not the end of the world and maybe my comment was a little dramatic. But it's still a little disappointing. I'm sure they didn't hide it, and I clearly wasn't running background checks either. I'd just kind of assumed they were southern from their music.
Kinda like how people assumed The Killers were from the UK during the Hot Fuss era (including me!).
The Killers comment is even funnier to be because when I saw them on a... Recent tour they repeated, multiple times, that they were from Las Vegas. Side note: if you can ever get to a Killers...
The Killers comment is even funnier to be because when I saw them on a... Recent tour they repeated, multiple times, that they were from Las Vegas.
Side note: if you can ever get to a Killers show, go for an arena sized one. They put on a big show.
ha! I'd love to see them live some time. They were a big part of my teen years. I distinctly remember during a church youth retreat a bunch of us huddled around my youth pastor's Macbook with our...
ha! I'd love to see them live some time. They were a big part of my teen years. I distinctly remember during a church youth retreat a bunch of us huddled around my youth pastor's Macbook with our iPods and trading mp3s around. My youth pastor suggested Hot Fuss as a must-listen to album and the rest is history!
What this article misses is that CCR has always been popular. Chronicle being on the charts isn’t even new. It has been on the top 100 charts for over 10 years straight now.
What this article misses is that CCR has always been popular.
Chronicle being on the charts isn’t even new. It has been on the top 100 charts for over 10 years straight now.
Wasn't that kind of the whole point of the article? That there wasn't a modern re-popularity of it based on a soundtrack or meme (unlike Kate Bush, for instance), but just a staying power.
Wasn't that kind of the whole point of the article? That there wasn't a modern re-popularity of it based on a soundtrack or meme (unlike Kate Bush, for instance), but just a staying power.
I like CCR. I think John Fogerty's accent is very interesting. "I hoid it on the grapevine". Maybe it's a bit fake? As other people said on this post, CCR is from California, and Californians...
I like CCR.
I think John Fogerty's accent is very interesting. "I hoid it on the grapevine". Maybe it's a bit fake? As other people said on this post, CCR is from California, and Californians don't talk that way. Still interesting to listen to the music.
The article was fine but I had to look up the word "choogle" which for some reason appears 6 times. Anyway based on context it may mean "debauched white boy boogie". Or maybe it means nothing.
Reminds me of trying to look up "colitas" as in "the warm smell of colitas" from Hotel California in the pre-google era. The closest dictionary match being colitis. I always side and think about...
Reminds me of trying to look up "colitas" as in "the warm smell of colitas" from Hotel California in the pre-google era. The closest dictionary match being colitis. I always side and think about "the warm smell of colitis" when I hear the song.
"no backstory or drama" ... "But ironically, there’s plenty of dramatic lore in the Creedence story," Read that first line like... Besides the brothers hating each other and everyone continuing to...
"no backstory or drama"
...
"But ironically, there’s plenty of dramatic lore in the Creedence story,"
Read that first line like... Besides the brothers hating each other and everyone continuing to perform as completely separate acts?
That’s a really interesting phenomenon, if the article was awfully fluffy. I wish the writer would go into why we can’t produce anything like ccr today, and what we can do about it.
I think what I miss the most about new popular music is that it isn’t ever just fun. It’s also rarely sorrowful. It seems more often angry or sexy. Thinking about it right now, the only artist i can think of is bruno mars.
There's incredible soulful music out there. Sufjan Stevens' album Carrie & Lowell, which explores his feelings about his late estranged mother who abandoned him, is an incredibly beautiful, sad album.
I think the reason why there isn't CCR today is due to sociocultural fragmentation. There's more music than ever, and everyone is listening to ten thousand times more niche genres — it's getting more difficult for artists to command national or global attention. Attention is super scarce these days.
When I listen to what I consider "good music" I can pick an instrument and follow it through the whole tr a ck and have a "good time". The hallmark of a good to great track is when I can pair off or combine elements/insturmente and get even more entertainment/ enjoyment. There is a cohesiveness and musicality that modern tracks seem to lack that the good stuff today and, almost as a rule, virtually all of the older stuff has... at least to my ear/brain combo.
Now I am off to listen to John Fogerty's masterpiece album Blue Moon Swamp
I love listening to my favourite songs and just following a new instrument through it, but I've never known anyone else who does it!
Happen to come from "musical family"? I chalk mine up to my dad being a guitar pianist of sorts (small hands so he'd never dare claim to be). My sister plays anything with a reed and has dabbled with a bass guitar. I am partial to percussion but mostly just a listener. Hearing every one kind of doing their own thing I feel created that method of enjoying music.
No, no music in this family really except for listening.
