Has the sound of pop music stopped evolving?

I understand what the OP is referring to, especially when doing "date that tune". I've sampled music off the radio, as an example, pulled up SoundHound and was surprised that the song in question was five / ten / sometimes even fifteen years old. I thought it was brand new.

But I still think that's more on me versus the music. I'm past middle-age now and, like it or not, my grasp of what's new is going to lag just a bit. No getting off my lawn here...more like sometimes I forgot when I put my lawn.

 

You think?

 

The music has nothing to do with Stevie at all. It's a total fusion of a lot of things. The vocalist is doing more a Brian McKnight thing than a Stevie thing. Still, glad you listened.

Ed

 

Disagree with your distillation but glad you like it. I'm waiting for the CD to come out. Should be amazing. Glad you like.

Ed

 

I will agree that was pretty weak. The singer definitely sounds like he is trying too hard. I started thinking about Jamiroquai. Not that I know anything about Jamiroquai, heard a couple tunes on MTV 20 years ago.

 

I did say from the start he is a very talented guy. Quincy Jones is behind him for a reason. That tune is the best one I've heard and I like it. NPR calls it the standout: "In My Room's delightful standout, "Hajanga."

With 'In My Room,' Jazz Phenom Jacob Collier Is Bringing Jubilation Back »

 

Jamiroquai? Two completely different bands. Jamiroquai can be very funky and they started with almost acid jazz. Dirty Loops is Pop/Jazz/R&B/Dance - a little of all of it, really. His style is apparently an acquired one and I get that. I love em and they're definitely doing something new.

Ed

 

I guess it's also worth mentioning that an internet forum is a rather odd place to source information. Not putting any of 'em down, mind you. It's just that the most popular threads on this one lean more towards covering Nirvana and Pre-Nirvana times, and the forums that cover newer acts, well... you'd think there wasn't a valid pop artist to be had aside from Beyonce and Rihanna.

 

I guess I meant white guy trying to be soulful but not really succeeding, in my opinion. The rhythm section sounds like they are on loan from a prog metal band. To me that is not new at all, just pop soul type music with an overly active rhythm section, but reasonable minds can disagree.

 

The bass player is very Victor Wooten. Both th drummer and he are out of their minds good. Oh well. Different strokes...

Ed

 

"Millions of Swifties and KatyCats—as well as Beliebers, Barbz, and Selenators, and the Rihanna Navy—would be stunned by the revelation that a handful of people, a crazily high percentage of them middle-aged Scandinavian men, write most of America’s pop hits. It is an open yet closely guarded secret"

It must be easier these days to hide songwriting credits where the kids can't find them. Back in my day they were in large print right there on the record label. I knew damn well which songs Bowie (for instance) wrote and which ones were covers without needing to squint at the blurry fine print at the bottom of the booklet in my mp3 download.

But to be slightly more serious; I doubt they'd be stunned at the revelation as to be just mildly confused as to why anyone would care who writes the songs.

 

Songwriting credits (or credits for anything) have and always will be heavily political. Elvis Presley no more wrote "Love Me Tender" than Justin Bieber. Singers and producers alike have awarded themselves songwriting credits that weren't factual. Some don't have credit but they still share in publishing revenues even though they wrote nothing (Celine Dion). Musicians have been credited as playing on things they weren't even in the studio for (Danny Seraphine didn't play on Chicago's "You're the Inspiration", for instance). Heck, even producers have been credited that didn't do the job.

Ed

 

I don't know if it has stopped or not. Only thing I know is it isn't anything worth buying, and I see no trace of evolving

 

I guess Berry Gordy and the Funk Brothers never existed in this reality you've built up in your head, right?

 

Those chord changes are right from the Stevie handbook the way they are voiced and the chord choices as well.
I went thru some of the chord changes in the Dirty Loops song.
Look at the way the Dirty Loops song uses suspensions and tell me it is not similar to how Stevie Wonder used them.
It is way outside of the scope of this thread but there are close similarities to Stevie's music. Of course, a lot of R and B music uses them the same way.
There is nothing new about that song that has not been done over and over.
The musicians are great but the song is nothing new. It is better than a lot of the other stuff out there today though.

 

Perfect distillation of the true intent of this thread and all that's wrong with much of the populace here.

