Maybe when it comes to buying singles, but look how many famous old songs were in the movies and Broadway. More likely, fewer people practice singing in choirs, choruses, or alone, and fewer still are trained singers, but we all want to at least hum popular tunes.
Of course, old movies and Broadway weren't sliced up into tiny pieces like modern videos. Even something as old-fashioned as Riverdance changes cameras every other second, making it unwatchable to me.
Agreed. Although I'm a participant of said global IQ decline. I came to this conclusion after staring at Steve's visually interesting melody chart. My only thought was how can I monetize this thing.
Trying to identify the "worst" songs in Rock history seems an odd way to go about things to my mind. I tried in this piece https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak to tease out what made for the "best" of it (includes a fair (but not exhaustive) number of YouTube links.
An excerpt: "For most people all this is a big thing in their lives in their teens and twenties; from then on interest wanes. Those for whom this phase ran its course at anytime in the 60’s to 90’s tend to think of themselves as having been around for the best of it. If the thee billion plus hits on Spotify’s most streamed songs is the measure, you could argue that it is now bigger than ever. But nobody seriously believes that any of them will go down in history as great ones. So what will? What songs will endure when all rock’s ephemera evaporates into the mist of time?....."
Check out the Youtube links (mostly towards the end).
Why is there always shade directed at Muzak? It's melody centric, somewhat homogenous, and quite relaxing. It's postwar America. Limey nerd boy Steve Wilson was especially venomous towards the harmless Muzak in one of his Porcupine Pie albums. Which album? I couldn't say they all sound the same. And that was nerd boy's complaint about Muzak.
The quintessential Muzak song is also one of the greatest songs of all time. The Girl From Ipanema. And its a fascinating case of "one speaker, two songs" (to paraphrase Scott Adams). If someone is outside that tradition is is a tacky, saccharine garbage. If someone knows their music it is heaven. Weird.
Brazil has a colossal tradition of popular music, but Americans, for whatever reason, seem largely immune to its charms, without at all disliking it. Ask an American if he likes Brazilian pop music and if he's like me:
"Oh, yeah, The Girl from Ipanema! Great song."
"Do you know any other Brazilian songs?"
"No."
"Do you want to hear any other Brazilian songs?"
"No."
"So, The Girl from Ipanema wholly satisfies your interest in Brazilian music?"
I had a CD, Beleza Tropical Vol.1 or 2 I can’t recall - I particularly liked Gilberto Gil - that I played a *lot* but I no longer have a CD player. So it’s more a memory of liking Gilberto Gil. Very easy to like. I wish they’d play him in stores …
The only other Brazilian song I've heard of is the one that Rod Stewart plagiarized for "Do You Think I'm Sexy?"
When I got off the jet at the Rio de Janeiro airport in 1978, the loudspeaker was playing "The Loco-Motion" by Grand Funk Railroad, Homer Simpson's favorite band. A little too much American cultural imperialism, even for my tastes.
I wouldn't call that Muzak. In my own essay title I was just using it as an approximation for patently forgettable trash (and to be honest because I needed a word with the right number of syllables to complete my ironic borrow from the Lennon song title). The word never gets used in the essay itself. And in it I identified Ronette s/Spector's 'Be My Baby' as an example of one of my all time greats. Depending on definitions, I'm guessing some people would call that Muzak although I would call it a great Rock song.
I'm an "old" Gen X'er... and when I look back I can't believe how many songs in the early 70's were about death. I can rattle off ten quickly. So many hits about people dying, even animals dying. I guess it was the leftovers of Vietnam influencing things? Either way, it lended a moroseness to growing up, without realizing it at the time.
Interesting. The 60's is when momentum began building for mandatory seat belt laws. I don't think it was a coincidence. Nowadays, we are so splintered and segregated that could never happen.
