"Good lord, Internet! Cut it out!" On Excessive Beiber Hate

[Lt. Fred]

Be careful about universalising Western music. Guess where Western tonality isn't the norm? Most of the world.

My trips to England, Germany, and Belgium would prove you a little wrong there... It's just in a different language in some countries. There are even dance clubs and such who are very into American-made music. 

England and Germany are basically ground zero for western tonality (Belgium isn't so consequential). Along with Italy, Germany is probably the single most substantial home for Western music. Try some traditional Chinese music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Y4ncLy9LA

How about Indian? This stuff is extremely Westernised Indian music, by the way. Fifty years ago, it would have been much less nice on the ear

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4z_XROlsJE

I have no issue with that. I get they need money. I just know that there a million skilled, awesome bands that would make just as much money for the executives if they told told the public to like that instead.

The problem is that you're assuming that the public is "told to like it." They're not. Our brain responds well to patterns, including in music. Everyone knows how a pop song will go, and our brains are outright demanding predictability so it can reward itself with figuring out the pattern. That's why this stuff is popular: the public is demanding it from the executives, not vice versa.

Be careful about universalising Western music. Guess where Western tonality isn't the norm? Most of the world.

Fred, you're actually kinda wrong. There was a song about this. America's culture displaces everyone else's. As the song says, "we're all living in America".

Well, yes. To a certain degree the US is systematically destroying most of the world's culture accidentally. That does not prove that simple western tonality is hardwired into our brains.

Pop is a little over fifty. It simply is not universal. It just isn't. Our modern preference for very simple music is not hardwired into our brains.

No, the music that Western audiences perceive as "pop" is a little over 50. The article I linked specifically mentions how someone raised on Western music won't be able to predict patterns in Indian raga. However, the article's main point is how music's evolutionary purpose is likely linked to predicting patterns. Our brains respond well to being able to identify patterns. Different cultures have different ideas of common music, but what's consistent is that our brains are wired to respond positively to something predictable. It just so happens that modern pop music is what we're raised on, and thus what we can most easily predict.

Okay, sure. What relevance does that have to your argument that we cannot have a middle-brow culture, because low-brow shit is just hardwired in? Classical music has patterns as well- more complicated patterns, but they're no less recognisable.

Ever hear of New Hollywood?

It was big around the 1970s, though it started in the 60s. It's the movement that gave us people like Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. Some of the biggest names in directing, especially when it comes to True Art. The whole point behind this era of Hollywood was abandoning the Golden Age and the studio system, which was based around executives making what earned the studios the most money. Directors held much more creative control than before, actors were coming from all sorts of nationalities and backgrounds (rather than the Golden Age's consistent white bread image), and taboos were being broken down. You got sex, violence, and True Art.

For a while, it was good. The Godfather and Apocalypse Now are two big names to come out of this time period. Same with stuff like Taxi Driver and Easy Rider. Everyone's seen films from the New Hollywood period. The major studios failed at the time (as they were trying to copy the success of The Sound of Music with big budget musicals that never profited), so they handed a ton of creative control to these directors.

The problem is that handing over total creative control to the artists isn't the way to go. And that was proven when the New Hollywood directors started making flops. They had gotten so much power that they were essentially protected from anyone who could reign in their egos or tell them that they were making mistakes or overstepping their boundaries. Heaven's Gate is the most infamous, being a gigantic, big budget Western with a ridiculously troubled production that flopped at the box office and lost everyone a lot of money, but it was a similar story across the board. Francis Ford Coppola has remained under the radar for ages despite being literally one of the most famous directors period. Michael Cimino made The Deer Hunter, but the aforementioned Western means that he's directed only 5 things since then, and only one was in the 2000s.

Giving total creative control to the creators seems like a good idea to someone who hasn't actually tried to work with them. Artists in all venues are flawed. Quite a few of them don't understand business as well as they do their art, which can turn a brilliant project into a travesty when they realize that they can't budget properly, or their magnum opus has essentially no appeal to anyone outside of a very specific demographic. Full artist control works on a small scale, like cheap indie films and small local art galleries. But as soon as you hit the big leagues, those nasty executives can actually tell you how to make enough money for your next work without alienating a lot of people. At the very least, you need people who are grounded enough to identify your mistakes and have the balls to tell you that you're fucking up.

tl;dr We tried your idea already, Fred. It worked for less than 20 years before it imploded.

