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Originally Posted by Norma J
Pavement have made some great Pop songs.
I partially read a book once where it studied Theodor Adorno's concept of Pop music. The opposite of Pop music being 'Serious Music', as he put it. Pop, being 'popular' (obviously), but in the sense of 'popular song structure'. There's a set structure that a song can be established upon that can be classified as Pop, or a Pop song. Where as serious music, would be, say, Sonic Youth. A band that follow their subconcious, if you want, who have no set structure, or a structure that doesn't necessarly follow a popular foundation anyway.
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I'm going to disagree with this, for a few reasons - mostly around the ambit of what Adorno understood by the avant-garde (which still holds true today) and what the lay (i.e., wrong) conception of the avant-garde is. The avant-garde is
not synonymous with 'serious' music, but it's often the easiest way to understand it (although I'm pretty sure Adorno had quarrels with 'radicalism').
1. Sonic Youth have conventional song structures. They may bend and distort the shape of a pop/rock song, elongate passages, use 'unconventional' (in and only in the rock context) melodic ideas, but they invariably return to what is, if we don't want to say 'pop', a conventional song-structure.
2. Adorno, and I, would say that a conventional song-structure is not the same as serious music.
3. Adorno hated jazz for its consecration of various compositional rules and its use of improvisation. Sonic Youth, if they ever aspire to move away from pop/rock (whether they succeed or not), would aspire to jazz over classical (i.e., they err towards improvisational rather than compositional forms).
4. Adorno couldn't abide Stravinsky. I forget precisely what he said about Stravinsky, but I seem to recall it revolved around Stravinsky's 'patchworking' of art, as opposed to Schoenberg's more 'complete' serialism; whatever the case, if Stravinsky isn't considered 'serious' by Adorno, you can bet your white ass that SY won't be.
These are all minor points, and I'd like to point out that Adorno is probably my most loathéd of Cultural Theorists; however, while I disagree with a lot of what he says, and I think it's not a very
necessary distinction to make, within the context of 'rock/pop' vs 'serious' music, SY definitely sit on the side of the former. The point being that
if you wish to make the distinction, you're more than welcome to, but be careful with it. By way of analogy, while the Beatles had a great many melodic inventions and [faux-]compositional ideas, they are only 'radical' or avant-garde
within the context of rock music. Outside of this context, which is to say, insofar as Western 'classical' (in its broadest sense) music endeavours to encompass, or formalise, musical notation
totally, rock music has very, very few inventions which fall outside of the initial remit of the Romantic era of music, let alone those of the Neo-Classicism, the first/ second 'avant-garde' or the more recent movements of musique concrete, stochasticism or spectralism. Electricity & volume, I'm afraid, don't cut the mustard.
Yeah. These are all words, all of them.