Probably not saying anything everyone else already knows, but my armchair musician/production explanation is that popular music today is engineered to emotionally manipulate you on multiple fronts, which wasn't nearly as widespread before the 90's-2000's, at least from a purposeful marketing perspective. I don't mean that in a conspiratorial way at all, but most pop music now has to check certain boxes or they just won't get streams and radio play.
Obviously there are exceptions, but most hit songs need a very rigid verse/chorus structure, simple/catchy rhyming schemes, and are edited to pin point perfection in both timing and tune. This even reaches more niche genres like metal. You'd have a very tough time finding a band worth their salts who doesn't use a decent amount of time and tune correction. It sounds "good", but also you lost a lot of character/feel/soul/whatever by doing this.
Also, recording was a lot different back then, both in quality and process. People still work with tape today, but it is extremely expensive and I'd be willing to bet there are very few record labels that would justify the cost when its so cheap to record digitally. But the point is, analog recording gives music a lot more character because its a limited resource in a studio and artists would generally not always get the "best" take, but was a much more organic feel. Not to mention, tape just sounds cooler in a lot of cases. That's not to say digital is inferior, in anyway, its just different.
My prediction is that the tide might be turning though, as we are seeing more and more "old" music coming back because of TikTok. You can even see it with younger artists like Billie Eilish who do a lot of things you normally wouldn't see in pop songs from the past 20 years, probably thanks to an interest in older music, which tended to have more interesting and inventive arrangements.
tl:dr as most people know, most popular music today needs to be perfect, it didn't have to be perfect back then. I think this is already changing, and I'd be willing to bet in a few years we are going to see some really interesting music come out from younger artists.
Pop music has always been this way, it's just that the requirements have changed. Pop, from the companies' point of view, is a game about sounding the same as everyone else but just different enough to stand out.
I agree with you, but I guess my point is less about all pop music sounding the same and more about how it has become more creativly bankrupt over time. I try to avoid being a "music was better back in the day" type person, and listen to a lot of modern artists, but overall music has gotten more simplistic over time (noting I didn't take much time to look through the actual studies linked here, but it is something I've seen claimed with data to back it up.)
Pop music has always been creatively bankrupt, too! At least as long as music has been called pop. There has always been trash mountains of disposable pop songs with very little actual work put into them, even by very popular artists. In the 90s there is a band called They Eat Their Own who came out with a single album. They were famous temporarily for one song called Like a Drug, which was arguably the only "good" song on that album; the rest of them were pretty simplistic and had obviously not had the same level of development and production quality as that one song, and as a result even the few people who can remember Like a Drug do not remember any other song they recorded.
But keep in mind that at the very least the songs are original. In the past, performers would make quite a lot of money by performing arrangements or straight covers of previously released songs. Dancing in the Street Is a pretty big example because it has been covered so many times by so many people, probably most famously by David Bowie and Mick Jagger, but it was also performed by big names like The Mamas and The Papas, The Grateful Dead, and Van Halen. A number of these covers were very high in the sales charts. Covers still happen, of course, but they seem to be a lot less common and popular.
But the study in question was not actually about the music. It was about the lyrics. It would be much more difficult to analyze the actual music itself, and even then it would be hard to make any judgements about how repetitive or simplistic they are because the repetition and simplicity is part of what makes music enjoyable in the first place.
But even then, through just an analysis of the rhythm and pitch of melodies there was shown to be a significant decline in complexity over the decades since 1950. Maybe this melody simplification just mirrors the same lyrical simplification, but it’s hard to argue that songs are maintaining their intricacies when they are becoming repetitive for the sake of a skinner-box-style dopamine rush of engineered sound.
Honestly I thought of Bruno Mars immediately when you mentioned the word 'sorrowful'. The last popular song I could think of that met that description was When I Was Your Man ("I should have bought you flowers...").
That song was released in 2012.
The only other one I can think of is Hozier's Take Me To Church, from 2015. And maybe some stuff by Adelle? But that stuff is even older, isn't it? There are some sorrowful songs that get popular but they seem to disappear from the zeitgeist pretty quickly. I completely missed Olivia Rodrigo's Driver's License (which is still a bit upbeat in spite of the subject matter), and I'm pretty sure there's a few Billie Eilish songs that would probably count, too.
But then again, I'm now officially "old", so all pop music bothers me to an extent. I think the new stuff is overproduced, and I don't like that all of them sound like they're being performed in some impossible fantasy stage. I miss live performances, and that's perhaps why I like King Gizzard so much.
You should be listening to Chappell Roan because she is all those things and more. The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is a near perfect pop album.
I've always loved CCR, but I haven't been able to enjoy them as much since I learned that they're not actually from the south (they're from California) and John Fogerty's accent is an affectation. I always had them categorized as authentic southern americana, now it just feels like hollow appropriation. Even though the music is still technically great.