There may also be another reason; you can't generally be accused of ripping off a simple melody. Or if you do, it's common enough the charge won't stick
I remember reading a prediction that the biggest reason record companies will exist in the future will be IP. "That’s a great song! Too bad the second verse was written by Stevie Wonder in 1973. And the music was done by Kraftwerk a couple years later." Basically save artists from themselves accidentally getting sued.
Yet another good reason for copyright reform. To a fixed term, like it was when originally instituted. Which I know is about as likely as myself dating Taylor Swift, but it still doesn't mean it isn't something we should give up on.
Not that it wasn't too long already, and Disney might well've found some other collaborationist, but Sonny Bono really should've picked an earlier time to die in a skiing accident.
> Dave Barry ... called “Seasons in the Sun” “A song about a guy who is dying, but not nearly fast enough.”
A clever line in the Dave Barry style. Barry was once popular enough to have written multiple best-selling books and have a CBS sitcom based on his life, but he sort of petered out rather than retired per se. Also, he doesn't seem the type, but the current Mrs. Barry is the third woman who hold that distinction.
When Barry polled his readers as to the worst hit song ever recorded, they came up with the original version of MacArthur Park performed by Richard Harris. As an aside, its writer, Jimmy Webb, is still alive at 77.
For what it's worth, Iggy Pop is on record having said that the worst hit song ever written was Marrakesh Express by Graham Nash who was then in the Hollies. The Hollies refused to record the song so Nash quit the band in protest and his new band recorded it, which ended up being a minor hit for CS&N.
A kindred spirit ::) Awful song; husband loves it for some awful reason.
Your song explanation makes total sense. In college, one of my professors told me what a good writer I was. Suddenly, I took it very seriously and myself... and my writing became overthought and long. It became downright lame. Just like your Hey Jude scenario :)
The best version of Hey Jude is the Wilson Pickett cover. The Muscle Shoals Swampers supply a groove the Beatles could never quite get, the horns are great, the Wicked Pickett slays the phrasing on the vocal, and the gone-way-too-soon Duane Allman unleashes a killer guitar solo to wrap it up. What’s not to love?
That Wilson Pickett album also features a cover of Born To Be Wild. The irony of the album is that not only is it called Hey, Jude, but that the Beatles never thought to put Hey, Jude on an album themselves. It was released as a 45 with Revolution on the back coincidentally enough on the first day of the 1968 DNC. The Beatles' catalog was standardized when their albums were put on CD, and Hey, Jude and Revolution were put on the Past Masters Volume 2 CD. For those who don't realize, when the Beatles albums were first sent to the US, the track listings were not the same as their British counterparts.
As an aside, my favorite black cover of a Beatles song is We Can Work It Out by Stevie Wonder.
As a boomer with a "tin ear" I have been listening to the best and the worst popular music for over half a century. But even the music I liked back in the day is a bit boring to me today. The only music I listen to today is classic jazz on the Sirius receiver in my truck. It isn't just the music these days that disappoints. The artists seem to be more interested in their entourages than producing anything worth listening to. I find it only slightly encouraging that the music IS worse, not just me growing old.
There's still good, complex new music that's being made. Black Midi is an excellent band of young rockers, and Kamasi Washington is making jazz every bit as good as the mid-20th-Century greats. Though neither act is close to as big or as relevant as King Crimson or John Coltrane were in their days.
Personally, I blame hip-hop. Not that there aren't excellent hip-hop musicians, or that I haven't loved plenty of hip-hop, including plenty of dumb stuff I'm sure my forefathers would've all hated. The talentpool's tremendous, and higher now than ever. But it's really easy for criminals to launder dirty money through making hip-hop music, and they seldom have the sophistication or tastefulness of an Andre 3K or a Lin-Manuel or a Kendrick Lamar. Not that there haven't always been popular, undersophisticated musicians, as country and folk and blues were certainly all full of such, but hip-hop allowed a lower bar for musicality than any prior type of music, at least before the advent of AI. Puff Daddy and Birdman Williams would never have been on hit singles prior to the advent of hip-hop, and while they're particularly egregious in their bad taste, lack of talent, and rampant criminality, they're far from anomalies.
