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The pop music problem

Posted by DavidLD (A) on March 15, 2007 at 04:35:49

I guess one reason I like vintage gear is that I grew up listening to the pop music from the 50's 60s and 70s. Radio stations had unique personalities back then, and were not homogenized duplicates of each other, and the top 40-tunes were hummable.

But something happened in the pop music world starting in the 1980s. We experienced a steady decline as all sorts of non-musical heavy rock, hip hop, rap etc took over the music scene. my interest in what was going on in modern music deteriorated rapidly. All of this continued to the end of the 20th century.

But then what? American Idol came along. Suddenly the pop music that I loved in the 60s and 70s is back again, and in a big way. HUGE numbers of viewers watched a show Tuesday night where the tunes basically all came from the 60s and the 70s, and they totally loved it.

I suppose the cynics would write off American Idol as just another reality show that captures peoples'attention at the moment.

But oddly enough, I have been thinking much the same as Diana Ross was saying last night. We have kids who grew up on the crappy stuff the music industry (often unsuccessfully) tried to sell in the last two decades of the 20th century. Yet here these same kids are now on TV singing ballads and pop tunes from a decade or two earlier and seemingly having the time of their life.

Suddenly a lot of little kids are saying to themselves "what I really want to be is a pop singer like the singers I see on Americal Idol."
What this show has done for the music industry that only recently has been in an advanced state of decline is nothing short of amazing. It has proven to record executives that it is possible to sell zillions of recordings of music in genres where only recently they thought was almost no market. Can you imagine someone like a Clay Aiken hitting the charts with a top recording had he shown up on the scene before American Idol? No record executive would have had enough confidence (courage) to spend the money to record and market him. Or for that matter a host of others who appeared as winners or as losers on the show over the past 5 years.

Prior to all of this, the kids interested in pop music could mostly only follow the rap stars who were not really producing "music" as such but rather speaking to a beat using a lot of 4-letter words. Suddenly the idealized role model is completely different for these same kids.

What's happened basically is that American Idol has somehow managed to single handedly revitalize the entire music industry not only in the US but world-wide and created a whole new generation of young people interested in becoming serious pop music performers rather than NBA or NFL stars and in idolizing the pop stars that come out of the process. That the show appeals to those in their 60s (Tony Bennett will be on one of the future episodes) as well as those in their 20s says a lot. (Who claims the Lawrence Welk show is dead? Lawrence Welk fans are now watching this with the same interest they had for that show).

I don't really care what happens on American Idol in terms of who gets voted off first or last at this point--it doesn't matter at this stage. What I do know is that out of the dozen or so people you are watching right now, two or three of these individuals are on the verge of breaking out and becoming major stars, just as has happened in each of the last 5 years. Who exactly these individuals will turn out to be at this point does not depend on who stays on the show the longest and who gets voted off and all that hype.

Having said that, I do think two of the women, Lakisha Jones and Melinda Doolittle, are way ahead of all the others this year, and I expect that they will both be there at the very end. My personal favorite is Lakisha, tho I admit Melinda is excellent as well. Lakisha has a one in a million set of pipes, heck it's one in 100 million--what a gift! I would be totally shocked is she weren't a very major star a year or two out, if that. Tune in to see the next Aretha Franklin at the first stage of her career--heck she aready has a better voice than Aretha has!

Bottom line: American Pop music, after a long and steady decline in the last 2 decades of the 20th century, once again has a real future. The vintage guys here should all celebrate that.

David

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