Three types of popular music, part 2: graphing theories

I hinted in my last post that there's another reason I like the triangle. In my view it's a fairly interesting tool when examining the theories of others about popular music. By positing a set of three categories of popular music we can easily look at how aesthetic theories overlap, interact and differ, and while I certainly can think of theories that don't fit the system at all a remarkable number do.

I think this has a lot to do with the perceived values, or if you like authenticities of the three corners of the triangle. Personal or artistic authenticity is key to the arty-pop corner. Cultural authenticity is what defines folky-pop (in whatever sense you put into the word, I personally don't see traditionalism as part of it for instance). And I guess a kind of populist authenticity defines the commercial pop corner - if people are buying it, who are you to say it's bad?
These kinds of values are very common in music discourse, the first since the early romantic period, the second since national romanticism and the third more recently. Although it's often not explicitly said, I think these valuations underlie a lot of the theories about popular music, concious and unconcious. The standard "music journalist consensus" for example definitely likes arty-pop, has an ambivalent relationship to folky-pop and hates commercial pop. (Remarkably similar to the romantic aesthetic that still permeates classical music, by the way, but on a smaller scale.)

For this post I'm singling out two well-known theories of popular music and one less-known, all of which posit a dichotomy but that I nevertheless think make sense graphing on the triangle.

First up is Critical Theory. Although granddaddy Adorno himself hated all popular music, even the pretentious stuff, some later critical theorists have accepted the arty end as having "truth content", freedom and creativity. Critical theory also makes the not-that-startling claim that the commercial pop corner of music is manipulating the populace into docile servility to the capitalist system.

However, the interesting point the theory makes (as made apparent using the triangle) is that the variety offered by the seemingly self-created and self-maintained folky-pop corner is in fact only "pseudo-individuality". Its pleasures are easy and escapist and serve exactly the same purpose as commercial pop, to distract from the economic hardship of the people.
So what the theory does is basically actively define away one of the corners of the triangle. Our second theory, Cultural Studies, arose at least partly in response to this curtailing - one definitely gets the sense that a basic desire there is to re-appraise the self-created culture of the working class. Cultural Studies concedes the idea of a culture industry creating according to a capitalist agenda, but its central theory is on the reception end. Some people do fall for the hegemony, but a lot of them "negotiate" the culture for their own ends and the media is a battleground rather than purely hegemonical. This focus on (essentially working class) reception means Cultural Studies hardly ever deals with the arty stuff. It's basically outside the theory (or can be constituted as belonging to either side).

A third fascinating theory, though I guess less academic, is the one presented by Martha Bayles in her book Hole in Our Soul. Her basic contention is that the real, popular, civilized music (very obviously her imagining of the folky-pop) has been destroyed by what she calls "perverse modernism", the desire to shock (which she traces from futurism to 2 Live Crew). This is interesting because not only is the bunt of the argument directed against arty-pop, but on closer reading she actually includes commercial pop in this category as well! How's that for a different perspective on the triangle?
So as a thought experiment the triangle is not a bad one. It's limited in that it does not differentiate between different conceptions of the same corners - for instance you can have two or more competing types of cultural authenticity that would be in conflict with each other without it becoming apparent on the triangle.

But enough with the triangle already. A futher discussion on the musical characteristics of the three corners will appear under the heading "Genre of the Week: Pop, part 2" in due course.

There's only three types of popular music

There have always been attempts to generalise and put music into different boxes. Sometimes it can lead to stifening and clichéd thinking, but I think it's a useful tool in many ways - thinking about music in categories can help you develop a more complex understanding of it.

A fairly traditional way of trying to categorise popular music is to set up a number of dichotomies. For example:
Here commercial music, with pure pop as some sort of extreme, is pitted against non-commercial music with people making music only for their own enjoyment or for "art". Although very simplistic, this kind of division can help examine motivations and uses of music, and perhaps examine what musical characteristics are typical for each end.

Other examples would be complex vs simple music, professional vs amateur music, etc. etc. But here we encounter a problem. None of these categories really overlap. Non-commercial music can be either professional or amateur without any significant problems. Simple music can be both non-commercial and commercial. And so on. One way of dealing with this is to accept a multifaceted complex of different non-overlapping characteristics, but I think there's a more interesting (and hopefully revealing) option available.

I want to bring back the dreaded and widely discredited triangle.
This thing turned up several times in the first month of musicology classes and is a classic piece of bad old-fashioned musicology (which the field by the way if rife with). The basic idea is that there's three kinds of music. "Art music" is the music of the elites and the grand western tradition. "Folk music" is the music of the pre-modern common people, oral traditions within smaller communities. And "popular music" is the music of the modern, mediated, industrial masses.

