How did the current trend of mainstream pop start?

[arkmabat]

The supersaw is the modern equivalent to the first (edit: heavy metal) electric guitar.

[Aryaroman]

There is no argument to be had in this thread. It's ALL taste. There is no such thing as bad music - just music you don't happen to like.

There is as much argument as there was when my grandfather dismissed The Beatles or The Bee Gees as yay-yay-music. None, I think. I don't think I would like a song made with a saw played with a drill, but that wouldn't make it objectively bad, no. I'm wondering how come and if people will still be listening to something close to a super charged electronic stimulation of that 5 to 50 years from now.

Genius minimal pop - super minimal arrangement - super catchy hooks - awesome mix. f**king hard to pull off.

Yes, it was a simple, but working arrangement. Very much repetition and the vocalists are screaming girls. What did you think of that David Guetta concert?

[/quote]The supersaw is the modern equivalent to the first electric guitar.[/quote]

That's why I am afraid what comes next.

[do_androids_dream]

What did you think of that David Guetta concert?

Well, what I think of it is no reflection of what it actually is - it's just my taste. But, for the record I think it's beyond awful - truly garbage And I've been a true house and techno head since I first head Farley Jackmaster Funk around '87.

[Tricky-Loops]

What did you think of that David Guetta concert?

Well, what I think of it is no reflection of what it actually is - it's just my taste. But, for the record I think it's beyond awful - truly garbage And I've been a true house and techno head since I first head Farley Jackmaster Funk around '87.

The prices for the tickets for a David Guetta concert are beyond awful, too! At least in Germany...

I'd rather go to a concert from Paul van Dyk, Fritz or Paul Kalkbrenner, Blank & Jones or Kruder & Dorfmeister!

[do_androids_dream]

Very much repetition and the vocalists are screaming girls.

You say repetition like it's a bad thing!! Well those 'screaming girls' are Iggy with her very unique rap voice and Charli XCX who has a great, sexy voice. They're where they are because of hard work and talent.

[do_androids_dream]

What did you think of that David Guetta concert?

Well, what I think of it is no reflection of what it actually is - it's just my taste. But, for the record I think it's beyond awful - truly garbage And I've been a true house and techno head since I first heard Farley Jackmaster Funk around '87.

The prices for the tickets for a David Guetta concert are beyond awful, too! At least in Germany...

I'd rather go to a concert from Paul van Dyk, Fritz or Paul Kalkbrenner, Blank & Jones or Kruder & Dorfmeister!

PVD did some great stuff back in his early days.

[DSmolken]

Are supersaws really still trendy?

[Gamma-UT]

Are supersaws really still trendy?

Are supersaws all over every track? No. LMFAO had a good go at banging the nail in its coffin of trendiness. But the supersaw and it's daddy the hoover have kept on popping up on recordings for 25-odd years now in various forms. They do have a lot in common with distorted guitars. They soak up practically the entire frequency range, which gives them that insistent quality we look for in the overdriven guitar.

[IncarnateX]

There is no such thing as bad music

...only too few drugs.

[Aryaroman]

Very much repetition and the vocalists are screaming girls.

You say repetition like it's a bad thing!! Well those 'screaming girls' are Iggy with her very unique rap voice and Charli XCX who has a great, sexy voice. They're where they are because of hard work and talent.

They remind me of that show, "two broke girls" or something. I see two white girls acting and singing like rappers, to which they have every right to. Overall, it's well mixed track, the electronic bass works well, but it does get repetitive. It's not simple and it works for what it is and musically, it's far from noisy mush. I think this is very much like Britney Spears' early career. Even the high school setting is very reminiscent of that.

What did you think of that David Guetta concert?

Well, what I think of it is no reflection of what it actually is - it's just my taste. But, for the record I think it's beyond awful - truly garbage And I've been a true house and techno head since I first head Farley Jackmaster Funk around '87.

This is my point. David and many other artists are pushing the boundaries between noise and music. I don't like most of the 90s electronic music, apart from Deep Forest, etc. but I don't think even then there was as much compressing the music into complete mush as there has been recently. Even David did music like "Sexy Bitch" or "Memories", which were structured songs, even if a bit already pushing the boundaries back in the day. It's still been a big leap from those songs into songs like "Shot Me Down", and that next song in the concert, where he took the opening of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", loops it and then does nothing with it, until he "blows up" the song into that super charged mush. Here's a lot of that same thing, the mush:

[DSmolken]

Are supersaws really still trendy?

Are supersaws all over every track? No. LMFAO had a good go at banging the nail in its coffin of trendiness. But the supersaw and it's daddy the hoover have kept on popping up on recordings for 25-odd years now in various forms. They do have a lot in common with distorted guitars. They soak up practically the entire frequency range, which gives them that insistent quality we look for in the overdriven guitar.

I think supersaws are a lot less common than they were just a year ago, and most tracks which have guitar have it with light overdrive at most, but I haven't really done a proper statistical analysis or anything. That's just the impression I get from new tracks I've heard in the past few months in both pop and EDM. Big festival stages are still heavy on 128 bpm tempos, huge risers, huge supersaw leads, true. But outside of that and some clubs, things have changed a lot and gotten less aggressive.

Though filling out the entire frequency spectrum is still a big deal, that's true. But nowadays in a lot of tracks it's done with lots of layers of percussion, sax parts, heavy harmonic exciters on vocals etc. instead of supersaws and sidechained or filtered white noise.

[MOK19]

That's why I am afraid what comes next.