This is an interesting take. For me CCR has always been iconic of the 1967-1969 California era beginning with the summer of love in 1967 and ending with the Manson Family murders in 1969. Songs like Fortunate Son is straight up California anti-war hippie. Lookin' Out My Back Door is bumped by The Dude as he drives around LA in The Big Lebowski.
Also, Caifornia was the west for a long time. Home of spaghetti westerns, ranches, environmentalists like John Muir, landscape photographers like Ansel Adams. So yeah, while most Californians don't have an accent, I don't know why being from there disqualifies them from authentic americana.
Edit: my disappointment stems from how many covers they pumped out. They hit in 1969, and then flooded the market with music, a lot of filler covers. I still love the classics though.
From my perspective as a Californian, most of the center of the state is basically the south, for better or for worse. To say that California doesn't include that rural experience is to discount a significant part of the state that does often get overshadowed by the massive urban agglomerations with their culturally significant tech and entertainment industries.
Fair enough, but I'm not sure if country singers are dragged for growing up in Austin, are they? (I know nothing about Country as a genre.)
I mean they are from outside Davis which like many others have said has quite a country vibe to it. I think it's a bit myopic to say that a band from California isn't a valid blue grass band because of where they are from. Many Californians from the central valley came across during the dust storms of the 1930's and were derogatorily called "Okies" up until the turn of the century. Their families all had roots in the south and plains states. My mom went to university in Fresno and all of her friends had twangy accents, because all of their families emigrated there during the 30s-40s. So to say that a band from California singing like that is "hollow appropriation" sounds to me like you might have a blind spot about the history of the state or diasporas in the US in general.
Damn I really wish I hadn't read this. I'm not even from the south and this disappoints me greatly.
If Keith Urban can be a 'Country' singer despite being from Australia, what's stopping CCR from doing a Blues Rock bit? At least they're from America. The Beatles and the White Album? C'mon, they're not even from the US! Many artists have a different voice or affectation when singing. Just because you don't swing the same way as Jake Shears means you shouldn't hit his high notes if you can?
Bluesy rock was one of the popular 'counter' genres of the era and CCR certainly coped the sound but any picture of them from Cosmo's they look dressed closer to Weezer than anything from the 'South'. It wasn't some dark secret they hid or anything.
I mean, they're not Drake.
I'm already suffering severely from the knowledge of CCR not being southern and now you casually drop this Keith Urban is an upside down man news on me? And the Beatles...not American?! I could've swore with all the red, white, and blue! Why must you kick me while I'm down?
Obviously, it's not the end of the world and maybe my comment was a little dramatic. But it's still a little disappointing. I'm sure they didn't hide it, and I clearly wasn't running background checks either. I'd just kind of assumed they were southern from their music.
Kinda like how people assumed The Killers were from the UK during the Hot Fuss era (including me!).
The Killers comment is even funnier to be because when I saw them on a... Recent tour they repeated, multiple times, that they were from Las Vegas.
Side note: if you can ever get to a Killers show, go for an arena sized one. They put on a big show.
ha! I'd love to see them live some time. They were a big part of my teen years. I distinctly remember during a church youth retreat a bunch of us huddled around my youth pastor's Macbook with our iPods and trading mp3s around. My youth pastor suggested Hot Fuss as a must-listen to album and the rest is history!
The genre was literally called Southern rock. Blues rock is a different thing entirely, and a lot of that came from England (think Eric Clapton).
I wasn't able to enjoy them much after learning what a big jerk Fogerty is, just makes it hard for me to appreciate anymore.
What this article misses is that CCR has always been popular.
Chronicle being on the charts isn’t even new. It has been on the top 100 charts for over 10 years straight now.
Wasn't that kind of the whole point of the article? That there wasn't a modern re-popularity of it based on a soundtrack or meme (unlike Kate Bush, for instance), but just a staying power.
I like CCR.
I think John Fogerty's accent is very interesting. "I hoid it on the grapevine". Maybe it's a bit fake? As other people said on this post, CCR is from California, and Californians don't talk that way. Still interesting to listen to the music.
The article was fine but I had to look up the word "choogle" which for some reason appears 6 times. Anyway based on context it may mean "debauched white boy boogie". Or maybe it means nothing.
Reminds me of trying to look up "colitas" as in "the warm smell of colitas" from Hotel California in the pre-google era. The closest dictionary match being colitis. I always side and think about "the warm smell of colitis" when I hear the song.
"no backstory or drama"
...
"But ironically, there’s plenty of dramatic lore in the Creedence story,"
Read that first line like... Besides the brothers hating each other and everyone continuing to perform as completely separate acts?