This is a hugely problematic way of division. It's got unconscious prejudices built in. (I mean, "art music"? Come on.) It makes a very arbitrary division between popular and folk music, both of which essentially mean "music of the people". It seems very closely connected to outdated ideas of one or two categories being of higher quality than the others, particularly racking down on popular music.

It does have one significant advantage though and that's the fact that it's fairly good at dealing with our dichotomies from before. For instance, popular music and folk music both tend to be fairly simple compared to the complexities of art music. That means you could draw a diagram like this:

A similar division can then easily be made for professionality (popular and art music tends to be professional, folk music amateur) or commerciality (popular music tends to be commercial compared to art music and folk music). Or any of a number of other factors. Plus there are factors that very clearly have three different answers, like who the music is for - the masses, your community or no-one/yourself/art? Each one fits nicely into one category.

I think if you limit the triangle to the popular music corner of the field, it makes much more sense than the whole thing. All popular music is to a certain extent mediated, commercial and mass-oriented (I'll freely admit) but you can easily find examples of popular music that exhibit relatively little of these characteristics, in different ways.

This is especially true since about 1967. In the rock era there's been three diverging directions of popular music that fit relatively well with the three traditional definitions. There's the thread of "intelligent", "independent", "progressive" music, ranging from prog rock to post-punk to idm. There's the pure commercial pop, made more extreme from bubblegum onwards. And there's a huge plethora of smaller music-making communities like hyphy or bluegrass or soca or whatever that are, relatively, folk. Thus we can construct a triangle with "folky" popular music (community-oriented, limited distribution, often amateur initially), "arty" popular music (complex, pretentious, created for art's sake) and... a third category. I hate to call this "pure" popular music because I think most popular music actually tends to fall into the other two categories, but let's just call it "pure commercial pop" or something.

I think this is a useful way of dividing popular music. Mostly, I think we can create excellent systems of characteristics for the three different categories. For instance, arty-pop tends to be consumed and produced by the upper-middle-class, folky-pop tends to be produced and consumed by the lower-middle and working classes, while commercial pop tends to be produced by the upper classes for the consumption of the lower...

I'll highlight two more I think are a bit interesting. First is the genres. The vast majority of tiny, insteresting genres will actually fall into the folky-pop category, simply because genre = scene = community. Arty-pop musicians tend to think themselves beyond mere genres, and all commercial pop falls into one or two broad genres like "pop".

Then there's consumer age. At any normal school (as, I think, Simon Firth first explored) the youngest kids will listen to commercial-pop, the young teens will tend towards folky-pop and older teens will disproportionally listen to arty-pop.

As you can see it's not a bad tool for categorisation and it fits neatly with lots of three-part divisions. I'll try to return to the triangle in the following two posts to talk about traditional arguments about music and how they interact with the triangle, and about the musical characteristics of the three different ends.

Greece and Russia: Fake and Real Timbalandisms

Timbaland is one of the world's best-selling producers and certainly one of the few in the pure pop world whose production signature is instantly recognisable. Considering his success, it was perhaps inevitable that some of this year's Eurovision entries would try to copy that signature sound - I mean, we all know what a mature Timbaland production sounds like, right? Lots of short vocal samples like "hey!". Jiggly rhythmic figures that go semiquaver-semiquaver-quaver. Multilayered rhythms, strange percussion instruments, some handclaps.

The Greek entry has copied all of those aspects. Yet they get it so wrong.

Kalomira - Secret Combination


It already starts off wrong. Timbaland would never establish a rhythmic hook in the intro that then completely disappears into the background for the remainder of the song. Once the main rhtyhm is introduced it drops very conventionally into a first verse which I guess is okay, until the chord change and the guitar, and then the chorus which is very standard Eurovision pop. Not necessarily a wrong thing ("slightly hard" verses and a "soft" chorus has a tendency to produce winning entries) but it totally breaks the illusion of continuity. The only bit of the rest that feels good in the context is the last break, which adds an "ethnic Timbaland" touch as well. Still, overall it rests uncomfortably between two chairs and the constant breaks in style fuck up what is perhaps the main strength of newer Timbaland production.

Starting around 2006 Timbaland started incorporating a great minimal-hypnotic quality in his music, largely based on the influence of Latin Freestyle from the eighties. The shimmering, high-pitched chords, the subtle yet relentless propelling rhythm, the little repeated changeover motifs... It's brilliant. "Secret Combination", of course, has very little of it.

