Re: A New Offense

Sorry guys, couldn’t post this in the comments string… too long.
 
Keith wrote:
“Just like you and I both can tell the difference between a French painting rightly honored by a place in a museum such as the Getty and a cheap yet artistically sound airbrush painting on the back of a Rolling Stone magazine advertising Cigarettes or Coke, so you and I can tell the difference between a Paganini orchestra (superior quality) and these four girls’ techno-heavy, beat-drenched wannabe classical music (inferior quality). I don’t know what they could do to make their music better; that would require training. I do know what Paganini could do to make his worse: Add techno beats and Ramba whistles. Agree or disagree?”
 
To which I say:
 
I agree that we both have some limited degree of taste with which we can recognize one music as brilliant and one as empty.
 
It’s the immediate aversion to all things “pop” which irritates me.  True, pop will burgeon and die in a short span while the classics will live on, but the line is not as clear as we might imagine.  I think Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and Elvis Presley will live on for a long time to come although most of their body of work is distinctly pop — then there are the musicians we now consider classics but were at the time criticized for their popular leanings (Tchiacovsky and Puccini come to mind).
 
Pop is music written to be more immediately accessible to wide audiences — generally they do this by appealling to emotions since emotion is more immediately accessible to nearly everyone.  I don’t think this is a reason to derride pop music.  True, it’s appeal to the emotions opens it up to an ugly weakness — it has a propensity to become very shallow, but that doesn’t mean all appeals to emotion are shallow.
 
“Bond” probably sucks, I’ll trust your judgement, but some pop lives on and Bob Dylan may, in the end, outlast Bach. 
  
 Don