It's always been a way to launder money. It does have plenty of genuine popularity as well, but so do lots of things that are used to launder money, like porn and gambling. It's just seldom explored because those who care most about such things don't want to see it brought down via increased scrutiny, and those whom want to see them brought down seldom want to learn much about said fields.
Porn is even more obvious with this than hip-hop, as almost nobody pays for it, and the "advertisements" are all for other porn sites. Money has to be coming from somewhere at some point. From where, what, and who is anyone's guess, but few wanna take a look. Least of all those whom work in the industry, as it's a sure way to get blacklisted.
You're no older than you feel. I remember the 50s and 60s and thought the music was great. My mother, who had a beautiful voice, would sing the songs of the 20s, 30s and 40s and so I know them as well. I don't really think it has as much to do with pitch as it does with the deliberate dumbing down of American education. It's across the board, not just math, science, reading, writing, it's music and even social engagement. No one can hold a decent conversation today. Their phones take up all their time and interests.
In the 1880s, John Dewey (not the one of the decimal system) brought forth his liberal education. John Rockefeller was so enthralled with it that he sent all four of his sons through this education. All of them were functionally illiterate and dyslexic. In the 1930s, teacher's unions were the goals, and the Marxists were already subtly in the field. Former Congressman Shafer and John Howland Snow exposed the Marxists in their 1953 book, THE TURNING OF THE TIDES.
Just about everything we've lost in this once great country goes back to education and the lack thereof. Think of our founders and what they had already learned by their 20s. No one today can compare.
Could this relate to live music being a paying gig early in the century to being a hobby now? Being in the house band of a night club was not a huge job category but it once existed. Now a paying audience for live music is an event rather than a standing offering at many small venues.
By which I mean, having a very very high standard of musicianship was once more widely incentivized across classes and there was a community for it that was professional rather than amateur. Higher standards plus more participants making for more opportunities for innovation.
Julie Andrews said an amateur practices until he gets it right, a professional practices until it can't go wrong. Recording has made pop musicians amateurs, but a live performer has more at risk.
Playing 8 hours per night in Hamburg famously did the Beatles a lot of good.
My late father-in-law, a classical tubist, played in a swing music big band touring the Great Plains when he was 16 in 1945.
The swing era (1935-1945) saw an enormous demand for professional musicians. My father-in-law's benign conspiracy theory was that high school marching band programs became a big deal after the war as a surreptitious jobs program for the big band musicians who came back from the war, and suddenly in 1946, big band swing was out of fashion. So, American high schools have been teaching kids to play Benny Goodman-style instruments ever since.
When my father was at Annapolis just after WW2, his company officer had been a musician in a Navy band, which I thought was an odd choice for the Academy. Perhaps it was a cover story, and he'd really been a spy. More likely, they had so many ships and so many men returning to civilian life, they needed all experienced combat officers at sea. Dad's first 8 years were sea tours.
The great Navy cryptographer who broke the Japanese code at the Battle of Midway got himself assigned the band from a battleship sunk at Pearl Harbor. Guys who could read music proved useful at doing the grunt work in codebreaking.
I put my swimming earplugs in my ears for my weight workout before swimming for the reasons stated in this fine piece. Inexpensive and effective, unlike so many other things.
And I remain a Bach/Handel/Beethoven/Gregorian Chant man. Cheers.
The pitch is the frequency of a sound. "Simplification of pitch" is nonsense. Melodic simplification would probably be a better term.
Even better would be to analyze the predictability of the chord progressions. Harmony is where compositional brilliance really shines, often with a deceptively simple lead melody.
The primary reason for the decline in melodic complexity is because of declining vocal technique. A lot of "singers" today don't even have a full octave, let alone two. Sex appeal is what matters, and as such, musical talent or training isn't really a prerequisite for entry into the industry.
