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Anonymous
Regarding popular music criticism 2017-06-18 02:59:22 Post No. 73434782
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Regarding popular music criticism 2017-06-18 02:59:22 Post No. 73434782
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Why does the high-quality analysis of popular music (e.g., pop rock, techno, soul) pale so much compared to the exhaustive criticism one can find in the realms of art music and even jazz?
Most rock music journalism seems to focus its reviews almost exclusively on the lyrics and the cultural impact of the album at hand rather than the music itself, which is at best described in vague terms such as "complex", "eerie" or "upbeat". The majority of the music theory textbooks dedicate entire chapters to classical and jazz (understandably so), yet rock music barely gets a spot beyond some footnotes and the mention of the twelve-bar blues.
Why is this? Is rock music not taken seriously?
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because pop (using this as an umbrella for the music genres you mentioned just for the sake of clarity) music is commercially oriented and not even close to being as theoretically complex as jazz, classical, some types of "art" music
the reviews focus on the lyricism and the historical impact because lol, it's pop music. while classical/jazz has their obvious cultural impact they generally do not have as much as a widespread sociological impact as popular music does (accessibility and the emergence of reproducible sound being reasons for this)
most of our popular music has very direct roots in blues (and surf rock, which is heavily influenced by arabic classical music) so it's no wonder that the closer you get to the blues chronologically (be it the album or the genre's general time frame, this also applies to "revival" genres) the more of an observable blues influence there is. rock stems from R&B most directly with some traditional blues trappings
also a lot of the reviewers who know what they're talking about theoretically are either making music themselves, in academia (ethnomusicology) or elsewhere, most p4k reviewers are mac demarco types. the typical p4k demographic does not care about theory anyways
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