I think that's a reasonable case. I've worked with very dumb people before (as a singer). I know as well as anyone that artists are often idiots. But at least they take what they do seriously on its own damn merits. As I said, my solution to the problem was only very tentative and not at all well fleshed-out.

But let's go back to the problem again:

Quality is not the determining factor.  Success is.

There is a disincentive to create quality. A disincentive. People don't just fuck up and make shit, they're actually told to do a bad job. Or required to do a bad job. It's been said before: corporations hate risk, they hate change, they hate innovation. So they squash it, so they make the same film a million times, so they hire Justin Bieber instead of someone with an actual talent. People who try to make stuff that is actually worth making face a huge number of hurdles. What? That's backwards!

Now, maybe if we went back to trying to make things of quality, we're going to face problems. People fuck up! You get stupid ideologies infecting the place, and poisonous personalities dominating culture. Yes, that happens. Is it the case that in order to prevent fuck ups we need to abandon even the attempt at creating things worth making? Nope. There has to be some way other than "just give up".

[Lt. Fred]

Ever hear of New Hollywood?

It was big around the 1970s, though it started in the 60s. It's the movement that gave us people like Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. Some of the biggest names in directing, especially when it comes to True Art. The whole point behind this era of Hollywood was abandoning the Golden Age and the studio system, which was based around executives making what earned the studios the most money. Directors held much more creative control than before, actors were coming from all sorts of nationalities and backgrounds (rather than the Golden Age's consistent white bread image), and taboos were being broken down. You got sex, violence, and True Art.

For a while, it was good. The Godfather and Apocalypse Now are two big names to come out of this time period. Same with stuff like Taxi Driver and Easy Rider. Everyone's seen films from the New Hollywood period. The major studios failed at the time (as they were trying to copy the success of The Sound of Music with big budget musicals that never profited), so they handed a ton of creative control to these directors.

The problem is that handing over total creative control to the artists isn't the way to go. And that was proven when the New Hollywood directors started making flops. They had gotten so much power that they were essentially protected from anyone who could reign in their egos or tell them that they were making mistakes or overstepping their boundaries. Heaven's Gate is the most infamous, being a gigantic, big budget Western with a ridiculously troubled production that flopped at the box office and lost everyone a lot of money, but it was a similar story across the board. Francis Ford Coppola has remained under the radar for ages despite being literally one of the most famous directors period. Michael Cimino made The Deer Hunter, but the aforementioned Western means that he's directed only 5 things since then, and only one was in the 2000s.

Giving total creative control to the creators seems like a good idea to someone who hasn't actually tried to work with them. Artists in all venues are flawed. Quite a few of them don't understand business as well as they do their art, which can turn a brilliant project into a travesty when they realize that they can't budget properly, or their magnum opus has essentially no appeal to anyone outside of a very specific demographic. Full artist control works on a small scale, like cheap indie films and small local art galleries. But as soon as you hit the big leagues, those nasty executives can actually tell you how to make enough money for your next work without alienating a lot of people. At the very least, you need people who are grounded enough to identify your mistakes and have the balls to tell you that you're fucking up.

tl;dr We tried your idea already, Fred. It worked for less than 20 years before it imploded.

I think that's a reasonable case. I've worked with very dumb people before (as a singer). I know as well as anyone that artists are often idiots. But at least they take what they do seriously on its own damn merits. As I said, my solution to the problem was only very tentative and not at all well fleshed-out.

But let's go back to the problem again:

Quality is not the determining factor.  Success is.

There is a disincentive to create quality. A disincentive. People don't just fuck up and make shit, they're actually told to do a bad job. Or required to do a bad job. It's been said before: corporations hate risk, they hate change, they hate innovation. So they squash it, so they make the same film a million times, so they hire Justin Bieber instead of someone with an actual talent. People who try to make stuff that is actually worth making face a huge number of hurdles. What? That's backwards!

Now, maybe if we went back to trying to make things of quality, we're going to face problems. People fuck up! You get stupid ideologies infecting the place, and poisonous personalities dominating culture. Yes, that happens. Is it the case that in order to prevent fuck ups we need to abandon even the attempt at creating things worth making? Nope. There has to be some way other than "just give up".