Many, many, many people have the radio on at work, so it’s safe to say I listen to the radio almost 40 hours a week. Also just driving to work, I have the radio on. Safe to say, I listen to the radio on the way in, and back from work 5 days a week, if I’m not playing my iPhone or CD

When my alarm clock goes off in the morning, it is my local radio station that wakes me up. Safe to say, my alarm clock goes off 5 days a week. This is where people hear the newest music and buy it if they like it.

Ever been in a Dentists Office Ed? Radio station playing all day long in there.

Ed, I believe you are the thin sliver of population who does not listen to the radio. Radio is far from dead.

 

As a young guy, my observation is that music and fashion stopped seriously evolving around 2003 or 2005. Nothing sounds or looks much different.

 

I checked it out this morning on Tidal when I saw the Pitchfork review and really liked it. I only planned to sample it but I ended up listening to the whole album.

 

Fashion too???? Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!

That tears it, the entire kit-n-kaboodle's shutting down, I guess, it’s turtles and entropy and the heat-death of the universe all the way down.

And to think I completely missed that turning point when it ground to a halt in 2003 or 2005. I was such a blind fool.





1935

 

What big changes have you seen? Since I'm sensing sarcasm.
What defines the 2010s from the 2000s, besides technological stuff? There's no 2010s music, no 2010s fashion. Maybe it's just too soon to tell, but we're 6 years in and I honestly think you could put a picture of someone now and olace it next to a picture of someone in 2006, and they wouldn't look wildly different. That wouldn't be the case for '06/'96, '86/'76, etc. You can do the same for music. I'm gonna use Gwen Stefani here. The Sweet Escape came out in 2006. Does it sound so different from Make Me Like You, her big song from this year? No. You could play most stuff from a decade ago on a playlist with stuff from this year, and outside of whatever memories you may have of the songs, they wouldn't sound out of place with the new ones. That's always been my opinion, anyway.

 

I figured someone else other than me can obviously hear (and see) the Stevie Wonder influence. So I searched reviews of Dirty Loops.
Here is a section of Matt Collar's review from AllMusic..........

"Dirty Loops certainly have chops to spare and layer each track with enough jazz-informed chord progressions, arpeggiated six-string basslines, frenetic drum fills, and melismatic vocal breakdowns to fill any number of Stevie Wonder albums (to name-drop an obvious influence). " [Emphasis added]

Loopified - Dirty Loops | Songs, Reviews, Credits | AllMusic »

He also gives them praise in that they meld many genres effortlessly. I guess I am just getting tired of melisma which was why I posted I did not like it. I will listen to some of their other songs.

 

Sarcasm aside, I’d say that looking for big superficial obvious decade-based transformations to arrive on schedule like Amazon boxes via a UPS truck while singing a chorus of same-old same-old is no way to live.

I’m not going to try to convince you or anyone else in this thread that there is amazing new art, music, fashion, movies, TV shows, theatre, literature happening all around you, and that the conviction that we’re all in the grip of some overwhelming stalled-out stasis and everything-is-a-remix repetition is a very sad and strange psychological state of being. If I actually believed that’s the way things are, I’d be incredibly angry and pissed-off, and rebelling and breaking s*#t until the comfortably numb sad feeling went away. I damn sure wouldn’t shrug and accept the crisis the way every dead-ender in this thread is doing with this poison embrace of retread realism. But in fact it’s an illusion.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” (William Blake)

 

I lived through the tail end of the 60’s, the 70’s, the 80’s, etc. Believe me, the nostalgic idea that change and transformation was more obvious and easier to embrace and understand then than it is now is bunk. It was hard work to get hip then and it’s hard work now.

 

OK. But I think it's very odd that every decade of the last century had something very defining about it, yet the 2010s seem very much like the 2000s, still, 6 years in.I'm not saying things have to arrive on schedule, but it just seems to have happened that way up until now. I'm currently watching Soap, a show that came out in '78, and it was crazy to see how fast the fashions they wore switched to very obviously '80s fashions during the 3rd season. Maybe I just need hindsight, IDK.


I know there's a lot of great stuff happening in the arts, but even that stuff, in my opinion, doesn't seem drastically different from things in the last decade. Everything has seemed pretty much the same in pop culture, since 2003, ignoring advancements in cellphone and Internet technology.

 

I'm quite confident that many of the songs I grew up loving were musical rehashes of other songs, but I didn't know any better.