Is Songwriting Obsolete?

noogies

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Here's something I think about every time I hear a recent pop song on the radio: can anybody write a pop tune any more?

What I mean is, does anyone still write using the traditional intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus kind of structure? Most of the new songs I hear seem to rely on playing a groove or vamp over and over again, ad infinitum. Examples would include Pharrell Williams' "Happiness", American
Authors' "Best Day of My Life", and pretty much the entire catalogue of Coldplay, so it seems to cross the lines of all pop genres.

I can pretty much trace this "repetitive-riff" songwriting technique back to
U2's earliest work ... I think. Or is the vast influence of rap/hiphop -- where the rhythm track trumps melody -- the culprit?

And is this a good thing? Maybe a streamlined songwriting form is just the ticket. Now a 10-second snippet of music is all you need to capture the essence of a song -- think of the time we'll save not having to listen to the whole thing.

Or maybe it's just de-evolution.

I dunno. But things certainly ain't what they used to be.
 
The head chart for Happy reads

Intro > Verse > Chorus > Verse > Chorus > Bridge > Chorus > Bridge > Chorus

So maybe the trend is to tack on extra choruses? I agree it's repetitive but I don't think the Verse / Chorus / Bridge model is obsolete ....
 
U2 never gets a lot of respect around here but I put them up there with the best of the best. When rock was tired and aging in the late 70's/early 80's they were able to help revive it and move it through the 80's with a new attitude before it's real demise in the 90's. What about The Clash? One of the best rock bands ever. We can point that same finger at them.

The only thing that never dies is a damn good pop song!

Yesterday by the Beatles is repetitive. The same mini-melody over and over again throughout the entire song. The same riff strummed over and over and over. Are you sure you are not just drawing a generational line in the sand and saying "I don't get this new stuff because it sounds different than the stuff I consider to be real music."
 
I don't think intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus is obsolete, but just another option. Song writing cannot be obsolete, unless nobody writes songs, so unless they are intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus by definition, we're in for more.
 
I dunno. Pop sucked even back in the day. The radio was playing Tony Orlando while we listened to Led Zepplin and the Allman Brothers on vinyl since they didn't fit the format. You just have to look a little deeper and there are many great songwriters out there. I've even heard some deep hip hop songs that are wonderfully written.
 
Here's something I think about every time I hear a recent pop song on the radio: can anybody write a pop tune any more?
. . .

You are not going to get a representative sample of "recent pop" music by listening to over-the-air radio. There are lots of good songwriters out there who put out poppy, hooky, melodic tunes that aren't insipid drivel, Diane Birch being one of them.

More good music today than ever before. Just gotta know where to look for it.

EDIT: +1 on Richard Thompson
 
You are not going to get a representative sample of "recent pop" music by listening to over-the-air radio. There are lots of good songwriters out there who put out poppy, hooky, melodic tunes that aren't insipid drivel, Diane Birch being one of them.

More good music today than ever before. Just gotta know where to look for it.

EDIT: +1 on Richard Thompson

That's the problem, the good stuff isn't on the radio. I am just waiting for Clear Channel's business model to fall apart when they realize no one is listening to their stations anymore. then maybe they will bring back diversity.
 
U2 never gets a lot of respect around here but I put them up there with the best of the best. When rock was tired and aging in the late 70's/early 80's they were able to help revive it and move it through the 80's with a new attitude before it's real demise in the 90's. What about The Clash? One of the best rock bands ever. We can point that same finger at them.

The only thing that never dies is a damn good pop song!

Yesterday by the Beatles is repetitive. The same mini-melody over and over again throughout the entire song. The same riff strummed over and over and over. Are you sure you are not just drawing a generational line in the sand and saying "I don't get this new stuff because it sounds different than the stuff I consider to be real music."

Ummm ... maybe I should have phrased it a little differently as we seem to be experiencing a failure in communication.

I wasn't trying to point any fingers or saying "old good, new bad" or anything like that. Rather, I meant to make an observation about what I perceive to be a possible evolution in the craft of songwriting -- is it getting stripped down and streamlined, and if so, to what possible purpose?

It wasn't supposed to be about what music you or I might find repetitive or annoying; it was supposed to be about the actual structure of the songs and whether or not we're at a crossroads in modern songwriting and if so, what direction might we be taking from here?

In reading back the OP, I realize that I used some critical and pejorative terms, so I apologize if anybody misconstrued my meaning.
 
Songwriting's not obsolete...It's just being held hostage, that's all... But negotiations are currently at a standstill, so it may be a while...
 
A good song should tell a story like Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust.

You don't see much of that anymore....
 
More good music today than ever before. Just gotta know where to look for it.

EDIT: +1 on Richard Thompson

It would be nice to know "where".

Perhaps a savvy FM radio format could lead to me the promised land of all the musical cream which seemed to once easily rise to the top instead of all the searching producing skimmed milk today.
 
It would be nice to know "where".