[Art Vandelay]

There is a disincentive to create quality. A disincentive. People don't just fuck up and make shit, they're actually told to do a bad job. Or required to do a bad job. It's been said before: corporations hate risk, they hate change, they hate innovation. So they squash it, so they make the same film a million times, so they hire Justin Bieber instead of someone with an actual talent. People who try to make stuff that is actually worth making face a huge number of hurdles. What? That's backwards!

Now, maybe if we went back to trying to make things of quality, we're going to face problems. People fuck up! You get stupid ideologies infecting the place, and poisonous personalities dominating culture. Yes, that happens. Is it the case that in order to prevent fuck ups we need to abandon even the attempt at creating things worth making? Nope. There has to be some way other than "just give up".

Two things.

Firstly, said disincentive is there not because of executives, but because of audiences. Not everyone, least of all teens, appreciates or demands complex and skillful music. They want the likes of Beiber, Simple Plan and One Direction because they're young, kind of stupid and have very simple tastes. Unless you have a way to instantly induce a decade or two's worth of development and refinement of their tastes in music, that's not going to change.

Second, Beiber and Co aren't the beginning and end of all music in the world. Quality music does exist. If you look elsewhere from record labels who're specifically targeting teens with tightly controlled content, you may just have an easier time finding it.

In all honestly, this is like complaining that McDonalds doesn't sell fine Italian cuisine, all while ignoring the Italian restaurant down the street.

[Barbarella]

There is a disincentive to create quality. A disincentive. People don't just fuck up and make shit, they're actually told to do a bad job. Or required to do a bad job. It's been said before: corporations hate risk, they hate change, they hate innovation. So they squash it, so they make the same film a million times, so they hire Justin Bieber instead of someone with an actual talent. People who try to make stuff that is actually worth making face a huge number of hurdles. What? That's backwards!

Now, maybe if we went back to trying to make things of quality, we're going to face problems. People fuck up! You get stupid ideologies infecting the place, and poisonous personalities dominating culture. Yes, that happens. Is it the case that in order to prevent fuck ups we need to abandon even the attempt at creating things worth making? Nope. There has to be some way other than "just give up".

Two things.

Firstly, said disincentive is there not because of executives, but because of audiences. Not everyone, least of all teens, appreciates or demands complex and skillful music. They want the likes of Beiber, Simple Plan and One Direction because they're young, kind of stupid and have very simple tastes. Unless you have a way to instantly induce a decade or two's worth of development and refinement of their tastes in music, that's not going to change.

Second, Beiber and Co aren't the beginning and end of all music in the world. Quality music does exist. If you look elsewhere from record labels who're specifically targeting teens with tightly controlled content, you may just have an easier time finding it.

In all honestly, this is like complaining that McDonalds doesn't sell fine Italian cuisine, all while ignoring the Italian restaurant down the street.

For once, Art, I'm with you.

Y'know. Sometimes even I enjoy a bit of cheese & pablum in my entertainment. It's fun & gets your mind off things. There's many outlets for music, shows, movies, etc. these days, why is this an issue? Don't like reality shows? Don't watch them! Choice, my friends.

Besides, some of this corporate pop gunk started off as something "genuine" (same holds true for restaurant chains, stores, etc.). Bieber was once a regular kid on YouTube. KFC was once a simple Mom & Pop eatery/gas station in Kentucky with a really good fried chicken. Walmart was once a nice little general store.

The difference is HOW it's done.

I'm not a "CEO"-worshiper by any means & I agree with the "Corporate is a big cheesefest" sentiment but even then, I'm not some elitist "hipster" who rails against something perfectly decent because it's now become popular & mainstream.

[Art Vandelay]

Y'know. Sometimes even I enjoy a bit of cheese & pablum in my entertainment. It's fun & gets your mind off things. There's many outlets for music, shows, movies, etc. these days, why is this an issue? Don't like reality shows? Don't watch them! Choice, my friends.

That is certainly true as well. I do enjoy high art and intelligent entertainment that makes me think, but sometimes I just feel like switching my brain off and just getting some cheap laughs. I believe it's called abnegation, and it's hardly a unique phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination.

[Jack Mann]

I'm spontaneously wondering how Eiffel 65 is doing today.

According to what I can find, still operating after officially reuniting in 2010. They're still touring (like a "mini-tour" in Australia) and are making slow progress on another album.

I figured they'd be feeling blue.  Da ba dee, etc.

