Modern pop music is designed to please everyone, and that’s a problem. In the past, the hip, new songs and musicians you and your friends would blast to annoy your parents were the most popular.
Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, anything that could get mom and pop to shake their fists and yell, “Turn off that racket!” isn’t what’s mainstream. Nowadays, a lot of what’s popular in music appeals not just to the kids and teens, but also to their parents.
Music, and art as a whole, exist not just for the aesthetics and first-glance impressions of it, but to convey messages and to receive criticism. It just so happens that making stances and making people understand conflict with big corporations, ideals, and agendas is more pressing of a matter. At the end of the day, no company will output any media that strays against what they want the issues to be.
To that end, pop music has become sterilized, substanceless, and devoid of anything real to the artist. And when the art forms we consume lack substance, in turn, so do we.
What was the last song you heard on the radio that did not sound like background music for a supermarket? When was the last time you spent more than three seconds thinking about the lyrics of the new hit single? Does that seem unintentional? Nothing in modern pop exists without extensive rewrites and production.
Most of the time, if there even is a theme or subject of a pop song, it is about breakups. This is a topic that most people go through and very easily relate to. More common in the past several years are love songs, and those, too, are fed through an industrial mill to be mild, insubstantial, and void of love. However, the vast majority of the time, the ultimate goal of a song from a company is to be catchy: just the right melody and mash-up of instruments to keep songs playing on loop as long as possible, the right sound to get talked about but not discussed.
The music industry does a good job of this because pop music appears to also be the most popularized music. The internet breaking over re-recordings of songs with a single line changed, marketing being entirely based on an artist’s sex appeal instead of their talent, every big pop act having an invisible sticker on their jaw reading “Board Certified.”
People have shown their adoration for corporate mascots, so long as they play guitar, and every time someone sticks their fingers in their ears and refuses to admit the issues in their manufactured idols, a marketing executive somewhere gets a bonus.
Nowadays, the need for music that goes against what the parents want and what the kids crave is filled almost entirely by rap. Rap is the current last bastion of genuine lyricism. But, meaning should not be confined to just that genre in the way it is.
Pop music has lost its uniqueness, charms, and most importantly, its meaning. Simply put, it’s just not popping anymore.
