Is There a Correlation Between Music’s Popularity and Its Shittiness?

So a couple of weeks ago, I was discussing my Grammys post-mortem with my pal Max and he asked me a question, inspired by my assertion that, statistically speaking, a Grammy-nominated band will be a shitty band. That question was, “Do you think music’s popularity and its shittiness are somehow correlated? And if so, why?”

I gave Max a short answer (“Not as much as people think”) but he and I agreed that an in-depth discussion of this topic might make a good Bollocks! post. So that’s what this is.

The first thing you have to get out of the way in any discussion like this is the (obvious to me) fact that this is all dependent upon taste. One man’s dookie is another man’s donut and all that. If you like a lot of really popular music, you would probably say that there’s a correlation between its popularity and its greatness. And that’s fine.

But Bollocks! is all about my opinion; for whatever reason, that’s what people come here to read. As I’ve said a billion times (and I’ll say it a billion more), we can love completely different music and still be friends. I promise. But the fact is, I don’t like very much popular music so it might be tempting for me to say that there is a correlation between how popular something is and how awful it is.

But I don’t think that’s the case. There’s plenty of insanely popular music that I like: Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, the Beatles, Cee Lo Green’s Ladykiller, and I could go on all day. I bring this up to provide you, humble Bollocks! readers, with evidence that I never dislike popular music (what the fuck is a Kesha, anyway? I won’t put the fucking dollar sign in her name, either. But what the fuck is she? Who is creating demand for a white trash pop diva?) simply because it is popular.

For purposes of our discussion, I’m gonna divide popular music into two categories: good popular music and bad popular music. Again, this is all based on my subjective experience of music (there is no objective experience of art, no matter what any pretentious asshole tries to tell you. It pleases you or it doesn’t and the reasons why you hate something might be the same reasons other people love it. My wife, for instance, does not like the Screaming Females because they are, true to their name, Screaming Females. On the other hand, this is precisely one of the reasons I love them). I think that good popular music becomes popular because it is just undeniably, universally appealing. This is why a lot of good popular music happens to be in the pop style – that particular genre is almost always on a mission to be catchy. Punk music, on the other hand, is typically designed to polarize and won’t appeal to a broad enough swath of the population to become truly popular if its any good. For “punk” music to be popular, it has to water down its message and attitude and stay vague about its politics. This is why Green Day’s American Idiot (not a punk album in my opinion) is more popular than Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ Shake the Sheets and it’s also why I tend to despise the popular shit that some people consider “punk” today.

Last summer, I talked about The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and his suggestion that stuff has to be “translated” for mass consumption before it can become really popular. At the time, I said that the translation idea was a killer for good music – my exact words were “By the time the raw, beautiful music you love is fit for consumption by everyone, it fucking sucks. Always.” I stand by that assertion, but I have to admit that not everyone likes the purest, rawest forms of music. For instance, you might like John Mayer where I like Chris Whitley or Son House. You can sort of see a tenuous connection between the blues of Son House and the white frat-blues of John Mayer, and Mayer definitely moves more units annually than the late Mr. House. Likewise, the Clash is undoubtedly an influence on Green Day, but fans of Green Day are not automatically fans of the Clash (and vice versa; I love the Clash and I think my feelings on Green Day are pretty clear).

So why does so much shitty music become popular? Well, to be popular, you have to appeal to as wide an audience as possible (duh). That’s extremely difficult to do without compromising your sound quite a bit (“compromising” might be a bit strong of a word, but we use strong words here). If you want to rock like the Screaming Females rock, you have to accept a smaller (though certainly no less devoted) audience than if you want to rock like Nickelback rocks (which is, in my opinion, not at all). Nickelback fits a definition of “rock” that appeals to a whole lot of people, some of whom most assuredly think about music a whole lot less than I do. That’s not a criticism of those people (in an odd way, it’s a complement), it’s just a fact. A lot of Nickelback fans probably want some drums and electric guitar, but they also want a couple sensitive ballads thrown in there for good measure (I, on the other hand, want “Buried in the Nude”) . Some of those folks might even take the commercial success of Nickelback as an endorsement of that band’s talents; “if other people are buying it, it must be good.” And I don’t think the fact that Nickelback sells lots of albums makes them bad; I think the fact that they suck at playing music makes them bad.

Because pop tends to be built around catchier melodies and major chords, it’s easier for someone like Cee Lo Green to become massively popular behind something like “Fuck You” than it is for someone like the Future of the Left to earn an appearance on everyone’s I-Pod with “You Need Satan More than He Needs You.” Snobs like me enjoy Cee Lo because he represents the cream of the pop crop, while I think some people will eat up “Fuck You” because it’s the best song on the radio, which in my opinion is like being the cleanest corn kernel in a chicken turd. So I think how you find music influences how you feel about the most popular stuff. If you don’t wanna work that hard to find music (again, that’s your right), you will choose what’s good and bad from what you hear on the radio – so you’re already choosing from stuff that is kind of popular. I use every resource I can think of to find music and I dismiss a lot of the homogeneous stuff that shows up on the radio because it all sounds the same to me. I’m not saying this stuff because I think I’m better than other music listeners; if anything, I’m admitting to you what an obsessive fucking nerd I am.

