In my crappy part time job counting inventory I spend a lot of time at stores like CVS being forcefully exposed to pop music. So I'm hearing a lot of the chart toppers, and hating most of them.

But if you go back just ten years to the post grunge period, a lot of the popular songs were actually pretty good. Or at least tolerable. And the farther you go back in AM, the higher percentage of the top tens of the year people not into indie will have heard of.

And there's a reason for that. Dare is a great album. Thriller is a fantastic album. Critically acclaimed stuff like Oasis and Foo Fighters from the mid 90s were at least pretty good. But in the last few years, especially if you only count American popularity, there's barely a single popular, good album coming out.

Why is that? Is it the change in the attitude of the record industry where it's easier for a beautiful, untalented person to get a record deal than an ugly, talented person? Is it the growing narrowness of popular genres or the growing control teenage demographics have over the industry? (Is it that people who like good music are downloading more?)

Why is it that the quality of popular music seems to get lower and lower every decade?

little innovation, as a lot of stuff sounds the same (more nowadays than before, it seems). I know that some of these rent-a-rappers just blend together, and give me a headache more than anything else.

Since pop music is short for popular, a lot play it safe and don't try to being something fresh to the mainstream, overall.

My obligatory Madge mention: .
Will be interesting to see if any of Madge's new music ends up doing well on the year-end lists this year, since she worked with very mainstream producers this time out.

It's an interesting question. I'm not sure how to post actual Youtube videos, but here's what the guy from TV on the Radio thinks about the state of pop music.

There's definitely lowest common denominator pandering.I think, though, it's even worse when it comes to movies. Have you noticed that on metacritic, there are only four movies that get "starred" for high ratings, and that seems to go back nearly a year. It does seem like music has to "suck" before it gets played on the radio. Even stuff that you would think that would be instantly accessible, if it doesn't have some sort of novelty element to it, won't get played on top forty radio. I can't think of a better example than "Troubled Times" by Fountains of Wayne.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUhsI-CC4Ac

A lot happened to lead to the decline of pop music:

- the music video (although I also see the positive spin on videos)
- the reduced value of music (especially in the download age)
- the growing identification of music as a brand rather than as an artform
- American Idol and similar-themed shows popping out people with absolutely no personality or uniqueness

I think it's the same as always. Good pop always exists but it doesn't seem like it because there is a ton of crap that's around it. Look at old Billboard weekly charts or even yearly. Most of it is terrible. When you listen to a true oldies station that music is spanning at least 15 years. When you consider that they have a very tight playlist heavily catering to 10-15 core artists older pop doesn't look that great either. Oldies stations will be the same in 30 years and people will ask questions as to why pop is terrible. When you put this weeks hits up against the classics of 30 years ago it's definitely going to pale in comparison... and if you don't like any new pop, you just don't like modern pop. That doesn't mean there isn't good pop coming out, it means you just don't identify with it anymore.

completely agree w/ John

Got to second what John has said, you are looking through rose-tinted specs. Maybe the best out there isn't as good as it was back then but there is as much bad stuff and it was just as bad.

The reason you don't like today's pop music is that you're getting old. I have it the same way, and I have accepted my destiny.

I also second John. (I third John?)

Keep in mind Sturgeon's Law (which Peter Buck has quoted approvingly):

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

It was a valid observation in 1958 when it was first published, and it's valid fifty years later. But the corollary, of course, is that if you sift through all the crap, you can find ten percent that's pretty good. And that's as true for 2008 as it was for 1971 (which is kind of my point with the Unscrabble list).

There's a lot of flashy swill on the radio right now (I won't name names, since I don't know most of them), but there always has been. In my high school in 1985, I guarantee you there were more people listening to Night Ranger and Whitesnake than Prince or the Replacements (and Run-D.M.C. was beyond the pale).


It's interesting that we've had two threads pop up over the weekend with exactly opposite ideas about pop music: BillAdama's story of decline (with a nostalgic longing for the Good Old Days) and A.Lee's story of progress on his Beatles thread (in which the older something is, the more it sucks).

I disagree with both. Assume that every era produces ten percent good stuff.

