In Aug 25 A.D. 2010 allcoms scripsit: Hm, I wonder, I am blind, have been my hole life, and looks mean nothing to me. Though I like Britney Spears, exactly because "her" music is what it is! Of course it marks a certain type of music and image, but that has been around for ages as well. This image has existed for hundreds of years, only now TV and charts aid it to spread very quickly and the marketing is easier and global. This image of seductive maiden and her male pendant have existed in some operas, in even older "popular" songs. Although I think the love for this image is slowly dwindling a bit, for th3e next fancy of popular culture. Why not call pop music worthy on its own. To get back to the afore mentioned Britney, there have been some quite nice arrangements, simple melodies, but you have to think of them as well and you have to arrange, record and produce them in a certain way, to get the desired effect. Of course this is far from progressive rock, Jazz or contemporary orchestral music. Still can you compare them? I think someone also mentioned the fiend "commercial" music. Well there is commercially produced music and music intended for commerce only, written by musical economists. The former doesn't have to be fiendish. People have to live. I know some really good, complex, well done, superbly played and innovative music, which is commercial in the sense, that the musicians live from it, have it produced in studios, sell it, go on tour with it. As to the music with commercial intend: It depends who works on it. Commercial intend can be - I believe - induced by at least two sides; The record company and the songwirters/producers they involve. If you have a good songwriter/producer, who still knows what music is and what interesting sounds or gripping melodies are, it can still be worth a listen, if you take to that music after all. Kindest regards Julien -------- Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles) ======== FIND MY WEB-PROJECT AT: ======== http://ltsb.sourceforge.net the Linux TextBased Studio guide ======= AND MY PERSONAL PAGES AT: ======= http://www.juliencoder.de

On Wed, August 25, 2010 8:20 am, Rob wrote: Yes, this is my conundrum so to speak. Is it possible to subvert the subconscious minds of people in such an environment and have DJ's happily play said music and people happily listen to and therefore absorb it's affects? I have to also mention I am talking entirely about the Britney/Miley/Florider/... club sound now. IMO that is what modern pop music has become. -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd.

On Wed, August 25, 2010 11:42 pm, Louigi Verona wrote: In this case the response mechanism might be growing up, having kids and not being able to go out to clubs anymore? Still I'm interested to find a way to subvert this compositional technique if it is possible. -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd.

On Wed, August 25, 2010 11:51 pm, Louigi Verona wrote: I'm not sure we are discussing the same music. The stuff I am talking about has a very clearly defined structure and methodology to the composition and the sound scape. It is not translatable to dub ambien or even house. The best I can describe it genre wise is Club remixes of modern pop. I'm pretty sure Timberland discovered the technique and since he had his string of hits in 2007/8 almost every new track that has been remixed or made for the club sound. I'm not talking about house or trance or tech or dnb. This is a completely seperate genre of music and in most of the world is the most popular form of club music these days. Alot of it seems to be derived partially from hip hop influenced beats and definitely the hip hop producers have been pumping out the club tracks using this technique over the past 2 years. -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd.

On Thu, August 26, 2010 1:35 am, Louigi Verona wrote: How about a test instead. Listen to 10 of the latest club remixes of the latest Pop music from the last 3 years and tell me if you can spot the compositional technique therein? It's mostly centered around certain very similar synth and drum patterns and is complemented by the use of sexually suggestive breathy female vocal tracks/samples and aggressive dumbed down male lyrics. Definitely the context helps to reinforce the subconscious emotional affect of the music and I am not saying that it is a guaranteed affect. It probably takes several years of conditioning to really work it's magic. I'm not sure because I have been over exposed to this kind of music over the past 10 years by hanging out with people who like it. -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd.

On Thu, August 26, 2010 6:20 am, Louigi Verona wrote: That's fine but I don't see what you mean ;-) Composition is the process of combining musical patterns to create a complete structure. What is context? I've never heard it used in this context... -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd.