Russia's entry does though, at least a bit. It retains the "Timbaland hand clap" (in place of the vocal shout) and some of the rhythmic complexities and although it's excessively buttery it hints at the kind of regularised chord changes and hypnotic continuity discussed above. (Perhaps you hear it better in a studio version.)

Dima Bilan - Believing


If you've been following the Eurovision news you will know that the reason for this is that it's actually Timbaland who's produced this track. It's not one of his stronger productions (very throwaway and old-fashioned) but it does have a small touch of the magic. I think it can do fairly well in the competition.

As will probably Greece, unfortunately. Pity they couldn't repeat the quality of the last Greek code-themed entry, which actually has the high-pitched hypnotic synth chords this one is sorely missing.

Spain: Reggaeton, Minstrelsy, Internet Memes, Oh My!

The Spanish entry for this year's Eurovision makes me want to forego the usual "first voted in, first posted about" rule for my Eurovision coverage. And that's because it fits so very clearly in with all my other blogging interests.

Because "Bailar El Chiki Chiki" by Rodolfo Chikilicuatre is, strangely enough, en reggaetón. And because it raises questions about post-colonialism and the internet age.

Rodolfo Chikilicuatre - "Bailar El Chiki Chiki"


Welcome to the brave new world of Eurovision. The Spanish TV company TVE decided this year to make all the sent-in entries (numbering in their hundreds) available on Myspace for the public to select from. Fairly revolutionary in itself, I guess. But then a team of Catalan comedians, led by Andreu Buenafuente whose TV Show is apparently very popular, perfectly interpreted and exploited the new selection method and placed a song all the way at the top.

They did it by creating a meme.

Rather than market their song through the usual channels they worked very hard to ingrain the song in internet culture. The character of Rodolfo (played by actor David Fernandez) has his own web page, Twitter page and Facebook page, all very popular. Even more importantly, they encouraged people to create remixes and funny videos of the song, putting them all into a group on Youtube. And it worked amazingly well - this marketing effort (as driven by a rival broadcaster to TVE, by the way) has managed to push itself into the general Spanish realms of internet phenoms. There are the required teletubby mashups, Counterstrike machinima, etc. It's been watched something like a million times altogether in various versions.

On the surface this does bear some similarity to the memes created around El Chombo twofer Chacarron and El Gato Volador, that are very similar musically, thematically and as phenomenons. This, too, is a (no doubt loving) send-up of reggaeton and its themes. The timbres and the way of singing might as well have been lifted straight from El Chombo.

But obviously Rodney Clark as El Chombo is Panamanian whereas David Fernandez is Catalan/Spanish, making their position in the post-colonial world very different. I'm wondering how much of a difference this makes to the reception of the music - there's a real danger "El Chiki Chiki" will be perceived as racist against Latin Americans, minstrelsy style. I've yet to see any reggaeton fan's responses to the song, but that would certainly help clarify things.

One thing that speaks in its favour is that it seems to have been reggaetonned-up considerably during the selection process. The original, as appearing on Rodolfo's Myspace, is that worst-thing-of-all, a mild western copy. But somewhere along the way someone who knows reggaeton has added on a proper production with a real, prominent dembow.

I've got mixed feelings about it myself. I like the idea of the extension of the competition into the internet sphere and don't mind the resultant entry as a piece of music, even liking it a bit. But I am concerned about the implications of its position in the post-colonial power structure. How much easier it would have been if Fernandez, as suggested on another site, had been Mexican...

Genre(s) of the Week: Electro

Electro is one of those strange nebulous genres that seems to mean different things to different people. Sometimes, it seems as if people are actually talking about completely different genres.

Perhaps that is because they are.

This is an article that I originally wrote for the webzine of a Swedish music festival, which in turn is based on an episode of my now-defunct student radio show. It appears here translated and in slightly modified form.

Throw together a hip-hopper, an indie fan and a house devotee in a room and ask them to name their favourite electro tracks and you'll get wildly diverging answers. The hip-hopper will talk about Afrika Bambaata and Egyptian Lover. The indie guy about The Knife or (if he's Swedish) Familjen. The house lover David Guetta or Bodyrox.

You might imagine this is because Electro is one of those nebulously vague genres that don't mean anything specific, really. But it's actually a fair bit more complicated than that - the three are actually taking about different genres, all of which happen to be called electro. To stir up even more confusion there's at least another three genres called electro as well.

But let's go through it from the beginning. The word "electro" as an obvious short form for electronic has existed at least since the thirties, when the Westinghouse robot Elektro amused the crowds at the 1939 New York world fair. The first style of music that was called electro-something was probably electro-acoustic music from the mid-fifties, but music that we could possibly think of today as electro only starts appearing in the mid to late seventies. The genre that appears then, early synth pop with a strong sense of the robotic and dystopian in its aesthetics, was usually called "techno pop" or "synth pop" but those terms have obviously disappeared as they've come to be applied to other music. The one term that remains from that era is electro pop, which is interesting for our discussion but not quite yet the first electro.

No, the first genre whose name is just "electro" is a Kraftwerk- and YMO-inspired old school hip-hop subgenre that appears in New York in 1982 and dissapears as the winds of fashion change around 1987. At first it was called electro funk, in accordance with the naming principle of electro pop, but the suffix disappeared fairly quickly.

Electro names appeared in rock as well. Laisons Dangereuses, the german EBM band, called their music electro punk for example. The next genre to abbreviate itself electro (or rather elektro, I guess to be different) is the fairly obscure genre of electro-industrial music at the end of the eighties, succeeded in short order by electro #3, dark electro, which at least to me sounds fairly similar to its immediate predecessor.

The current electro trend can be traced back to the mid nineties, when bands like Dopplereffect in Detroit (a city with a long electro tradition) together with Anthony Rother in Germany revived the hip-hoppy electro genre while focusing on its most futuristic qualities. One offshoot of this "electro revival" was the fairly similar genre of French electro (electro #4!) with hitmaker Mr Oizo at the spearhead. A few years later there was also a reborn interest in electro pop (spawned by, among other things, wonderful home brewed bootleg mix CDs) which became the fashionable genre electroclash. That in turn is the basis of today's indie-subgenre electro (#5!).

The last piece of the puzzle is electro house, which inevitably is also called (say it with me...) electro. The most obvious precedent electro here is the French one, sharing similar snaky analogue bass lines. That genre, of course, has also kept on growing and developed towards a mode of expression that most of all resembles electric boogie form the early eighties.

None of these genres have much more in common than their electronic nature, and perhaps a slight fascination with science fiction and the eighties. That simple, appealing definition and the looseness of the term practically ensures that there will be even more electros in the future. In Belem in Brazil, for instance, a new hard style is growing out of the local pop genre tecnobrega. And that too, of course, is called... electro.

Azerbaijan and Bulgaria: The power of a great intro

One of this year's new countries is Azerbaijan and they're certainly off to a promising start. In fact, having now heard most of the entries I can safely say that they're one of the best so far.

Elnur Hüseynov and Samir Javadzadeh - Day After Day


I love the devil-and-angel scenography, the very on-trend (as previously discussed) operatic metal dance-pop music and the lack of any debutante respect. But what I like most about the song is the intro.

The rhythmless synth sweep, the totally secco opening lines, then the shouting over the guitar riff (a technique I've always loved). It's perfect. Now, I realise the rest of the song isn't up to as much (the second singer is particularly atrocious, though the weird breakdown section is brilliant), but I think that intro alone should propel them into the top ten.

Sometimes, though, a fantastically brilliant intro is probably not enough. Especially if you forget to add more than the sketch of a song to it. I'm looking at you Bulgaria:

Deep Zone and Balthazar - DJ, Take Me Away


I'd still vote for them, mind, for the sheer balls and the burning turntables.






In case anyone is interested, I've started to put together a playlist of some Eurovision favourites of mine, past and present, well-known and obscure. A lot of the material is new to me so expect more to be added here as time goes along.

Is there any other art where fine is necessarily equal to upper class?

To continue yesterday's rant a little bit, here's a very simple question.

In classical music, pre-20th century, only the music of the power elites and that of the church is accepted as "art music". There's a comprehensive equivalence between the music of the top echelons of the ruling estates and "musical quality". Is there any other art where this is the case?



There's plenty of fairly "small" painters and writers that made art purely for themselves or never got anywhere that today are seen as geniuses. Not to mention highly populist ones, like Shakespeare. Are there any composers?

What else could be? Furniture making? (Nope, at least in Sweden "folk" furniture is considered highly valuable and interesting.) Dance? Very closely tied to music, methinks.

Does anyone have an idea of another totally upper-estate genre or a type of classical music that wasn't that of the rulers and that is considered good today? Otherwise I'll be forced to conclude all classical music lovers are unpleasant snobs and all my teachers are apologists for conservatism. :)