COMMENTAEY
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By Mike Leonard
I am more or less a child of the Pop Music
ear. I grew up with the Beatles. Literally, grew
up with them, through their immediate impact
on the rock 'n' roll world, through their psy
chedelia, their East Indian gurus and finally,
through their breakup. Their influence on me
is limitless. They are probably responsible for
a series of text book stages in child develop
ment. But their influence on the rest of the
pop music world is even more vast. After the
Beatles and Motown, everyone was buying
45's and the then-small record companies were
drooling over the profits.
Today, most everyone takes for granted the
inevitability of hit singles, instantly famous
bands and conglomerate record companies.
Pop music is so huge in terms of its commer
cial impact, as well as its effect on the ears of
countless radio listeners, that it defies descrip
tion. So, of course, what.I would love to do is
to describe in detail the myriad elements that
make up pop their sources, roots. . .the dif
ferent sub-genre, if you will, that diversify and
make pop interesting, as well as those elements
that make it boring and banal. The problem is
Pm not sure that I can. Popular music is not
only diverse in its particular brands and form
ulas, but especially the effects it has over dif
ferent groups of people. Herein lies the key,
and my thesis if you can call it one Popular
music, however commercially viable it may be,
is first and foremost accessible. You know,
listenable, danceable, full of those hooks and .
rhythms that hit your frisides and make you
feet bop. Right on down to The Record Bar to
sink another $8.99 into that good feeling.
Pop tends to incorporate what is timely,
what is the trend in musical fashions, and
grow with it, evolve. The music industry de
pends on this ongoing musical evolution to
support its livelihood. It wishes more than
anything to feed the ravenous appetites of
album consuming radioheads til the end of
eternity, and it precisely this wish that keeps
them tuned into the new trends and sounds
that will make up the crest of the next new
wave. They must market a sound that is acces
sible. They'd like to know what you'd like to
hear before you hear it.
. But they don't know and you don't know
and the bands that write the songs that be
come the hits don't really know what works.
That's the beauty of popular music, or any
popular art form in general. There is an ambi
guity to its composition, an amorphousness to
its structure because it is a hodgepodge of so
many different influences and styles. Popular
ism is the melting pot of art, stimulating in its
relationship to mass society, compelling in the
expressions that it evokes, intellectually and
emotionally, from the average man-on-the-street.'
When it is good. It can be the most in
ane and odious garbage that ever graced your
ears when it is bad. .
Popularism in art is always disdained by
purists. A purist can be defined as someone
who won't like something that a hundred or
more people ascribe to. Most people who are
"into" a certain genre of music funk, reg
gae, classical, country, heavy metal, Southern
rock, opera, polkas and then tend not to ap
preciate mainstream, i.e., popular music be
cause it is too diluted, too lacking in musical
substance or tradition to be reputable. They
are not shaken by the argument that maybe
millions of records buyers are on to some
thing. To me, a person isn't really listening for
music if he is "into" only jazz, or Shastako
vitch and Mendollson, or whomever. They are
only taking from music what they want and
discarding the rest. Such narrow mihdedness is
against what music stands for as an artiform.
It is ironic, then, that popular music per
haps best expresses art's freedom,' gathering
and synthesizing the many influences that one
finds in life. Yes, it seems that Men at Work
has accomplished something in the world of
performing arts, simply by creating its particu
lar sound. Yes, the same can be said of Police,
or Alabama, or Hall and Oates. The fact that
the groups make tremendous amounts of
money is incidental. They first devised a sound
that would prove accessible to millions. They
rake in their cash only after the people are
frollicking on the dance floor.
It angers me that a person, a friend, says
they won't go to see Return of the ' Jedi or
won't buy The Polices' "Synchronicity"
(though they might like both) because they,
refuse to belong to a popularist public that en
dorses these things. It is the greatest form of
hypocrisy to dislike something on purpose. If
taste cannot be spontaneous, then it is not
taste, but rather intellectual posturing unreal
because it is unfelt and contrived.
There is a reason why this defense of pop
art is necessary, though you might have given
up finding one long before now. There is a
change being wrought by the music industry
that will effect our access to popular music
and the tidy sub-culture that surrounds it.. It
comes in the guise of MTV and can be properly
subsumed in the current "video revolution,"
Quite simply, vicleo is going to change the way
we experience music. At its best, any good
music worth its vinyl is going to evoke emo
tional as well as intellectual responses. The
responses are rarely similar since the nature of
human response to art is to confound logic; it
is never the same in different people and hard
ly ever the same in the same person hearing the
same music twice.
Got that? What video allows that audio
can't do is to provide mental images for us. To
do the work of our imagination for us. To
daydream over a song for us; to attach a
romantic memory to a song for us. Eventually
feel for us, if you care to take it to the ex
treme. No, I do not think that MTV is under
mining the imaginative fiber of America's
youth. But I do think that it threatens to make
popular music something it is not. Pop visual
art. .-. -
I can't help but feel that all these videos are
nothing more than elaborate advertisements
for the record albums .themselves, that they
are packed away in record stores everywhere,
Waiting to be picked, sans video, from the
shelves. It's as if the thing we most liked about'
a hot tune, the rhythm, the vocals, the hooks,
maybe even the lyrics, are suddenly not good
enough. Now we want to see the lead singer
chasing some painted chick through the Phil
ippine underbrush. Or do we? I think that
rather the record company executives have
decided that we want to see it, which somehow
makes the music more accessible, more lucra
tive. "Too bad," I can hear them saying, "the
Beatles didn't make videos."
Mike Leonard is a senior Interdisciplinary
Studies major from Lexington:
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