[Witchyjoshy]

D'aww, you cheated by using etc

[chitoryu12]

Okay, sure. What relevance does that have to your argument that we cannot have a middle-brow culture, because low-brow shit is just hardwired in? Classical music has patterns as well- more complicated patterns, but they're no less recognisable.

Why is it that every time I try to debate you, Fred, I start to think that you're intentionally ignoring stuff that other people say so you don't need to acknowledge it?

What we in the Western world know as "pop music" gradually evolved from pre-existing music types until it became commonplace. The style of pop has changed over time, but certain aspects remain the same, namely that it tends to match the general public's preferred music today (pop from the 1950s and 1980s are quite different, but they quite clearly match the preferences of that decade). Because it's commonplace, our brains grow up learning its patterns. Someone who has the same reaction to classical music as the majority do to pop music would be someone who had grown up listening to classical music.

Also, it's nice to talk about classical music and all. But even when it was being made, the average person didn't listen to a lick of it. What we view today as "classical" was contemporary only for the upper classes, while most of the music that the general populace would listen to was a collection of simple folk songs and drinking songs that just about any self-taught idiot could perform. Advances in technology and education as time has gone forward have made it possible for more people today to learn music and advance themselves farther through self-teaching than their ancestors 300 years ago would have, as well as made more decent instruments and computer programs available for them to play it at more easily accessible prices.

[Witchyjoshy]

Okay, sure. What relevance does that have to your argument that we cannot have a middle-brow culture, because low-brow shit is just hardwired in? Classical music has patterns as well- more complicated patterns, but they're no less recognisable.

Why is it that every time I try to debate you, Fred, I start to think that you're intentionally ignoring stuff that other people say so you don't need to acknowledge it?

You've noticed too, eh?

[Sigmaleph]

Quality is not the determining factor.  Success is.

There is a disincentive to create quality. A disincentive. People don't just fuck up and make shit, they're actually told to do a bad job. Or required to do a bad job. It's been said before: corporations hate risk, they hate change, they hate innovation. So they squash it, so they make the same film a million times, so they hire Justin Bieber instead of someone with an actual talent. People who try to make stuff that is actually worth making face a huge number of hurdles. What? That's backwards!

It would perhaps be more accurate to say that there is an imperfect incentive. By any reasonable measure*, quality and success are positively correlated, if perhaps weakly so.



*I'd argue that a reasonable measure of quality must at the very least have the property of being correlated with what humans like and dislike (because what else is there to base yourself on?). Given that people are more likely to consume things they like, and less likely to consume things they dislike, the obvious economic incentive is there. Other factors like cost and weak appeal to large numbers vs large appeal to small numbers complicate matters, which is why the correlation is not necessarily a strong one, and I just realised this footnote is much longer than the non-footnote part of the post, for which I apologise.

[Lt. Fred]

There is a disincentive to create quality. A disincentive. People don't just fuck up and make shit, they're actually told to do a bad job. Or required to do a bad job. It's been said before: corporations hate risk, they hate change, they hate innovation. So they squash it, so they make the same film a million times, so they hire Justin Bieber instead of someone with an actual talent. People who try to make stuff that is actually worth making face a huge number of hurdles. What? That's backwards!

Now, maybe if we went back to trying to make things of quality, we're going to face problems. People fuck up! You get stupid ideologies infecting the place, and poisonous personalities dominating culture. Yes, that happens. Is it the case that in order to prevent fuck ups we need to abandon even the attempt at creating things worth making? Nope. There has to be some way other than "just give up".

Two things.

Firstly, said disincentive is there not because of executives, but because of audiences.

I don't think think this is true. It's certainly not true of films. Is it true of music? I doubt even that is the case. Would an actually talented teenager singer Bieber's age sell as well as he (assuming a similar level of PR support)? Probably better. Look at Adele. She is one of the highest selling singers on Earth, because she is actually talented.

Second, Beiber and Co aren't the beginning and end of all music in the world. Quality music does exist. If you look elsewhere from record labels who're specifically targeting teens with tightly controlled content, you may just have an easier time finding it.

Here's my point, which you don't seem to have grasped:

There is low-brow shit. Okay, fine. That exists. I don't think there needs to be as much, but it does. Low brow emphasises style over substance. But modern low-brow stuff doesn't even do that! You could fire Bieber tomorrow, hire some new 18 year old kid who actually is capable of singing, and knock out the same teeny-bopper tunes a million times a week, without any reduction in sales. Instead of using auto-tune, you could hire someone who is capable of singing. Why don't they? Corporate structure.

