Friday, June 30, 2017

The Fraud of Popular Music


Muhammad Rasheed - Notices that the celebrated "moves like Jagger" are those of a hopping, wiggling, prancing dandy. This was worthy of a whole song? Curious.

Call me when you manage to find the moves like James Brown, crazy.

Riley Freeman - There's far too many dances these days where men feel comfortable shaking, bending, twisting, and tip toeing like females. This that bullshit.

Aminah Armour - did you forget that we had eras/history of dance where men were shaking, bending, twisting and tip toeing?

Riley Freeman - I would not equate routines by Gregory Hines or Sandman Sims with someone "hitting the Quan". Even with those dances, which were part of routines, the men did not look like high school girls when dancing. It's not even a close comparison.

Jeremy Travis - Y'all just now getting that song over there or something?

Muhammad Rasheed - I personally have an approximately 6 yr lag time on getting into pop music. I can't take it when it's fresh. lol

Muhammad Rasheed - Unless it has a strong retro sound.

Jeremy Travis - Well, wait until Bruno Mars starts getting good.

Muhammad Rasheed - I found his stuff a week or so ago...

Muhammad Rasheed - ...by way of that Carpool Karaoke clip Abdur shared.

Jeremy Travis - Well what the fuck kinda time bubble is that, Momo?!

Muhammad Rasheed - lol It means I'm probably just not really that into that medium.

Plus MJ and Whitney died, you know? So fuck it...

Muhammad Rasheed - Their early songs were the ones that really got me listening to my limited, over-picky music in the first place.

Muhammad Rasheed - But I guess all artists have a natural time to produce, with an inherently limited backlist folio. But already the trend in pop music is to rehash what came before instead of innovating new sound. I love Bruno, but it's only because he does a good job of capturing the era that l loved from the 80s/90s in showmanship & 'cool.' The new stuff pulled away from that altogether and I don't care for it for the most part.

Muhammad Rasheed - I admire the innovators, but I love a certain sound from the past. Can't they innovate by building on certain items, and going in a direction of growth, higher from what came before in a natural progression.

I just remember feeling very disappointed in the direction pop music started to go, like I thought there would be MORE and BETTER of what I grew up on. Of what did very well. Take the most celebrated and best of what came before and innovate it to the natural next level of what it would be. Can that be done in music?

Like take Billie Jean from MJ, and build it up into a grand full orchestra piece that can be played in an opera house. It retains what was cool about the original, but has become BETTER! More LUSH! More DEEP! Like a higher level pokemon (or whatever the term is for when they max out).

Muhammad Rasheed - It feels like what drives pop music isn't what ought to drive it. Like it's not following a natural path towards its ultimate form, but traveling down a path that's is unnatural and silly.

Muhammad Rasheed - I don't want my playlist to be endlessly stuck in this stagnant, "remember when?" retro loop that's growing increasingly more and more watered down as I slowly add the occasional songs from the new kids that sorta-kinda appeal to me.

Basically I'm saying I would really like to enjoy music a lot more than what I do, but I am not a musician, and I have zero control over what inspires others to create. It feels like the potential of the pop music genres was allowed to expire, and now the fully 'corporatized' music industry is just pretending to be a thing. Now it is pretending to be "art," but is actually a gaudy plastic structure with a neon "ART" sign bolted onto the front of it... wiggling & prancing... charging you money to artificially conjure the long-gone memory of something that used to try to blossom into actual greatness.

Muhammad Rasheed - WHY DOESN'T THE EMPEROR HAVE ANY DAMN CLOTHES ON?!?!  >:(

Subjective opinion my ass! Even if you aren't as extreme as I feel about it, you still know this is some dank, corporate-driven claptrap. What do you gain by pretending this stank, inbred bastard is fully clothed? Even when Dr. Boyce Watkins and Michael Eric Dyson had their 'hiphop' debate, they kept reluctantly admitting that even though they loved it, they wished it was 'different.'

I'm not talking about the message within the lyrical content (Chris Rock addresses that concept well in his "Not talkin' 'bout ME!" bit), I'm talking about the music itself... the melody, notes, cords, full arrangement stuff. All of it as a package.

Aminah Armour - have you tried different foreign artists? They tend to tap into what we grew up with, especially a lot of African artists. The different Afro Beats that are out now.

Muhammad Rasheed - Hm. I'm not sure how I feel about being forced to settle for another culture's spin on my shit, when I had my own perfectly good shit that was sabotaged. lol That would just make me bitter every time I listened to it, wondering how it would have been if it was still American...

Aminah Armour - well eventually you have to also put blame on these negro producers. Most of the time these record companies and some independents use the same producers over & over. Which is good for them.. I guess. But it doesn't do anything for expanding creativity. Somewhere in the mid 2000's especially 2008 is where it hit bottom.

Muhammad Rasheed - @Aminah...Should I blame the producers? The talent isn't really driving the vision of the industry as a whole, since it's the naked billionaire owners that determine which talent gets hired and pushed forward into the distribution/consumption machine, based on whatever their corporate agenda dictates. Is some of that talent guilty of that hating on the enterprising artists trying to break free from the plantation? Sure, but it's the art-killing vision of the moneyed owners that is the root cause of the problem here.

Obstacles on the journey towards Black Empowerment & Economic Inclusion.
Aminah Armour - its part of it. Like you said parts of the machine but Producers still control the sound that's being put out. I mean you have talented artist out here but look at who the producers are making the music. Since a lot of the sounds are just a hosh posh of genres mixed together. Dub, trap, whatever echo sounds to put over voices that just sound hollow with no soul.

Muhammad Rasheed - Aminah wrote: "... but Producers still control the sound that's being put out."

They control it within the limited parameters that are measured out by their bosses.

Muhammad Rasheed - Note that there is an awful lot of "sampling" and recycling within a carefully determined box by all of these flexible 'corporate men' producers, who are used over and over again by these studios.

Muhammad Rasheed - Although they can hardly be considered "new" any longer, I really like 'Fallen' and 'A Woman's Worth' by Alicia Keys, and 'Ordinary' by Wayne Brady. Unlike Bruno Mars' stuff – which comes across like a genuinely appreciative and admirable tribute to a by-gone era by a True Fan – those three songs sound like a reformation attempt of the music industry. Tapping into the same creative well of pure artist spirits from back-in-the-day, to me they feel like the effort to return pop music to the path that it had strayed from.

Brian Charboneau - It is not just music. Very few people learn to like anything new to them after age 35. Most people set their tastes in food, clothes, hair styles, furniture and houses when they are in their 20s or before.

How many people do you know who take up a new sport in their 40s ? And how many college educated women wear their hair all their lifeboat in exactly the same wat they wore it in there senior year in college ? And those who don’t, how many change styles as they get older to the style their mothers wore at the same age ?

That people fix their ideas about many things at a young age is a foundation idea of marketing. It is why advertising is often aimed at selling particular brands to young people - because a person who buys one brand of toothpaste will generally buy that brand for life.

Do you recall the idea that people had brand loyalty in cars - a man might be a Ford man or a Chevy man, ot maybe a GM man who bought up Alfred Sloan’’s hierarchy of GM brands as he became more prosperous. The Japanese cars were a big shock to this system.

Muhammad Rasheed - Brian wrote: “That people fix their ideas about many things at a young age is a foundation idea of marketing. It is why advertising is often aimed at selling particular brands to young people…”

Your comment may contain unintended insights into many industry practices. Perhaps the phenomenon you are pointing out in people is actually caused or deliberately exaggerated by brainwashing marketing techniques, that seek to create a quasi-artificial consumer landscape that favors corporate.

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