Perhaps a savvy FM radio format could lead to me the promised land of all the musical cream which seemed to once easily rise to the top instead of all the searching producing skimmed milk today.

You won't find it on the radio. Radio's dead and rotting.
 
It would be nice to know "where".

Perhaps a savvy FM radio format could lead to me the promised land of all the musical cream which seemed to once easily rise to the top instead of all the searching producing skimmed milk today.

I tend to find new music as tangents off of other things, like related videos on youtube. I'll give things a quick listen, and if a song intrigues me enough, I look into more songs by the artist. If multiple are good, I usually buy an album or two to hear more at higher quality. I've also found plenty of artists I now like thanks to threads on here like the 21st Century Playlist thread.

I basically never use the radio. The antenna in my current car has stayed down for the 5 years I've owned it. However, when I have to drive other people's cars, I put it on 101.1 out here in the Chicago area. They tend to have decent stuff playing all the time.


Here's my contribution to the thread as a whole:

A problem I see is that the older crowd usually thinks everything "back in the day" was better. Now, I'm not talking about just the legitimately great songs with excellent writing. I mean every damn song that hit the radio. That's simply not true. Most of the stuff that hit the charts has been forgotten over time, or is still thought of as great because of fond memories. For example, Def Leppard's Pour Some Sugar on Me is basically the same idea as 50 Cent's Candy Shop, just not as explicit. I'm sure there are plenty of people on here who would say Def Leppard is great and that's a great song while also saying rap is crap and 50 Cent sucks. The truth is both songs lack depth, but both did what they were made to do: become popular and climb the charts. You'd just rather have a repetitive guitar riff and metaphors for sex than a repetitive rap beat and metaphors for sex.

Another issue is that many of the people on here like things in the style of what is now classic rock. Let's narrow it down to the '70s for an example. The rock music of the '70s climbed the charts because rock music was the most popular genre in the '70s. The "club music" of the '70s was disco, so disco also climbed the charts. This is now 2014. Disco is dead. Rock is not the most popular genre anymore. The electronic and hip-hop music that gets played in today's clubs did not even exist back then, and many of today's pop songs borrow from those genres. That is the kind of music that is popular with many of today's kids/teens/college students/whatever, a.k.a. the target market for radio. Some rock and rock-influenced music still manages to get on the charts, but it's a completely different style than '70s rock. The music that climbed the charts in the '70s would never do so today due to different tastes in the general public of pop radio's target audience.

As for lyrical content, think about how many top hits of the '70s and '80s contained pointless or cliche lyrics. Pour Some Sugar on Me was a huge hit. There is no depth. The only thing they did great in that song was making something catchy in a genre that was popular. That is the key point. Pop music for radio is not about depth or great songwriting. It's about making something catchy in a popular genre. If you're not looking for something catchy in one of the currently-popular genres, don't bother looking to radio stations that play pop.

A good song should tell a story like Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust.

You don't see much of that anymore....

That song only hit #35 in 1975. When you go back and look at the Billboard Hot 100 of 1975, it isn't even on there. You know what is? Kung Fu Fighting. According to the charts, Kung Fu Fighting is better than Diamonds and Rust. Love Will Keep Us Together is the greatest song of 1975 according to the charts. The charts don't matter. Just because what you would consider to be great songs aren't on today's charts doesn't mean they aren't out there. The radio is not a representation of top-quality music. Pop radio plays what's on the charts. Artists from the past like Iggy Pop and Tom Waits that are now well-known and have been hugely influential didn't even get on the charts. Look elsewhere for today's great music.
 
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There's a lot of crud out there on the commercial airwaves. I had to suffer at one workplace with the constant barrage of music made by anonymous Scandanavian electro music producers. It was awful.....there again, the 80's were just as bad. Can't remember hearing Joy Division, Metallica or The Pixies on commercial radio. For that you had to listen to the independents.
 
That's the problem, the good stuff isn't on the radio. I am just waiting for Clear Channel's business model to fall apart when they realize no one is listening to their stations anymore. then maybe they will bring back diversity.

They will program whatever maximizes listeners and thus maximizes ad revenue. As the great audiophile H.L. Mencken once said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

Being a capitalist, this doesn't bother me in most cases, but radio is different. The spectrum belongs to us. The repeal of limits on media cross ownership in 1996 was touted as promoting competition (I'm thinking George Orwell, 2+2=5) but had the opposite effect.

Anyway, I think it's pretty easy nowadays to find a wide variety of new and good music. Thank goodness for a few streaming NPR and college stations at the bottom of the dial in big markets.
 
It's always amusing to hear people cry that today's music sucks. There was crap music in every generation, not just today.

Face it, you've gotten old. Just like your parents didn't appreciate the music you listened to growing up, you've become sterile just like the parents who never understood what it's like to be young. Reminiscing only about yesteryears and how nobody writes and performs the good ole' songs that you grew up with.

There's plenty of good music today as there was in generations past. Go out and explore new bands, keep an open mind and stop playing those same Pink Floyd albums.
 
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