But to your point about long term influence of the jazz era, 60's and 70's musicians had the benefit of actual musicians creating all of their studio tracks. Most of those older rock bands didn't actually make their own recordings. They were little more than male models on album covers.
Probably worth a Sailer investigation. The Black Diva was one of the most successful musical archetypes for over half a century. In the age of DEI, where did they go? You could subtitle it "From Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish"
Just curious, how does metal (especially more extreme bands like Black Dahlia Murder) compare to older music styles like jazz? I've heard conflicting opinions about it and admittedly for the sake of my ego I would like to think it is a complex form of music since it is probably like 40% of what I listen to, but ultimately I just like how it sounds and the thematic content, and as much as I've given jazz a try it sounds nice but boring to me.
I'm not familiar with that band, but I do know that metal tends to follow the same harmonic rules as classical Western music. There's usually a driving bassline that defines the chords under a strong melody. Within those structures it can get extremely complex, from virtuosic guitar solos to operatic album narratives.
Jazz is...different. It's its own thing and often favors very unusual time signatures and self-consciously innovative chord progressions. It can sometimes pursue cleverness and complexity for its own sake a bit too much for my taste, but it's a big world and I don't know much about it!
Maybe when it comes to buying singles, but look how many famous old songs were in the movies and Broadway. More likely, fewer people practice singing in choirs, choruses, or alone, and fewer still are trained singers, but we all want to at least hum popular tunes.
Of course, old movies and Broadway weren't sliced up into tiny pieces like modern videos. Even something as old-fashioned as Riverdance changes cameras every other second, making it unwatchable to me.
The simplification of music is perhaps another good indication of the global IQ decline.
Third Worldization is a process that is not solely about IQ decline. There is a cultural-feedback process going on.
Agreed. Although I'm a participant of said global IQ decline. I came to this conclusion after staring at Steve's visually interesting melody chart. My only thought was how can I monetize this thing.
Trying to identify the "worst" songs in Rock history seems an odd way to go about things to my mind. I tried in this piece https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak to tease out what made for the "best" of it (includes a fair (but not exhaustive) number of YouTube links.
An excerpt: "For most people all this is a big thing in their lives in their teens and twenties; from then on interest wanes. Those for whom this phase ran its course at anytime in the 60’s to 90’s tend to think of themselves as having been around for the best of it. If the thee billion plus hits on Spotify’s most streamed songs is the measure, you could argue that it is now bigger than ever. But nobody seriously believes that any of them will go down in history as great ones. So what will? What songs will endure when all rock’s ephemera evaporates into the mist of time?....."
Check out the Youtube links (mostly towards the end).
Why is there always shade directed at Muzak? It's melody centric, somewhat homogenous, and quite relaxing. It's postwar America. Limey nerd boy Steve Wilson was especially venomous towards the harmless Muzak in one of his Porcupine Pie albums. Which album? I couldn't say they all sound the same. And that was nerd boy's complaint about Muzak.
The quintessential Muzak song is also one of the greatest songs of all time. The Girl From Ipanema. And its a fascinating case of "one speaker, two songs" (to paraphrase Scott Adams). If someone is outside that tradition is is a tacky, saccharine garbage. If someone knows their music it is heaven. Weird.
Brazil has a colossal tradition of popular music, but Americans, for whatever reason, seem largely immune to its charms, without at all disliking it. Ask an American if he likes Brazilian pop music and if he's like me:
"Oh, yeah, The Girl from Ipanema! Great song."
"Do you know any other Brazilian songs?"
"No."
"Do you want to hear any other Brazilian songs?"
"No."
"So, The Girl from Ipanema wholly satisfies your interest in Brazilian music?"
"Yes. Great song!"
I had a CD, Beleza Tropical Vol.1 or 2 I can’t recall - I particularly liked Gilberto Gil - that I played a *lot* but I no longer have a CD player. So it’s more a memory of liking Gilberto Gil. Very easy to like. I wish they’d play him in stores …
The only other Brazilian song I've heard of is the one that Rod Stewart plagiarized for "Do You Think I'm Sexy?"
