How to Create a Pop Star

dtguitarfan wrote: Ugh. Just go watch "Before the Music Dies" - it makes my point much better than I ever could. It's about companies, headed by people who know nothing about music telling artists what to do and grabbing pretty people who have absolutely no musical talent and using tricks to make them seem better than they are. It's about focus groups listening to ten second clips and these results being used to determine if music should be invested in.

I would say that stuff like that has probably been going on for a long time now, it's just that the quality of the music has dropped considerably in the past 12 years; and especially in the last 5 years.

dtguitarfan wrote: Calling a pop musician an artist is like calling someone who can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich a chef.

If you think that of all pop musicians then your statement is transparently lazy and naive bollocks.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament (Oscar Wilde)

I suspect that in your cramped and humid musical cosmology, Pop can be defined in the same way as say, Satanism e.g. it's everybody else's religion apart from your own?


Edited by ExittheLemming - June 02 2012 at 00:03

rogerthat wrote: darkshade wrote: I believe the topic of this thread is "How To Create A (late-2000s/early2010s) Pop Star Like Norah Jones?  She's not half bad either.  Pretty good, I should say, though I am not terribly fond of her work.

Edited by Dayvenkirq - June 02 2012 at 02:01

dtguitarfan wrote: And bringing in Beatles, and Stevie Wonder, etc., to try to argue that pop music has its merits - I asked my wife "do you consider the Beatles and Stevie Wonder pop music?"  She looked at me with a look that said it all.  Let me ask you something - when you turn on the radio to the local hits station in your town, do they play Stevie Wonder and the Beatles?  No.  What they play - THAT'S what I'm talking about.  I'm sorry, but Beatles and Stevie Wonder are NOT pop.  They may be POPULAR, but they're not Pop.  Neither is Dave Matthews Band.  Or Eric Clapton.  There is a distinction between popular and pop.

Yes, I suppose pop is what derisive elitists would like to label popular music as.   So there must be a distinction.  Right, if you have a problem with labelling Beatles as pop, how about Toto?  Made up of sessions guns and wrote some interesting songs like Africa which became huge hits.  

If you have a very specific notion of pop in making your points, it is better to clarify that at the outset than to assume that this is some universal notion which everybody ought to agree with.  And even then, you are simply generalizing at your peril.   Didn't you have some serious objections to people saying prog metal bands are same sounding?  So how does this work?

EDIT: And by the by, whether I like them at all or not is beside the point but if somebody played songs by Adele, Lady Gaga, Norah Jones, Michael Buble and Rihanna back to back, I would not be able to say it is all the same.  It would only be to the extent that they are all pop in some or the other way, which is like saying one Oscar Peterson performance sounds at least somewhat like the next.  So it is not necessarily true that all contemporary pop is the same; it depends on what artists inform your perceptions.


Edited by rogerthat - June 02 2012 at 06:18

dtguitarfan wrote: rogerthat wrote: If you have a very specific notion of pop in making your points, it is better to clarify that at the outset than to assume that this is some universal notion which everybody ought to agree with.  And even then, you are simply generalizing at your peril.   Didn't you have some serious objections to people saying prog metal bands are same sounding?  So how does this work? The difference lies in the fact that I can play a Rhianna song and say "this is a four chord song", and then I can play a Lady  Gaga song and say "this is ALSO a four chord song - same progression", and then I can play a Katy Perry song and say "hey, this is ALSO a four chord song with the same progression...and guess what, they're all in 4/4 time!"  There's a BIG difference in saying all pop music sounds the same and saying everything in other genres sound the same - you can actually back up the statement about pop with technical FACTS.

All four chord songs are not necessarily the same because they may involve different textures, both melodic as well as percussive.  If this were not the case, cover artists would be completely out of business and nobody would want to listen to a performance of a jazz standard. So, you are probably 'backing' up your statement with only one set of facts that you have selected, while ignoring others.  I Kissed A Girl does not sound like Rolling in the Deep, that's pretty obvious and doesn't need any investigation into the 'facts'. 

he doesn't like Foo Fighters either.

Trouble is that pop is not a genre just a catch all word that encompasses many styles of music.

dtguitarfan wrote: Calling a pop musician an artist is like calling someone who can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich a chef.

But what if a pop musician made PB&Js like this?

I love good pop music, just as I dislike bad prog music.  And despite what that statement implies, the two are not opposites.

I think I need to clarify something.  I have no problem with a four-chord song, per se.  What I have a problem with is when an artist has an entire collection of nothing BUT four-chord songs that never go anywhere, never add any unique elements, never strive for excellence, and this artist is worshiped by millions of rabid fans, they have multiple mansions on opposite sides of continents, and they win awards - like our society is saying "THIS is the best we have to offer."  I have no problem with finger-painting either - my kids make finger paintings, and they go on my fridge and I see beauty in them.  But if there were an "artist" who made nothing but this type of painting, and made millions of dollars doing it, and appeared on the covers of magazines, and won awards, while millions of teenage fanatics and middle aged women credited this artist as the greatest artist ever while simultaneously saying Leonardo Da Vinci was nothing special, it would infuriate me.