On Thursday 26 August 2010 08:38, Patrick Shirkey wrote: I started going out to clubs regularly in about 1990 and those elements were already there. The beats have evolved over the decades but I even remember hearing New Order remixes from the late 80s with the suggestive, breathy female vocal samples... not to mention everything ever produced by Enigma from '91 on. I would argue that what you're describing goes as far back as disco, and it's the ascendancy of club culture in the present day that attracted your attention to it. Of course they all have pretty much the same beat. So did disco. So did electronic pop in the mid-80s. So did house music. I knew someone who got really, really turned on by a remix of the throwaway novelty single "People Are Still Having Sex" about 20 years ago. It had the same beat as everything else at the time so it was in everyone's mix for a couple of months, and featured the sound of a woman whispering "Hello, lover" repeatedly throughout the track. On the other hand, 10 years before that, when I was still in elementary school, I had a girlfriend whose dad had a tape of disco stuff that all sounded like "More More More" by Andrea True Connection, but with fewer lyrics and more moaning. He was embarrassed when we made fun of it, leading me to suspect he was into it for not-purely-musical reasons. As you observed in your last post, the clubs I go to may not exactly be mainstream, and certainly most of the people there aren't going to react sexually to breathy female anything. But that stuff still gets played, often gets played there long before DJs in what you describe as mainstream clubs have even heard of it, and has been for decades. Timbaland may have added his own spin to it, but so did Giorgio Moroder (who may have invented the model), Stock/Aitken/Waterman, and so on through the years. In another couple years someone will come up with an even 'sexier' beat and bassline and even breathier female vocal talent, and someone else will be wishing he could use the same technique for, er, 'good'. I can't speak to the aggressive hip-hop stuff, because I generally leave if too much of that stuff gets played. To sum up, I think the best way to positively affect people's lives through music isn't to try to come up with some scientific formula for imparting intelligence, tolerance, etc. subliminally through beats, but through writing songs embodying the qualities you wish to impart. Make them close enough in sound to everything else that they slip underneath the radar while also being catchy and novel enough so that everyone (well, everyone who plays non-major-label stuff) plays them. I think that'll be easier and more effective than finding and subverting a magic formula. Rob