When I got off the jet at the Rio de Janeiro airport in 1978, the loudspeaker was playing "The Loco-Motion" by Grand Funk Railroad, Homer Simpson's favorite band. A little too much American cultural imperialism, even for my tastes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxyU4W8iyeI
I'm sure you've heard of Mas que Nada by Brasil '66
I wouldn't call that Muzak. In my own essay title I was just using it as an approximation for patently forgettable trash (and to be honest because I needed a word with the right number of syllables to complete my ironic borrow from the Lennon song title). The word never gets used in the essay itself. And in it I identified Ronette s/Spector's 'Be My Baby' as an example of one of my all time greats. Depending on definitions, I'm guessing some people would call that Muzak although I would call it a great Rock song.
I'm an "old" Gen X'er... and when I look back I can't believe how many songs in the early 70's were about death. I can rattle off ten quickly. So many hits about people dying, even animals dying. I guess it was the leftovers of Vietnam influencing things? Either way, it lended a moroseness to growing up, without realizing it at the time.
In the early 1960s, they had lots of car crash songs, like "Last Kiss," which was revived by Pearl Jam in the 1990s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvjTo-hRD5c
Interesting. The 60's is when momentum began building for mandatory seat belt laws. I don't think it was a coincidence. Nowadays, we are so splintered and segregated that could never happen.
There may also be another reason; you can't generally be accused of ripping off a simple melody. Or if you do, it's common enough the charge won't stick
I remember reading a prediction that the biggest reason record companies will exist in the future will be IP. "That’s a great song! Too bad the second verse was written by Stevie Wonder in 1973. And the music was done by Kraftwerk a couple years later." Basically save artists from themselves accidentally getting sued.
Yet another good reason for copyright reform. To a fixed term, like it was when originally instituted. Which I know is about as likely as myself dating Taylor Swift, but it still doesn't mean it isn't something we should give up on.
Not that it wasn't too long already, and Disney might well've found some other collaborationist, but Sonny Bono really should've picked an earlier time to die in a skiing accident.
> Dave Barry ... called “Seasons in the Sun” “A song about a guy who is dying, but not nearly fast enough.”
A clever line in the Dave Barry style. Barry was once popular enough to have written multiple best-selling books and have a CBS sitcom based on his life, but he sort of petered out rather than retired per se. Also, he doesn't seem the type, but the current Mrs. Barry is the third woman who hold that distinction.
When Barry polled his readers as to the worst hit song ever recorded, they came up with the original version of MacArthur Park performed by Richard Harris. As an aside, its writer, Jimmy Webb, is still alive at 77.
For what it's worth, Iggy Pop is on record having said that the worst hit song ever written was Marrakesh Express by Graham Nash who was then in the Hollies. The Hollies refused to record the song so Nash quit the band in protest and his new band recorded it, which ended up being a minor hit for CS&N.
A kindred spirit ::) Awful song; husband loves it for some awful reason.
Your song explanation makes total sense. In college, one of my professors told me what a good writer I was. Suddenly, I took it very seriously and myself... and my writing became overthought and long. It became downright lame. Just like your Hey Jude scenario :)
The best version of Hey Jude is the Wilson Pickett cover. The Muscle Shoals Swampers supply a groove the Beatles could never quite get, the horns are great, the Wicked Pickett slays the phrasing on the vocal, and the gone-way-too-soon Duane Allman unleashes a killer guitar solo to wrap it up. What’s not to love?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y8Q2PATVyI
That Wilson Pickett album also features a cover of Born To Be Wild. The irony of the album is that not only is it called Hey, Jude, but that the Beatles never thought to put Hey, Jude on an album themselves. It was released as a 45 with Revolution on the back coincidentally enough on the first day of the 1968 DNC. The Beatles' catalog was standardized when their albums were put on CD, and Hey, Jude and Revolution were put on the Past Masters Volume 2 CD. For those who don't realize, when the Beatles albums were first sent to the US, the track listings were not the same as their British counterparts.
