Electronic music is music, too. Let’s not go off half-cocked here.
Rap is music, too, by the way… in case anyone was about to try and cut that out of the conversation. 
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OK, I’ll be right back.
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Pretty sure the latter has a very clear meaning, eloquently expressed, and that meaning it: I’m so stoned right now.
I feel like, and maybe I’m giving John too much charity here, but it seems like John isn’t so much saying that music has gone to shit, but more that a certain kind of music seems like it’s missing from the contemporary scene. Like, John’s done plenty of collaborations over the years and performed songs written by many people. Maybe it’s more like John is complaining about a samey-ness to the structure of the music that is making the top of the charts?
I don’t know, and I don’t know why I’m inclined to defend Elton John going all kids-these-days.
Maybe he’s just frustrated that he doesn’t have as much fun with Suzie anymore?
Related:
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You say that as if there’s a station like WFMU.
When did I say they weren’t music? But the variety within them has declined, too.
If he’s missing the same thing I am missing from pop music these days, it’s melody.
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As a musician who has played in top 40 cover bands for 20 years I can definitely attest to the idea of the “death of melody” or homogenization of pop music. And its not that this wasnt a thing before but it is so much more a dominating factor, like someone has distilled the essence of pop into a 3 note melodic range and 3-4 chords, so lets just keep churning that shit out.
And sure, you can point to numerous popular hits from the 50s onward as fitting into that category, but there is a big difference between “Johnny B Goode” and “Shotgun”, the first was an evolution of music that came before, the latter, well I don’t even know.
Tl;dr - If I have to play “Shotgun” one more time I’m gonna stab someone with the pointy end of my 80’s shred beast.
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Zappa in a 1976 interview:
“what do you think of disco music?”
“It fulfills its function and is a necessary tool of the disco industry. The disco industry has nothing to do with music or dancing, but it does have something to do with getting lonely people together in an environment where they can sort of make friends with each other and then enjoy recreation together afterwards”
I think there’s still great songwriting and performing going on, but markets are too fragmented for any but the lowest common denominator music to be called a “hit”. Harry Chapin and Jim Croce or Gordon Lightfoot types for example are still around in abundance, but it’s hard to imagine them having any hits nowadays. Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is fantastic, but let’s face it it would find little fertile soil nowadays and die in indie-fandom obscurity instead of being a huge hit. And could anyone imagine a song like Carry On My Wayward Son hitting #2 anymore.
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There could be another factor here, which is that now it’s easier for everyone to just listen to whatever it is exactly / specifically that they like with hardly any effort, given recommendation algorithms. I listen to tons of weird stuff (some old, some new) but none of it is current top 40 (if that’s even a thing anymore, who knows) pop music. It’s possible that people who are more finicky have more stuff tailored to specifically to them whereas in the past you didn’t really have much of a choice besides depending on local radio, local record stores, bootlegs, and eventually corporate monolithic tv. So all of those outlets had to appeal to the pickier people more.
That’s what I think is dumb about the argument if you don’t like whoever is on billboard or whatever right now (does that even exist now??) you are a curmudgeonly old. There is tons of new music that is not that stuff.
We’ve gone from top-down, monolithic broadcast to a weird world of AI holding a mirror to us and the songs we told it we liked, but the mirror reflects permutations back at us that will be in the ball-park, based on what it has observed about similar users.
Maybe people who are stuck in the billboard / top 40 bubble are stuck in it because they watch a lot of TV, go out to certain clubs, and the recommendation algorithms have been under-seeded with outlier material to nudge them onto a different path when they are using streaming music services. (Not to mention, if you are a new user that is exactly what you’ll get from their generic “we don’t know you yet” recommendations. So if you are fine with it to begin with, you’ll keep getting it.
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The Knight of Pop has spoken.
He’s obviously too fatigued to sign up for a music streaming platform to do some actual research into this.
It’s clear Sir Reginald Kenneth Dwight has never heard The Sugababes?
There’s always been vapid music with vapid writing. Most popular music follows a very specific formula that’s been highly tuned over decades. The song structure of a hit from the 1950s differs little from a hit of today:
Elton John is as guilty of relying on this formula as anyone.
I think the difference between now and then is now you have 5 writers, 7 producers, and 3 guest stars.
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Yeah, and Gregory Coleman died a homeless man… I am no fan of intellectual property and I have to roll my eyes at times at the anti “computer music” sentiment, but I actually know conservatives who would be all to happy point something like this out to defend intellectual property law and also a curmudgeonly attitude about modern highly produced music
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I think there a few ways one could go with this… one way would just be to return to western melody but another way would be to get into microtonal stuff in a way that becomes “accessible” to people who can’t handle it, and also introduce elements where rhythm and tonality integrate (I brought this a long time ago on here about Indian ragas and also Irish fiddle tunes) and I’m sure there are some other cultures that interesting things with keys and melodies but I have no idea what I’m talking about because I’ve never studied this stuff in school it’s just an arm chair observation. Rhythm got pretty sophisticated the last 50 years, maybe people are just bored with melodies and harmonies now in the US. There is also polyrhymic stuff left In rhythm which i am not sure pop music has exhausted
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I’m not impressed with modern pop music either, Sir Elton.
But there is a whole bunch of modern musicians I am just blown right out of my chair by.
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Bill Drummond said, in ‘The Manual’:
The Techno sound of Detroit, the most totally linear programmed music ever, lacking any human musicianship in its execution reeks of sweat, sex and desire. The creators of that music just press a few buttons and out comes - a million years of pain and lust.
We await the day with relish that somebody dares to make a dance record that consists of nothing more than an electronically programmed bass drum beat that continues playing the fours monotonously for eight minutes. Then, when somebody else brings one out using exactly the same bass drum sound and at the same beats per minute (B.P.M.), we will all be able to tell which is the best, which inspires the dance floor to fill the fastest, which has the most sex and the most soul. There is no doubt, one will be better than the other. What we are basically saying is, if you have anything in you, anything unique, what others might term as originality, it will come through whatever the component parts used in your future Number One are made up from.
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Well, 200 years ago, or any time before the invention of recorded music, popular songs were created to be (or evolved into) what a typical or slightly-above-average-talent adult could comfortably reproduce. That severely restricted what kinds of melodies you could reproduce. Lyrics would either be repetitive or have stories because those kinds of lyrics are easy to remember. Extraordinarily talented people existed, and even became famous, but only smaller audiences ever heard their works. 200 years ago Beyonce could never be a superstar whose songs spread beyond a local market, because so few performers could do her songs justice.
@tsath RE: the 1970s: At that time, artists had learned they could write songs unlike what had been popular before, audiences didn’t yet expect super-expensive (even bad songs cost a lot to make into studio albums) production (so more and smaller labels could thrive), and there was less corporate pressure on everything (ditto). So today instead we get earworms optimized for things like addictiveness rather than enjoyment, blasted into the world over and over.
As I’m sure Elton John would agree, there’s a huge amount of great music still being made. Most of it isn’t “pop” or never becomes a mass-market hit. In that specific segment, money is orthogonal to talent or writing.
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