Indeed, every era produces 90% rubbish. But also to some extent nostalgia for the past is being manipulated by terrible compilation albums. Take for example The Dave Clark Five - they're outside the top 2000 artists on AM. A terrible band back in the day, and now (apparently, I'm not sure of the exact details) Dave Clark is one of the main men behind most of the dull 60s pop compilations that fill bargain bins worldwide. People who don't do their own research are being given the impression that those songs are what was so great about the 60s.
I'm sure Pete Waterman is doing similar with 80s nostalgia too, and I wonder who's the 70s equivalent

What happened to pop music? Well it's become rap and hip-hop orientated. There is a lack of innovation in Rock Music or direction. I like a lot of bands today but quite frankly until you find a band like Nirvana or Oasis who could translate it into pop music it's going to lag behind to rap and hip-hop

It seems to me that you could run some sort of statistical analysis to prove or disprove the hypothesis that popular music today is crappier than it used to be. We could define "crappy" as "not acclaimed." We already have our list of music that is the opposite of crappy, the AM lists. Couldn't we compare something such as the Rick Dees end of the year countdown to the AM list for a certain year and determine how well the AM list correlates with the Rick Dees list? If fewer songs from the AM lists begin to appear on the Rick Dees end of the year countdowns then we can conclude that the best music isn't getting played on top 40 radio wheras it once was. Subjective things like this are measured all the time. For example, you might quantify physical attractiveness by how long a baby stares at a picture.

I agree in part that every decade had its fair share of crap, but I do believe that the "good stuff" used to get mainstream attention before, whereas now, I think a little digging is required. Of course, that's just my opinion, but I remember growing up in the 80s (born in 1980) and loving just about every song that was played. While my enthusiasm for some of it has waned, I believe that a lot of that stuff was at least interesting, or was performed by interesting people.

I agree Moonbeam, it seems that in the early days, the best stuff was mainstream. Whereas now the best stuff is "alternative" or "indie." Even if you look at rap and hip hop, the most acclaimed in that genre is usually not what gets played on the radio.

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

I hope you're wrong. How about:

Only 10% of the music is made for the brain. But that doesn't mean the rest is crap.

If someone as great as The Beatles came out today, but with a 60's musical sensibility incapable of innovation, do you think they would be acclaimed?

I think so. Bands that follow the Beatles script still tend to be well received. Only difference is they don't have the songwriting skills or voices like Lennon/McCartney. See: Apples in Stereo. If a band came along that had the whole package and sounded like a lost Beatles album I think it would be pretty well received.

My opinion is unless there is a rock band who can create a new sound or a highly innovative sound with pop sensibilities rock music examples "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Eight Miles High" rock music will lag behind rap and hip- hop. Nirvana has really been the last revolution in rock music along with Oasis and Britpop.

It's got to happen sometime!

Pop music died when the Talking Heads stopped making sense

I don't think anyone needs to be reminded that taste is subjective. When we say 'best' we should always be able to assume we're really saying 'the music we subjectively consider to be the best'.

Still. I hear stuff like Ashlee Simpson on the radio. It's so completely atrocious I can barely stand to be in the same room with it. In the 1980s even the bubbly dance-pop was respectable. Back then we had Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. Now we have Britney Spears and various Simpsons.

I think people in general are getting sick of pop music, which is why indie music has been steadily growing in popularity (Along with country and hip-hop).

Just, indie artists insist on creative freedom. They're not something the record companies can control so they don't invest any time into popularizing them when they can just polish up some random teenage hottie. And indie in general is so diverse it's fan base is inherently splintered.

I think rock will come back into semi-popularity soon. We already see hints of rock nostalgia. I think people sick of 'yet another talentless hottie' are hungry for some heavy riffs and adrenaline rich choruses. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is that no record company has found a new trend to exploit.

Modern country is probably even worse than pop...

Modern "country" pretty much isn't even music anymore. It's 100% pure product.

I agree (somewhat) with John.

For every "Mack the Knife" there's a "Queen of the Hop" and in their day both were popular. Also, the passage of time tends to reassess the relative "greatness" of a song. How many REALLY believe The Singing Nun's "Dominique" was one of the best songs of 1963? Yet it kept "Louie Louie" out of the top spot and "LL" turns up on nearly any list of the "best" songs ever a critic ever releases.

It happened in the "good old days" and it happens now.
I do notice that I'm enjoying less of the top 40 than I used to but that may just be a function both of my age (I'm 38) and of unfamiliarity (I'm usually listening to stuff I already know via MP3 or library CDs so I don't hear the "current" stuff very often...I'm usually a minimum of 2-3 years behind the curve.)

I do think it would be interesting to correlate the Dees or Dick Clark yearend countdowns to crit lists and see if the percentage of "good"(acclaimed) music on CHR radio has gone up, down, or stayed the same.