As an aside, my favorite black cover of a Beatles song is We Can Work It Out by Stevie Wonder.
MacArthur Park....fantastic song. One of my all time greats
As a boomer with a "tin ear" I have been listening to the best and the worst popular music for over half a century. But even the music I liked back in the day is a bit boring to me today. The only music I listen to today is classic jazz on the Sirius receiver in my truck. It isn't just the music these days that disappoints. The artists seem to be more interested in their entourages than producing anything worth listening to. I find it only slightly encouraging that the music IS worse, not just me growing old.
There's still good, complex new music that's being made. Black Midi is an excellent band of young rockers, and Kamasi Washington is making jazz every bit as good as the mid-20th-Century greats. Though neither act is close to as big or as relevant as King Crimson or John Coltrane were in their days.
Personally, I blame hip-hop. Not that there aren't excellent hip-hop musicians, or that I haven't loved plenty of hip-hop, including plenty of dumb stuff I'm sure my forefathers would've all hated. The talentpool's tremendous, and higher now than ever. But it's really easy for criminals to launder dirty money through making hip-hop music, and they seldom have the sophistication or tastefulness of an Andre 3K or a Lin-Manuel or a Kendrick Lamar. Not that there haven't always been popular, undersophisticated musicians, as country and folk and blues were certainly all full of such, but hip-hop allowed a lower bar for musicality than any prior type of music, at least before the advent of AI. Puff Daddy and Birdman Williams would never have been on hit singles prior to the advent of hip-hop, and while they're particularly egregious in their bad taste, lack of talent, and rampant criminality, they're far from anomalies.
I had never thought of hip hop being a way to launder money but it makes sense.
It's always been a way to launder money. It does have plenty of genuine popularity as well, but so do lots of things that are used to launder money, like porn and gambling. It's just seldom explored because those who care most about such things don't want to see it brought down via increased scrutiny, and those whom want to see them brought down seldom want to learn much about said fields.
Porn is even more obvious with this than hip-hop, as almost nobody pays for it, and the "advertisements" are all for other porn sites. Money has to be coming from somewhere at some point. From where, what, and who is anyone's guess, but few wanna take a look. Least of all those whom work in the industry, as it's a sure way to get blacklisted.
Brilliant.
So what does 20th C art, HipHop, Porn & the Ukraine war have in common?
Money laundering. TY. Ive said these things before to deaf ears.
Boomer
You're no older than you feel. I remember the 50s and 60s and thought the music was great. My mother, who had a beautiful voice, would sing the songs of the 20s, 30s and 40s and so I know them as well. I don't really think it has as much to do with pitch as it does with the deliberate dumbing down of American education. It's across the board, not just math, science, reading, writing, it's music and even social engagement. No one can hold a decent conversation today. Their phones take up all their time and interests.
In the 1880s, John Dewey (not the one of the decimal system) brought forth his liberal education. John Rockefeller was so enthralled with it that he sent all four of his sons through this education. All of them were functionally illiterate and dyslexic. In the 1930s, teacher's unions were the goals, and the Marxists were already subtly in the field. Former Congressman Shafer and John Howland Snow exposed the Marxists in their 1953 book, THE TURNING OF THE TIDES.
Just about everything we've lost in this once great country goes back to education and the lack thereof. Think of our founders and what they had already learned by their 20s. No one today can compare.
Positivity 😁https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1k8craCGpgs
Could this relate to live music being a paying gig early in the century to being a hobby now? Being in the house band of a night club was not a huge job category but it once existed. Now a paying audience for live music is an event rather than a standing offering at many small venues.
By which I mean, having a very very high standard of musicianship was once more widely incentivized across classes and there was a community for it that was professional rather than amateur. Higher standards plus more participants making for more opportunities for innovation.
