Why Music Sucks, Part 2.1

Mind you, the rapidly accelerating cancellation of Katy Perry for being tone-deaf about flaunting her “space-going” privilege is a good start, but some of us in the music industry would really like to see wider cultural changes, like a wholesale rejection of pop music in favor of classical/jazz, but that’d require smarter audiences, which won’t happen at the rate music classes are being removed from public schools.

Most of the hits your kids listen to are written by the guy mentioned in the above pic, Max Martin, who did nothing more than develop a new songwriting formula to replace the one used by every pop band from the Beatles to Cheap Trick until, idk, the Aughts. Along with Martin, there’s just a handful of other guys who write all of today’s pop songs (and yeah, that includes Taylor Swift, whose actual original songs aren’t anywhere near as good as Jewel’s or Norah Jones’s, can we talk?).

I don’t necessarily hate Martin’s formula. It’s pleasant enough if I’m in a Target store near the electronics section: The tunes all sound like little mini Broadway showstoppers, you know, like the gigantically hooky orgasms from “Let It Go” from Frozen, and “Defying Gravity” from Wicked. Only things missing from today’s pop are any sort of buildup or nuance; it’s just monstrously catchy ear candy that gooses the soul. Is that wrong? At some level I think it is.

Some kids are gravitating to older music, arena-rock stuff. They’ve come to appreciate epic-level guitar solos, like the extended closing solos from “Stairway To Heaven” and Nazareth’s “Changin’ Times” (still my pick for the best guitar solo ever recorded).

That stuff is beyond pop, it’s classical, or at the very least it’s a gateway drug to classical. We’d be a much more peaceful people, I think, if our airwaves and mall speaker systems and such were playing classical by default. I know I’d feel a lot more peaceful if Vivaldi or Telemann or Strauss were playing over the 7–11 speakers rather than some disposable new hit. I think anyone would.

It’s a tragedy that today’s classical composers and masterful new jazz artists get almost no recognition whatsoever. You wouldn’t believe the number of CDs that land on my desk from those guys, and how appreciative they are when I give them a little press love in my weekly music review column (sorry, it’s paywalled, just adding the link for duty and humanity).

As a culture, we’re missing so much. Our seismic class divide isn’t just manifested by the the socioeconomic differences between people who get to joyride to the edge of space and people who can’t afford eggs, it goes right to our societal DNA. We really need to work on that.

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My second book, My Year In The Online Left, is out. Meantime, if you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my previous book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in those books, but you’ll get it, I promise. My Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com (I’m spending a lot more time there now), my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social (ditto) and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9 (I do visit it daily).