The Unwound Third > Jam Session

Speculation music

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Mr.OMuck:
I hate the term "pop" music. It is of course an abbreviation for popular music , one of the catagories, like race music invented by the recording industry to help sales people organize and direct sales.
It included show tunes and accesable ballads and the occasional novelty song. It was the music likely to find commercial sponsorship on radio.
People engaged in this kind of music may indeed be gifted musicians and pen likable, memorable tunes, but their motives for doing so are most often focused around being sucessful from a financial standpoint.
The popularity of this music can often as not be manufactured by media saturation and sheer ubiquity. In this sense i believe it might be more accurately termed speculative, or speculation music. Discuss.....

Parlor Picker:
I think Duke Ellington is usually credited with the comment that there are only two types of music: good and bad.

Mr.OMuck:
Too general & sweeping to have any serious taxonomic usefulness...but not wrong either.

Lyle Lofgren:
Jon Pankake (full disclosure: he's a member of our band), who wrote extensively on the subject way back when he and Paul Nelson were publishing "The Little Sandy Review," distinguishes between two types of music: music as product, and music as art. A pop song could have artistic integrity, but it would be a side effect, not the principal reason for producing the song.

Lyle

Johnm:
Unless it can be demonstrated via case studies that the process involved in composing pop music is different than the process involved in creating non-pop musics in a consistent and more or less predictable way, all the talk of the "purpose" of the music is just blowing smoke and beside the point.  And since compositional process is all over the map, I never expect to see such a thing quantified.  Most people who talk in a denigrating way or theorize about pop music don't listen to it, like it, or know anything about it.  Was composing music for a patron, as in the 1600s and 1700s, somehow less tainted by the money motive than the music composed by pop composers of today?  Money has nothing to do with the quality of music, certainly no more than does the ability to play a musical instrument well indicate a high level of moral attainment.  It would be nice to think such things were susceptible to such simple and pat solutions, but they're not.     

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