On Thu, 26 Aug 2010, Rob wrote: I've been sitting out of this thread so far, but...some observations: When this discussion started, the OP was pointing out the recent trend of pop music during the 2000's...such stuff as Britney, 50 Cent, Miley Cyrus, etc. But then this all went into a critique of the fact that it's largely hedonistic, sexual, aggressive... I think we hit a tangent somewhere. As much as people like to sub-categorize, sub-sub-categorize, and sub-sub-sub-categorize rock music these days -- especially now that we have Wikipedia and other resources to help us keep track of a thousand or so mostly unnecessary and overlapping musical genre names -- this is all basically, for want of a better thing to call it, rock music. It's been around now for about fifty years, and it's *always* been hedonistic, sexual, and aggressive, as well as (after 1965) psychedelic, mind-altering, and some would say rock'n'roll might even just save your soul. (Others say it will damn it to hell, but whatever...) Anyway...I think the hedonism/aggression aspect of it is nothing particularly new. In fact, I don't think anyone would be very fond of rock music (again, using the term *very* inclusively) that had all the power and passion stripped right out of it. What's really changed is *quality*. Modern pop music leaves you flailing around looking for anything in it that has been done with excellence. The vocals sound sterile, they've been put through the Autotune plugin until the singer sounds just two IC chips short of being a robot. The dynamics are overcompressed to the point that some songs have less than 1db of dynamic range in the whole mix. The lyrics are banal -- not for being hedonistic, because that same criticism would exclude most of the Doors discography -- but for being passionless, mass-manufactured, and dumb. Not dumb in that big bad loud way that bands like AC/DC can get away with for having some balls and a bit of style. More dumb the way graffiti written by middle-schoolers during their lunch period is dumb. As for the instruments...what instruments? "Bands" are no longer actually expected to play *any* instruments at any point during the production process. I'm not even criticizing synthesizers or samplers or even computers, because I use all of those things, and so have many great musicians I listen to. In the right hands, those can all be tools. But today's music is made from sample loops of riffs that were played by someone else, drum tracks that were sampled off of a vinyl record from decades ago, melodies that were algorithmically put together by a plugin. I'm not even saying there is necessarily anything wrong with music that is done entirely on a computer. Again, in the right hands, there is potential for talent to shine through, even there. (Though that said, I'm more impressed when somebody had to play an instrument or two or six somewhere along the way.) Generally though, the perception of "bands" these days is that they consist of a singer and a troop of dancers. And the singer uses Autotune, and the lyrics are something you could probably generate randomly with a short Perl script. There are no instruments. Seeing an actual drummer on stage these days induces shock and awe. There's something to be said though for stars in the music business whose only job is to look pretty. There have always been stars like that, and there probably always will, male and female both. So naturally, after your brain gives up looking for talent anywhere in the vocals, the lyrics, the instruments (such as they were), and the overall flavor/timbre of the recording, you next turn to the videos. Unfortunately, the stars are not actually that cute either. The media will swear up and down that they're hot enough to melt the plastic the media is made of, but so help me, they're not. Actually they remind me of something that was once said of Prince: "He makes you want to think about sex...with somebody else." That pretty much sums up videos by pretty much all the mainstream acts now. Lots of sex. But can we please make it not be sex with THEM? So you're basically looking for anything in the music, or the lyrics, or the videos, or any aspect of the whole audio/visual product that has been done with any kind of excellence in any context whatsoever, even if you have to leave the musical appreciation aspect of it and go to their video product's appeal alone, and you simply flail looking for anything that was done well. Comparing this to the technopop and other very commercialized music of previous eras, back when even that type of music still required playing of instruments (ANY instruments!), singing talent, recording engineers that could make a sweet mix (and were allowed to by their label management), and if nothing else and all else failed, cute stars, is like comparing a gourmet meal to...Cheez Wiz. At least the commercial pop of previous eras -- sometimes deliberately, and sometimes by accident -- managed to sometimes be surprisingly profound, either directly, or indirectly through unintentional artifacts of kitsch-coolness. After about 1995 or so, we have apparently "perfected" the pop production process to the point where we no longer have to worry that anyone will be either intentionally or unintentionally impressive in any way. We're now 100% brilliance-proof, no brilliance can touch us. Quality (or lack thereof)...not hedonism. Rock music is supposed to be about hedonism, and rebellion, and aggression, and sex, and all that other stuff that makes parents want to go into the back yard and hurl. What good is it if it isn't? Despite our new obsession with making new absurd subgenre names and trying to convince everyone they're each a different style of music, it's all really supposed to be just rock music. We've forgotten how to do it well. I will admit there seems to have been this war going on for as long as rock music has been around between the intellectualist hedonists (60's "rock poet" type psychedelic artists, 80's new-wave/synthpop philosopher types, etc.) and the anti-intellectualist hedonists (70's colliseum rockers, 80's metalheads/burnouts, 90's grungers, etc.). But they're all hedonists. They all like some combination of sex, drugs, passion, aggression, and rebellion (or all of the above). The only difference is, some of them think those are things you're supposed to do while you're educated, and the others think that's something you're supposed to do while you're a glorified retard. They're all hedonists though. Probably. What would be the problem with that? Oh come on... Even the Bible had its Song of Solomon. I don't think that if you were able to reform rock music to an intellectual pinnacle never seen before that it would mean getting rid of the sex. I think one of the earlier posters nailed it -- music has drifted in this direction of being sexy and aggressive because people like to feel that way. Why fight it? Now if we could only get them to do quality art while they're doing that... There was a time when rap was actually interesting for a producer/musician like me to listen to, but not because of the actual rapping. Once, people would do the most insane things with effects boxes, TR-808 drum machines, little mixers, SH-101's, JX3P's...things that even new wave and synthpop would have been too "refined" to do on even the most experimental albums. You could listen to it, and it helped you break away from notions of what is "too much" in electronic music, as far as sequencing and drum machine programming went. And that made you want to try something that was "too much" in your own music. (I will admit though, even in those days, I found the actual rap vocals fairly boring.) These days, it's drag-and-drop on a Mac, and there is very little experimenting with MIDI and actual instruments going on. Sample loops taken from albums of someone else's, a little bit of time on a computer, and some guy who sounds dumb and dangerous droning on monotonously about how the pigs almost got him and he keeps his bitches in line. You know, after decades of parents crying that this "new music is going to make kids want to kill themselves," I think we may have finally found something so mediocre it might really just make somebody want to do that just to escape. Probably the intelligence part is enough. Most of the intelligent rock artists that have emerged since the 60's have proven that, without even trying to ever divert the listener toward less depressing / base / hedonistic subjects, if you can just get people *thinking* as a matter of habit (rather than having it be such a seldom occurence for them that doing that makes their brains hurt), you can make the audience and the whole world a better place. Most thinking people are able to deal with the depressing subjects, the sex, the adult subjects. What we can't deal with is all this mental retardation on the radio. And don't even get me into what Judy McGrath has done to MTV (and music in general) ever since Viacom bought out the network and put her in charge. -- + Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys + UNIX Systems Admin + banging on a million typewriters will + University of Chicago + eventually reproduce the entire works of + Physical Sciences Div. + Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, + James Franck Institute + we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky

Let me preface this by saying I'm not a fan of club music, but almost my entire social circle is made up of people who are. On Thursday 26 August 2010 01:37, Patrick Shirkey wrote: Most people who go to clubs are not going there to think, they're going there to lose their minds. Certainly going to a club and not drinking (and being in full possession of my faculties) is a real drag, but I do it anyway now and then to try to be social, not to try and gain insight or anything like that. DJs will play what gets people dancing and bars will hire DJs who keep people coming back to dance and drink. I have a theory that what you think of as sexual music is simply music people associate with sexual contexts after years of experiencing them together. Someone might have said the same thing about R&B or rock and roll 50 years ago, and in fact, I'm pretty sure they did. But "Hound Dog" has never gotten my blood flowing. I'm not sure what clubs you go to, but I can't remember the last time I heard Britney Spears or Miley Cyrus at one (not sure about the third act you mentioned). I bet you would have a few things to say about Lady Gaga if you heard her stuff and its remixes, though. On the other hand, I can't recall ever getting sexual feelings out of music. Maybe there are some provocative videos that go with them, or sexually oriented lyrics, but music doesn't turn me on that way. Aggression, though, sure. There's already plenty of chill-out music out there, though, that's meant to have the opposite effect. Finally, portraying "more intelligent, tolerant, open minded, compassionate, altruistic" as existing exclusive of sexuality seems like a false dichotomy to me, though I'm not going to give counterexamples on a publicly archived list. Rob

On Thu, August 26, 2010 1:47 am, Rob wrote: I am also not a fan of this type of music which is why I am interested in subverting it if it is possible ;-) Yes I agree. Hence I wonder if it is possible to get to these people subconsciously without them realising and possibly even encouraging the event? I think the relation between sexual content and the attempt or success of getting to the subconscious sexual emotions of the listener are clearly defined in all modern pop remixed for a club sound. Lady Gaga, Rhianna, Kanye... Name a pop music icon and listen the their latest club mix and you will hear the technique in action... The clubs you have been going to are not catering to mainstream Pop culture. For the purposes of this discussion I have no direct interest in that crowd or the emotional content of the music played at those clubs. I'm talking about the vast majority of clubs that play middle of the road pop culture hits remixed for the club sound. Not my intention to portray exclusivity. In fact sexuality and aggression are often mixed together in club music so it makes sense that either or both of the above could be mixed with other emotions as well. -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd.