I can’t escape the conclusion that pop music is getting better.
At the very least, it’s getting more interesting. The area that lies somewhere between rock, pop and stuff you can dance to has opened up to a new breadth of experimentation. Some of the acts widely credited with recent contributions to creative rock are Grizzly Bear, Panda Bear, Beach House, and Battles, not to forget the no-fi outliers like Ariel Pink.
I don’t want to suggest that the raw quality of any given artist is better now than in the past. It’s doubtful that a certain generation of musicians could be more talented than another, and anyway, we’ve been provided with a recent example to the contrary.
The highest critical acclaim on the Internet music criticism circuit of late has gone, of all people to be recently discussed, to Otis Redding. A re-release of two of his albums has been reviewed alongside the new Death Cab, and the enthusiasm with which the writers speak of Redding belies their eagerness to discuss a musician of his caliber.
And in comparison with recent artists, the fact that the previous generation is often more skilled in the fundamentals, like quality of voice and instrumental performance, becomes clear.
The point is not that musicians have gotten better, but that the environment in which contemporary artists find themselves is conducive to an expanded idea of what pop music can be. The liberation that artists are privileged with (and the isolation that forces them into day jobs) is something unique to the current crop of independently minded musicians.
Unlike the days of record company-farmed supergroups, no longer a sustainable model, a more humble generation of musicians are making their own way from garages and bedrooms, working for less money but with more creative control than some of them know what to do with. This has laid the foundation for the infiltration of experimental ideas into pop music on a wide scale.
The 20th century has been the most experimental one for music in the history of that art. This is relatively obvious, as it has also been the time of greatest cultural change.
Until recently, however, much of pop music was disappointingly isolated from the developments that were going on in the academic/classical, jazz and later electronic worlds. “Classical” artists were experimenting with minimalism, the breakdown of form, atonality and pioneering the acceptance of electronic noises as a musical vehicle ““ before any sort of electronic dance music existed, Stockhausen was creating full works out of electronics. Jazz artists were stepping out into atonality, noise, bizarre song structures ““ many of the same ideas as the classical artists but with improvisation and a raw performance aesthetic.
There were, of course, more rock innovators than I can name, musicians such as the Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart, Talking Heads. The difference is that the number of musicians now able to get involved in the process of reforming and deforming pop is greater than ever before.
And, unlike Reed and Cale, modern experimenters can expect recognition upon releasing their work. There are at least two factors that have allowed the recent expansions in innovative pop music, the first being the isolation and independence I mentioned. Current artists don’t have to convince an A&R man that they’re any good to get recorded. Bands make their music first and get comments later; they can make whatever they want, post some tracks on the Internet, and let the world decide.
The second factor is the increased prevalence of electronics in music. A personal understanding of recording technology is important for a band operating out of a garage, but the more influential uses of electronics inform the compositional rather than the practical.
Panda Bear is a good example; he recently admitted in a New York Times article that his music simply wouldn’t be possible without computers. The spliced-up dream pop that brought his solo releases acclaim (“fame” probably isn’t the right word) is a phenomenon that could only come about in this time and place, and Panda Bear is only one example.
This is good news for pop music and something of a paradox: As musicians work from home, out of the eyes of institutions, their experimentation comes more into the open than ever before.
E-mail LaRue at alarue@media.ucla.edu.