I think you've got it backwards. Because you dislike the current trend so much, while it has seen so much success and growth, it can only mean things will change greatly, maybe get better, sometime in the next few years. Why? Backlash.

Something gets popular, it reaches critical mass, and then there's a backlash that prompts an evolution as soon as someone stumbles on something that's sufficiently different, and hits on the big social nerve of the moment. Maybe it wont tear down all that this wave of electro-pop has built, but a counter-culture will come together at some point, and create a real cultural competition. This has occurred many times in the past 50 years. It's just a question of when, and of what. Current pop will probably also continue to mutate slowly, as it has been. But besides that, a significant and punctuated disruption is due.
I think, anyways.

My terrible guess is that darker material might see a resurgence, to perhaps correspond a shifting cultural mood of the US and UK. Maybe it will even include more involved and complex arrangement and songcraft, who knows.

I was watching an interview a few days ago of , a guy who had a big part in the rise and apex of Industrial music, known for his time in NIN and Marilyn Manson. He was asked about what he thinks fostered that genre at the time. His thought was that it seemed to generate largely out of the Rust Belt, a region reliant on manufacturing, that was hemorrhaging those jobs at the time and for the prior decade, depressing the region in multiple ways. The dark music was thought to be a byproduct of this.

Depending on how you interpret our western culture's current zeitgeist, you might guess where things will go based on that line of thinking. My impression now is that the attitudes that lifted this pop, and the music surrounding it, is subsiding, and perhaps darkening.

Guess we'll see. But personally I have no worries that the current trends will last for too long, even though I like some of it.

[chk071]

How did the current trend of threads like these start?

[Aryaroman]

Are supersaws really still trendy?

Are supersaws all over every track? No. LMFAO had a good go at banging the nail in its coffin of trendiness. But the supersaw and it's daddy the hoover have kept on popping up on recordings for 25-odd years now in various forms. They do have a lot in common with distorted guitars. They soak up practically the entire frequency range, which gives them that insistent quality we look for in the overdriven guitar.

I think supersaws are a lot less common than they were just a year ago, and most tracks which have guitar have it with light overdrive at most, but I haven't really done a proper statistical analysis or anything. That's just the impression I get from new tracks I've heard in the past few months in both pop and EDM. Big festival stages are still heavy on 128 bpm tempos, huge risers, huge supersaw leads, true. But outside of that and some clubs, things have changed a lot and gotten less aggressive.

Though filling out the entire frequency spectrum is still a big deal, that's true. But nowadays in a lot of tracks it's done with lots of layers of percussion, sax parts, heavy harmonic exciters on vocals etc. instead of supersaws and .

This is good news. Too bad the trends move in different speeds, atleast outside of US.

That's why I am afraid what comes next.

I think you've got it backwards. Because you dislike the current trend so much, while it has seen so much success and growth, it can only mean things will change greatly, maybe get better, sometime in the next few years. Why? Backlash.

Something gets popular, it reaches critical mass, and then there's a backlash that prompts an evolution as soon as someone stumbles on something that's sufficiently different, and hits on the big social nerve of the moment. Maybe it wont tear down all that this wave of electro-pop has built, but a counter-culture will come together at some point, and create a real cultural competition. This has occurred many times in the past 50 years. It's just a question of when, and of what. Current pop will probably also continue to mutate slowly, as it has been. But besides that, a significant and punctuated disruption is due.
I think, anyways.

My terrible guess is that darker material might see a resurgence, to perhaps correspond a shifting cultural mood of the US and UK. Maybe it will even include more involved and complex arrangement and songcraft, who knows.

I was watching an interview a few days ago of , a guy who had a big part in the rise and apex of Industrial music, known for his time in NIN and Marilyn Manson. He was asked about what he thinks fostered that genre at the time. His thought was that it seemed to generate largely out of the Rust Belt, a region reliant on manufacturing, that was hemorrhaging those jobs at the time and for the prior decade, depressing the region in multiple ways. The dark music was thought to be a byproduct of this.

Depending on how you interpret our western culture's current zeitgeist, you might guess where things will go based on that line of thinking. My impression now is that the attitudes that lifted this pop, and the music surrounding it, is subsiding, and perhaps darkening.

Guess we'll see. But personally I have no worries that the current trends will last for too long, even though I like some of it.

This is interesting. It occurs to me, that the darker stuff will mostl likely mean more distortion for the electronics and thus more pressure on the ear. There will be a lot more ear-bleeding and damage, hearing loss, etc.

How did the current trend of threads like these start?

128 bpm tempos, huge risers, huge supersaw leads, sidechained or filtered white noise, jet-level volume, festivals shaking buildings, booming in and out of cars, headache.

[Roman Empire]

I know we´re getting old and all that - true true. If I was a teen today I´d prolly find it so much easier to listen to TOP 40, because I wouldn´t have heard much of what was there before I was born, being what I´d benchmark against regarding what good music should sound like.
But this does not prove being the reason why we, the "matured" people, have issues with the turn pop music has taken. Try going back to the 70s and listen to how music was done back then: You´d need to have an understanding of above basic musical theory to catch anybodys interest, and people would require an investment in educated arrangers and acoustic musicians to play your song. It was all so much more about song writing and knowing how to touch the listener with chords progressions and dynamics coming out of the music itself - not just from the absense of hard limiters.
Today it seems that the focus is mainly on touching people barely listening on a dance floor with the correctly tuned bassdrum, and a repeated catchy phrase which in the 70s would have been just 3 seconds of a song - now there´ll be 4 mins of that same phrase.
So there´s the reason for at least me to not listen to much of the current TOP 40 music.. it´s about more than just age.