There are definitely people with no interest in actually doing so; but by the standards of signal processing challenges I strongly suspect that providing a precise model of “always a little ahead and a little behind the beat” (including generic-use models with some randomness for use in livening up arbitrary material and models constructed from specific genres or musicians so that your soulless machine can deviate from the beat in exactly the same way a particular person did) would be on the relatively low end.
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Well. . . would it be a “kids today” argument if someone younger said the same thing?
He does have a valid point, in that six writers and five producers on a single song smacks of music created by committee, “before we release this mix the marketing department needs to approve it.”
And this isn’t high art where jazz musicians co-author a group improvisation, or progressive rock musicians each submit part of a long suite. It’s a 3-minute pop song designed to sell downloads. That’s not necessarily ‘bad’, as long as you recognize that eating a bowl of Count Chocula isn’t the same as having a healthy meal. It is what it is, and should be enjoyed for what it is.
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I think some complaints are more about the system that enables music created by teams to dominate the market, making it harder for talented independent artists to be heard and succeed. There are also concerns about companies that use tech other means just to craft something designed to sell. It can be jarring to look at a list of hits and find more emphasis on marketing than music.
Other criticisms come down to personal taste. I compare the recipe for success in those cases to baked treats. Some people like the familiarity/consistency of a cake made from a box mix or Pop-Tarts, while others want a custom cake made from scratch. 
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Pop music was always a bit of a lowest common denominator thing with factory-style production lines. Think Stock, Aitken Waterman, or the assorted collaborations in the Brill building or what was going on in Motown (or read this about a more contemporary version) or any number of other examples. Though many of them did have truly original single writers or duos who could churn out hit after hit and it still be great music.
So yes, some of that stuff was brilliant and became classics, some was pap and deserved to be forgotten. Much was in between but at least managed to be better quality earworm.
But one thing I do feel is that so much of today’s pop music just sounds the same. The range of originality (which maybe does come from the original/singular ‘voices’ of the sort of songwriters the demise of which Elton is mourning) seems to be so much more limited, and it all seems so much more formulaic and written to order to meet some pre-determined criteria.
Maybe I’m not listening to the right stuff but some of them, at least, can vacate my lawn (and maybe leave some room for others to come and trample on my grass).
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If anything the system we have today is the most democratic it has ever been. Of course it’s still incredibly hard to break out and almost everybody languishes in obscurity, but that’s the nature of the beast.
I still think we probably lost a lot of really great talent under the label system just because they could read a contract and decided that it wasn’t worth it if you had to become a slave to the label to get published.
Motown would like a word re: group songwriting being a recent development.
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‘After peaking in the 1960s, timbral variety has been in steady decline to the present day, the researchers found. That implies a homogenization of the overall timbral palette, which could point to less diversity in instrumentation and recording techniques. Similarly, the pitch content of music has shriveled somewhat. The basic pitch vocabulary has remained unchanged—the same notes and chords that were popular in decades past are popular today—but the syntax has become more restricted. Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod by their predecessors and contemporaries.’
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Oh for the days when lyrical geniuses like John Lennon & Paul McCartney wrote songs that really had a message, like…
“Nahhhh nah nah nana na nahhhhh nana na nahhh heyyy Jude. Nahhhh nah nah nana na nahhhhh nana na nahhh heyyy Jude. Nahhhh nah nah nana na nahhhhh nana na nahhh heyyy Jude. Nahhhh nah nah nana na nahhhhh nana na nahhh heyyy Jude.”
or…
“I am the eggman (Ooh)
They are the eggmen (Ooh)
I am the walrus
Goo goo g’ joob
Goo goo g’ joob
G’ goo goo g’ joob
Goo goo g’ joob, goo goo g’ goo g’ goo goo g’ joob joob
Joob joob…”
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This might fall into the category of “You didn’t do it like I did, so you did it wrong”.
I would also imagine that in some cases, when there are numerous people being credited on a song, it’s just that - numerous people getting credited. As opposed to one person saying that they did it all themselves, despite the fact they had numerous people contributing to the overall success in some way.
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That’s always been the case. Commercial radio has always been about appealing to the least common denominator (at least since the seventies). If you want to know what’s really out there, I’d recommend a free-form non-commercial station like WFMU.
As a furthermore, lots of American radio stations all sound alike because they’re all owned by a few mega-conglomerates. I understand that they choose what gets played via algorithms. And I dare say that if someone like Elvis or The Beatles were just starting out today, they would have a VERY rough time of it.