There’s a lot more to discuss on this topic, so we’ll call this Part I and continue our discussion tomorrow. Let’s leave it here for now: music that is popular is not automatically shitty. Since it was a Grammy post that started this whole discussion, I want to talk tomorrow about why it is I think the Grammys specifically reward shitty music (it’s to do with how albums and artists get nominated) and hopefully wrap things up by dispelling the myth that only so-called “non-corporate” music is good.

Turn It Up Until the Cops Come

If there is some sort of Presidential or Congressional Medal for Fan Service, Atmosphere should probably plan a trip through Washington, D.C. very soon. The Minnesota rap duo have a habit of filling the time between proper releases with awesome little gifts for the people who allow them to do this for a living. Between 2005′s stellar You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having and 2008′s even more stellar When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint that Shit Gold, Atmosphere dropped – for free – a “party” album called Strictly Leakage which probably ranks right behind When Life Gives You Lemons as one of the two best hip-hop releases of 2008.

Of course, a follow-up to When Life Gives You Lemons will be a most welcome thing whenever it gets here. Until it does, Atmosphere has kindly decided to release 2 EPs on one disc (some of us would call that an album, being 12 tracks and all) and they’ve given the whole package the unwieldy full title of To All My Friends, Blood Makes the Blade Holy: The Atmosphere EPs. We’ll be calling it To All My Friends for short and whether you think it’s an EP or an LP, you can assure yourself of one thing: like the bulk of Atmosphere’s recorded output, To All My Friends is fucking awesome.

Pitchfork’s review of To All My Friends, which was mostly positive, contained a pretty hefty jab at When Life Gives You Lemons for its tendency to use (gasp!) real instruments. The P-forkers accused Slug (MC Sean Daley) and Ant (DJ Anthony Davis) of aspiring to be Gym Class Heroes, an accusation every bit as baseless as Pitchfork’s assertion that Sufjan Stevens is some kind of musical wizard. In fact, Sufjan Stevens is a trust fund kid’s Andrew Bird. Pitchfork isn’t wrong to be nervous about the use of live instruments in hip-hop, though: the usual result is something horrifying known as rap/rock, which seems to be all frat kids can come up with when rapping around a real live rhythm section. Here’s a test: can you name any good rap/rock bands? No? Me either. But Pitchfork is missing two crucial points that set Atmosphere’s use of real instruments in a different class than, say, Linkin Park. First: while there is a certain rock undercurrent to a lot of Atmosphere’s instrumentation, some of it is clearly soul and R&B based, creating funkier rhythms for Slug to flow over. Second, Slug writes better lyrics than your average Gym Class Hero or any of their ilk. I realize that’s not hard, so allow me to clarify: Slug writes better lyrics than the bulk of his hip-hop contemporaries and lyrics matter a lot in hip-hop, maybe more than in any other style of music. Besides, attributing the shittiness of Gym Class Heroes to their use of live instruments is overlooking a whole pile of more terrible features of their music. Like collaborations with Fallout Boy on songs that steal their chorus melodies from Supertramp. But – and I can’t stress this enough – Gym Class Heroes (and Rage Against the Machine, still one of the most overrated bands ever) notwithstanding, live band hip-hop can still be done well. If you saw De La Soul’s set at Coachella last year (or presumably anywhere else), you have a good idea of what I’m talking about.

About the time Sage Francis dropped the Lyrical Master ball and crawled up his own asshole to restyle himself as some sort of hip-hop Johnny Cash (which, you know, when you put it that way, sounds like a fuck-terrible idea), Slug picked that ball up and has been eking out Heisman-worthy yardage with it ever since, occasionally pitching on an option to fellow Rhymesayer Brother Ali. Slug crafts witty, humorous stories of life at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, a position he has had experience occupying. Even when he’s engaging in that tired old tradition of dissing other rappers, he’s legitimately better than they are – “Hope” provides the best example on To All My Friends, and it hinges on a jaunting electric guitar lick. Mostly, though, To All My Friends spends a lot of lyrical time being positive and reminding the listener to do the same. “Free Fallin” and “To All My Friends” end the album (er, EP[s]) with a one-two punch of 1) be grateful for what you have and 2) I’m grateful for what I have. Now, gratitude is nice to hear from rappers (I mentioned this in my review of Brother Ali’s Us, which you should own by now), but it struck me while listening to To All My Friends that it’s really difficult to do the whole positivity thing without sounding like a deluded idiot – Atmosphere pulls it off with style, largely because he seems to be operating in earnest. His optimism is hard-won to be sure, but that’s the best kind of optimism. If I can digress here (only slightly) for a minute, I think the reason a lot of overtly positive music (think Christian rock) sucks is because the positivity tends to exist in a vacuum. I don’t begrudge you your optimism if you haven’t suffered much, but I don’t find it very interesting either. If life has never really hurt you, of course you’re going to be positive. But if that’s the case, your life is probably pretty fucking boring. It’s much more compelling to me to see someone who can keep their head up even though life keeps throwing rocks at their face. I think Atmosphere and fellow Minnesotans the Hold Steady possess a gift for making decent positive music because they’re not just telling you to put on a happy face because Jesus loves you. Their songs acknowledge the negative aspects of life which help us appreciate our good fortune. To All My Friends will never try to kid you into thinking that everything is going to be all right because Atmosphere doesn’t believe that everything can be all right – things can be pretty good for quite a while and, if you calibrate your brain right, you can let the good shit carry you through the bad times.