The grand album-length statement and the rhapsodic, convoluted song lived on in 2010 releases by the Arcade Fire, Titus Andronicus, Joanna Newsom, Erykah Badu, Ne-Yo and, dopey as some of his lyrics can be, Kanye West.
[But] concision … is the essence of pop: its discipline, its challenge, its genius. To tell a story or sum up an attitude in a handful of sung verses or a salvo of hip-hop rhymes, and to unite them with music that lodges those words in memory — and, at best, also summons the feeling behind them — is a songwriter’s job description. And it doesn’t have to mean sacrificing ambition. A brief time frame can hold a lot: all the chordal transformations of Tin Pan Alley or 1970s R&B, all the vocal fireworks of Aretha Franklin, all the rhythmic intensity of James Brown, all the electroacoustic metamorphoses of Radiohead, all the colliding samples of Public Enemy, all the internal rhymes, comedy and psychodrama of Eminem in his prime.
Yet musical or verbal complexity can easily add clutter rather than depth, not to mention idle pretension. That’s why popular music regularly goes through back-to-basics purges like punk (both the 1970s and 1990s editions), electro (with iterations in every decade since the 1970s) and for that matter rock ’n’ roll itself.
Minimalism can be a corrective and a clarification, a reminder of primal pleasures and impulses, a knowing rejuvenation. The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica sees that spirit in the approach of Best Coast and kindred stripped-down bands that are due for albums this year, a strategy he has labeled the New Simplicity. And it’s true that if that style doesn’t generate its own orthodoxy, it could turn out to be endearing. Someone just might write the new “Wild Thing” or the new “Hey Ya!”
Here I’ve edited Jon Pareles’s article from today’s New York Times so that it only contains the parts where he argues against his proposition that contemporary popular forms of music are simplistic and bad. You might notice I’ve made him a lot more convincing.
There’s this trick that writers have whereby an opposing argument can be dismissed merely by enunciating it. It’s the “to be sure” clause; when espousing a piece of ill-thought flim-flammery, if you describe the opposing point of view, you will be able to carrying on as if acknowledging those objections were tantamount to dismantling them.
(For example)
After months of careful observation, I have come to the realization that the sky is green. To be sure, if one heads outside and gazes upward, one will perceive a distinct azure tinge. It is absolutely correct that of all the shades of gray, blue, sunset orange, or midnight black that color the heavens, the times the sky looks anything approaching verdant are so minuscule as to be potentially non-existent. Even so, when it comes to the color of the sky, one must conclude that it is green.
Because the sky is green, I assume it is made of grass, and would be a prime location for beef farming. This is why we should endeavor to build machines permitting cows to defy gravity as swiftly as possible.
See! Proposition, counter argument, conclusion. Writing!
Pareles does the same in this article, which says what dads have been saying to teenagers since teenagers (or maybe dads) were invented: modern music is Not Serious Enough. However, after laying out in detail the reasons why his proposition is complete bunk, he ends up only supporting his argument with a feat of wordplay, not reasoning: “Too often, however, less is merely less.”
Careful with that axe, Jon!
(To give him the benefit of the doubt, Pareles also includes an introductory section about how he doesn’t like Taio Cruz or Best Coast. OK!)
The worst thing about the article, however, is that Pareles assumes that simplicity and dumbness are so intertwined that he does not even need to examine his conflation of the two. Even when he sees echoes of music he likes in contemporary pop the differences he perceives are telling. Songs about the club, he posits, are perhaps “the modern equivalent of those 1930s musicals that were set in glamorous cabarets while people were on bread lines, though the 21st-century story lines are far less heartwarming.”
The potential for the warming of hearts seems an awfully strange criteria to require from pop, though perhaps it springs from the same kind of nostalgia that Pareles enjoys in the tunes of Bruno Mars: “four-minute, four-chord economies of doo-wop, Motown and reggae songwriting, […] he plays the nicest of nice guys.”
Note: Simple music is great if it’s old and “nice.”
Hip-hop, though it comes in for praise (because Kanye West made a Very Important Album) is still subject to that strange old insistence that ”club boasts and drug-trade chronicles” are bad, but “complex thoughts on celebrity, stray political observations, personal confessions and … psychological complexity” are intrinsically good. This is like applying to a general audience the theory behind children’s television programming: it must be educational and morally proper, otherwise someone might start having fun.
The strangest part of the entire article, however? When Pareles zeroes in on surely the biggest offender against his desire for complex, subtle, “nice” music, his j’accuse never gets around to being anything but praise:
Kesha, the biggest breakthrough pop act of 2010 (abetted by Dr. Luke), has devoted herself to songs about partying: seduction and rejection, hooking up, getting drunk and getting wild. They’re trashy, selfish, catchy and often hilarious — smart pop storytelling in a circumscribed realm.
