Is Pop Music Innovative Or Good Anymore?

Dean wrote: Pop music is at its best when it's being smart/clever/erudite/witty/provocative - anything that shows there is a brain and a personality (however prefabricated) at work behind the glitz and the gloss - of the modern era, artists like Tinie Tempah, Lily Allen, Biffy Clyro, Florence & the Machine, Kate Nash, Katy Perry, Gorillaz and (to some extent) Lady Gaga and Eminem, while not being stunningly profound or earth-shattering, are demonstrating that ti still takes talent and skill to produce Pop music as an art form rather than just a product.

I sort of agree with this (but haven't even heard of the artists cited apart from Lady Gaga, Eminem and Gorrillaz)

Casting your line further outside the goldfish bowl of celebrity however, we do reel in a former school of pop music that is intelligent , witty, thought provoking and occupies very familiar mainstream waters e.g.
Bob Dylan, Madness, the Go-Betweens, Blondie, The Kinks, Pretenders, The Stranglers (the list goes on)

The foregoing all write very conservative music using the types of structures (verse, chorus, middle eight etc) still endemic in contemporary popular song writing styles. Notwithstanding audio and computer software developments, technological aides become irrelevant if they do not engender new forms and structures after all. The only real difference I can hear see between Lady Gaga and my examples is that of the lowest common denominator scaling the top of the totem pole i.e. sexuality masquerading as innovation/non conformity ( a marketing guru's wet dream to be sure)

It would of course be naive to claim that record executives did not exploit Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde's obvious sex appeal to shift more units, but neither stooped to conquer success as women playing the industry 'man's game' c/f Madonna, Lady Gaga. I wouldn't imagine Gaga's fan base has sufficient nous to intuit their heroine's ironic embrace of a patriarchal mindset she is exploiting for her own mercenary ends.
(Good luck to her I say, but she is even more of an unwitting staunch reactionary than Madonna)

Forgive me if this question has been raised, I didn't read everything...

To start yes. But they were clearly more than that, at least in the period I assume you are referring to.

Man With Hat wrote: To start yes. But they were clearly more than that, at least in the period I assume you are referring to.   But that is a good point nonetheless. Their base genre was pop.

I'm referring to all their career, and I call all of it pop because no matter how sophisticated, witty etc. it was, it was also highly accessible, melodic, ergo the huge sales, larger than life impact on the masses, etc.

Slarti, who knows?  I have no idea what's going on with pop music these days.  My kids are grown up.  I'm approaching senescense.

This is a great song. It's pretty much the only good pop song in the past five years, probably.

On a somewhat related note, in the 60s there weren't also so many labels and genre-tags. So a lot of music that might be pop in some sense is today already classified as something else. For example, Brand New Heavies are classified as acid jazz but it seems reasonable to call this track pop:

lucas wrote: Joanna Newsom is not pop , she is, according to Roy Harper's own words "a pioneer of folk rock music like him".

Yeah, if you want to use the most precise tags and descriptors, then nothing's pop. But even so, Joanna Newsom is folk rock in the same universe where Jethro Tull is atmospheric black metal If we're into precise tagging, I'd say that what Joanna plays is acoustically supported vocal music, with a great emphasis on both composition and melody. Pop, in my book.

harmonium.ro wrote: lucas wrote: Joanna Newsom is not pop , she is, according to Roy Harper's own words "a pioneer of folk rock music like him". Yeah, if you want to use the most precise tags and descriptors, then nothing's pop. But even so, Joanna Newsom is folk rock in the same universe where Jethro Tull is atmospheric black metal If we're into precise tagging, I'd say that what Joanna plays is acoustically supported vocal music, with a great emphasis on both composition and melody. Pop, in my book.