I'm not, at this point lamenting the lack of actual substance, just the awfulness of substanceless crap today. Again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3M-_HJqgAs

This is new.

Okay, sure. What relevance does that have to your argument that we cannot have a middle-brow culture, because low-brow shit is just hardwired in? Classical music has patterns as well- more complicated patterns, but they're no less recognisable.

What we in the Western world know as "pop music" gradually evolved from pre-existing music types until it became commonplace.

Not really (though, of course, jazz, gospel, ect). Pop music is a different thing. This is a point made far more eloquently and at much greater length that I ever could by Adorno, who was right at least when he said that pop is something different to folk or art music. It's industrial.

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/SWA/On_popular_music_1.shtml.

Also, it's nice to talk about classical music and all. But even when it was being made, the average person didn't listen to a lick of it.

Nope. Early 20th century classical music was mass-marketed, to a certain degree. Late 19th century opera was mass-marketed. Maybe not as much in the US- and I stress as much, because it still was mass-marketed - but Albanoni, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Gershwin, Britten, Elgar et al were all very firmly middle-brow. Even Bruckner was listened to by actual people. Opera was often televised, and watched.

Now, I think it is the case that the reason middle-brow music has died is partly because musicians committed suicide- very much due to Arnold Schoenberg. I think there are other reasons, also. This can be fixed, and it should be.

[Art Vandelay]

There is low-brow shit. Okay, fine. That exists. I don't think there needs to be as much, but it does. Low brow emphasises style over substance. But modern low-brow stuff doesn't even do that! You could fire Bieber tomorrow, hire some new 18 year old kid who actually is capable of singing, and knock out the same teeny-bopper tunes a million times a week, without any reduction in sales. Instead of using auto-tune, you could hire someone who is capable of singing. Why don't they? Corporate structure.

Well, not quite. Replacing Beiber would mean re-building the fanbase around the new guy. Not too difficult, but it would mean the first album at least wouldn't sell half as well as whatever follows it. As for why they don't care about talent, at least as a singer, well, they don't need to. The songs are pre-written and autotune is used quite liberally, so talent really doesn't effect the final product. Audiences (at least the dumber pre-teens and teens) will eat it up regardless, so what is there to be gained by seeking out singing talent? Their target demographic simply doesn't care, so all it would do is make finding their new singer(s) slightly harder.

I'm not, at this point lamenting the lack of actual substance, just the awfulness of substanceless crap today.

Oh Fred. Substanceless crap was always awful. The whole "back in the good old days..." line of thinking is total bullshit. Just because the dreck fades into obscurity over time doesn't mean it never existed.

[chitoryu12]

Nope. Early 20th century classical music was mass-marketed, to a certain degree. Late 19th century opera was mass-marketed. Maybe not as much in the US- and I stress as much, because it still was mass-marketed - but Albanoni, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Gershwin, Britten, Elgar et al were all very firmly middle-brow. Even Bruckner was listened to by actual people. Opera was often televised, and watched.

Now, I think it is the case that the reason middle-brow music has died is partly because musicians committed suicide- very much due to Arnold Schoenberg. I think there are other reasons, also. This can be fixed, and it should be.

I actually forgot or accidentally deleted part of my post on that bit, but I was meaning for that part of my post to be about the "heyday" of classical music, like the 18th and 19th centuries. The early 20th century is the first time that more "mass market" music began to appear.

[PosthumanHeresy]

I'm not, at this point lamenting the lack of actual substance, just the awfulness of substanceless crap today.

Oh Fred. Substanceless crap was always awful. The whole "back in the good old days..." line of thinking is total bullshit. Just because the dreck fades into obscurity over time doesn't mean it never existed.

Awful crap existed, but not like now. Even the worst of the past is better than the worst of now, because the worst of the past was people trying. The worst of now is people not trying, cheating and succeeding.

[Art Vandelay]

Awful crap existed, but not like now. Even the worst of the past is better than the worst of now, because the worst of the past was people trying. The worst of now is people not trying, cheating and succeeding.

I'd take the opposite view, personally. At least autotune can somewhat compensate for a shitty performer. Back then, there was no such thing, you were hit with the full force of their shittiness.