Pop

Why can’t I stop talking about the “pop?” I guess it is because it took me over a year to analyze this musical style and put into some kind of historical perspective. “Pop” music is not just a general term to describe easily digestible, commercial, radio-oriented music. Pop music is a rhythmic concept. It is a style of music just like Rock, Reggae, or Afro-Cuban. It comes from the strum of the acoustic guitar. When the first android picked up a guitar and started strumming, Pop music was born. The only problem with the strum of the guitar is you can’t reproduce it on a keyboard instrument. Believe me, I have tried. After playing on a myriad of cruise ships were the band only knows how to play in Pop style, I have had the eternal challenge of trying to salvage my keyboard position while accommodating this musical ignorance. Maybe that is why today you only here Pop music. It is far easier to know only ONE musical style than all of them. I am lucky, because I dedicated two years of my life to the study of musical styles. I mean all styles, not just one. In the second half of the l980’s Pop was not big. Disco had been big in the 70’s. Hair Metal was big. Never was I ever faced with having to try to play a music that was based on a rhythmic concept not playable on the piano. Well, you can do it, but it looks ridiculous. (To play Pop on the piano, you must play alternating 8th notes between your right and left hand) The notes are so close together with the given rebound time of the piano key, you can’t duplicate it without using two separate hands. It looks moronic, and I quit a cruise line because the band insisted on playing in only this style. Why was I there? Can you believe there is an army of so-called professional musicians (cruise ship musicians) that think this is the ONLY way to play. It took me a long time for some reason to understand the Pop concept. It is most easily explained by the placement of the 8th note in relationship to the quarter note. Pop concept replaces the traditional “feel” of quarter notes by displacing the 8th notes above the quarter notes. Let me see if I can find characters to draw what I mean.


* * * *
@ @ @ @




Here are four quarter notes. (They are called quarter notes because there are four of them to a bar) The asterisks are the 8th notes. Weird huh? It is like every downbeat is really an arpeggiated strum, which it is. There is not a downbeat defined by one solid note. You have to roll the chords, and the downbeat is not as important as the little grace note that comes before it. As you can see real time can not be expressed in this way. As a result it GETS RID OFF the personification of time as we know it. There is time happening in good Pop music, but it is not being defined by what the band is playing. Essentially they are all playing a complex game by where they are placing the beat. That is why it took me a long time to figure it out. It is not that complex once you understand it. You can’t feel the time and play normally where you would in classical or jazz music. You have to know the feel ahead of time which determines where IN RELATION to the real time you are going to place your beat. You have to choose cognitively whether you are going to play on the top side or the back side of the beat, because no one is playing in the middle where the time is defined. Often on cruise ships the piano player is the one left to this task. Imagine playing jazz music where your job is to play 1 of each bar. It is insane. As a result it is a JIVE concept, because it is relying upon smoke and mirrors to produce an effect. Why spend your time thinking about this concept, rather then just playing the music the way it would be normally? Music was given to us by God, and all God’s “chillin” got rhythm. Any style of music that disguises this process is not right. To me Pop is akin to the Solfege system of sight-singing. I never committed to learn Solfege, because why would you learn a system that makes it more difficult to learn to sing? If you know your intervals, how they sound, and are able to recognize them in written music you can sight-sing. Trying to remember a syllable name for a pitch is secondary and more difficult. Hence this process also is jive. It is attempting to exclude humans from the process of music making. Modern day America is being represented on a massive scale by this kind of music. As a result no one gives a shit. It doesn’t move you to listen to it. It doesn’t engage you. It instead promotes its own self-serving message, that of being a pop star. Most pop singers are not capable of singing in any other style, because they have not taken the time to learn them. You have to be able to FEEL. Different styles of music are defined by different feelings. Now because of the payola scandal radio has become plagued with only ONE feeling, that of pop. Both radio and television are huge influencers of our people. Because of this notorious short fall Americans are being turned into non-thinking, soulless, autonomotons. (As Craig Ferguson so aptly put it) We as the human race need and deserve to feel different things. Brainless ear candy is a huge disservice to the American people. It’s times to Rock out.