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It’s been a while since we’ve seen timquinn— their last post was 50 years ago.
As far as Elton’s relevance I have a feeling most of you are thinking of Crocodile Rock or Candle in the Wind, but here is the Elton/Bernie song that has been on my mind recently. It’s the one that should have been included in the DNC: Burn Down the Mission, 1970
Anyway, I gave up caffeine about a year ago and haven’t felt the urge to participate here since. Probably for the best. Couldn’t resist this one.
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Yep, songs which recognise that repetition is useful device in crafting empowerment chants sure are lyrically inferior to “I see a little silhouetto of a man/Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?/Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me/Galileo, Galileo, Galileo Figaro magnifico”. Which curiously seem to be missing.
It’s a great song, but I wouldn’t be holding up the lyrics of Bohemian Rhaspsody as its strength.
“Bootylicious” vs “Fat Bottomed Girls” would be a more suitable comparison, and Beyonce (well, Destiny’s Child) and her team of writers win that one easily.
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The labels have a long history of exploitation, especially of artists of color.
I think that just shows that we don’t need them to get good music out to the masses.
It’s the core division of labor for most of the history of the music industry, even after the Beatles to a large extent. No one is shaming Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday for not being songwriters, though.
And? It’s still a legitimate way to make art. It’s just a new tool.
And there is nothing wrong with someone just interpreting songs written by others, either. Plenty of beloved singers were interpreting the works of others.
Entirely true. The problem is the label, not people collaborating, though.
Just over all… I understand the “corporate music sucks” argument, I do. But I don’t think that the way to pin that down is necessarily to focus solely on songwriting as some token of purity? Some of that is from the 60s, countercultural idea that prizes pure “authenticity” over commercialness… the reality is much harder to suss out, I think. Plenty of music written by the person performing it can be commercial in nature, while songs written by a team or by someone who is a pro songwriter only can be pretty authentic. Almost all popular music goes through the commercial grinder is some way, because we live in a capitalist system. The fact that there is music out there which very much rises above that commercialism is a testament to how central making culture that can act as a way to bind people together into shared, imagined communities is to being human.
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He basically tells the difference between inventing a song in front of a piano, or with a guitar, and then if needed port it into a computer, and directly writing the song into a computer. The latter makes you lazy so you start thinking “it’s like the 4 bars I’ve just done, why playing them again? Let me just copy and paste the old ones and then change this and that then add some randomness to fake a real musician”.
I’ve done both, and can guarantee there’s a huge difference.
One can make exceptionally natural sounding tracks using computers, they’re wonderful tools, but when writing songs, it’s much better if the computer stays turned down.
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Yes, of course this is totally a “kids today” type of argument.
But those arguments aren’t always wrong. Writing songs by committee is like writing movie scripts by committee, it leads to sameness and corporatization and Least Common Denominator syndrome. A lot of these songwriters don’t know each other and simply add some production element, and negotiate their 5% of the writing credit, often at the expense of the song’s main writer.
In general though I don’t think things were that different, in terms of big money corporatism, in Elton John’s heydey. There’s always good music that doesn’t get its due, and popular crap on the radio/wherever that gets attention just for being similar to the current trend.
Today there’s just more music out there, period, and it’s easier to find, and basically free, though at the same time there’s so much that gets lost in the shuffle, like Apps on the App Store.
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He ain’t wrong. And it’s not just “Damned kids. Get off my lawn!”
There have been a number of extremely broadly based studies showing that musical diversity peaked in the early seventies and has been on a very sad flattening ever since. Dynamic range has been sacrificed for volume. There has been a decline in musicians actually playing instruments or even singing. And there are two main gatekeepers who dominate the music industry and have undue influence over what will be produced and sold.
The Song Machine talked about this years ago.
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I’m sorry, but Elton Fucking John is complaining about this? Some of his songs are quite catchy, but a lot of the lyrics are absolute gibberish and he didn’t even write a lot of them. Don’t get me wrong; his music is fun and I like him fine, but he wouldn’t make my top fifty if I was putting together a list of people who were actually great songwriters.
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To be fair “songwriting” is not just “lyrics writing”. And sometimes lyrics are just something to be a vehicle so that the voice can be used as another instrument in the mix.
Edit: It looks like a few people in these comments are under this same misapprehension. Gibberish lyrics can be perfectly brilliant if they mesh with the instrumental portion of the song. It’s either gibberish lyrics or people just wailing wordlessly or scat singing, but when it works, it works.
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