I agree, and would add that singing in church choirs and playing music socially was far more common as well.
Small organs, and later pianos, used to be typical furnishings in a middle-class household. Every mall had a piano and music store.
Julie Andrews said an amateur practices until he gets it right, a professional practices until it can't go wrong. Recording has made pop musicians amateurs, but a live performer has more at risk.
A wonderful saying!
My father in law was a professional tuba player.
I love Simenon novels and Maigret is always interviewing nightclub musicians in 1950s Montmartre when he is on a case.
this is why some pop funk of the 70s was so good, many of the musicians were latin session masters who also played on the road all the time
Playing 8 hours per night in Hamburg famously did the Beatles a lot of good.
My late father-in-law, a classical tubist, played in a swing music big band touring the Great Plains when he was 16 in 1945.
The swing era (1935-1945) saw an enormous demand for professional musicians. My father-in-law's benign conspiracy theory was that high school marching band programs became a big deal after the war as a surreptitious jobs program for the big band musicians who came back from the war, and suddenly in 1946, big band swing was out of fashion. So, American high schools have been teaching kids to play Benny Goodman-style instruments ever since.
When my father was at Annapolis just after WW2, his company officer had been a musician in a Navy band, which I thought was an odd choice for the Academy. Perhaps it was a cover story, and he'd really been a spy. More likely, they had so many ships and so many men returning to civilian life, they needed all experienced combat officers at sea. Dad's first 8 years were sea tours.
The great Navy cryptographer who broke the Japanese code at the Battle of Midway got himself assigned the band from a battleship sunk at Pearl Harbor. Guys who could read music proved useful at doing the grunt work in codebreaking.
I put my swimming earplugs in my ears for my weight workout before swimming for the reasons stated in this fine piece. Inexpensive and effective, unlike so many other things.
And I remain a Bach/Handel/Beethoven/Gregorian Chant man. Cheers.
Years ago, I asked the staff at Gold's for something less Satanic, and they complied.
Good for Gold’s a quality operation.
The pitch is the frequency of a sound. "Simplification of pitch" is nonsense. Melodic simplification would probably be a better term.
Even better would be to analyze the predictability of the chord progressions. Harmony is where compositional brilliance really shines, often with a deceptively simple lead melody.
The primary reason for the decline in melodic complexity is because of declining vocal technique. A lot of "singers" today don't even have a full octave, let alone two. Sex appeal is what matters, and as such, musical talent or training isn't really a prerequisite for entry into the industry.
But to your point about long term influence of the jazz era, 60's and 70's musicians had the benefit of actual musicians creating all of their studio tracks. Most of those older rock bands didn't actually make their own recordings. They were little more than male models on album covers.
1990s gal singers like Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Celine Dion used to be spectacular vocal athletes.
Probably worth a Sailer investigation. The Black Diva was one of the most successful musical archetypes for over half a century. In the age of DEI, where did they go? You could subtitle it "From Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish"
On another site I visit (lots of science types) there’s a consensus that popular music started to decline in the ‘70s.
Interesting to see this analysis.
Just curious, how does metal (especially more extreme bands like Black Dahlia Murder) compare to older music styles like jazz? I've heard conflicting opinions about it and admittedly for the sake of my ego I would like to think it is a complex form of music since it is probably like 40% of what I listen to, but ultimately I just like how it sounds and the thematic content, and as much as I've given jazz a try it sounds nice but boring to me.
I'm not familiar with that band, but I do know that metal tends to follow the same harmonic rules as classical Western music. There's usually a driving bassline that defines the chords under a strong melody. Within those structures it can get extremely complex, from virtuosic guitar solos to operatic album narratives.
Jazz is...different. It's its own thing and often favors very unusual time signatures and self-consciously innovative chord progressions. It can sometimes pursue cleverness and complexity for its own sake a bit too much for my taste, but it's a big world and I don't know much about it!
My daughter has a.lot of metal head friends. I find that most of them really like Shostakovitch.