Rant Corner: Pop music

New month, new rant corner.  Gotta vent my anger some way right?  This time around, it's pop music.  You might like pop music, you might hate it.  Personally, I find it bland, boring, and quite frankly kinda sad.  For as much money and effort is put into pop music, it's so...generic and so...homogeneous.  What I find even worse or perhaps disturbing is that artists that create really unique and textural complete songs seem to lose that edge when they become famous in the US.  It's like the status of being a pop music star makes artists completely pedestrian and unable to experiment musically.  Although unable to experiment might not be completely accurate.  More accurately I would say that being in the pop music limelight makes people so reticent to experimentation and failure that they churn out shitty music that all sounds the same.

But let's not just take my word for it.  Let's dive into some examples.  At the point of this post, Katy Perry is a famous singer who sings pretty shitty formulaic party pop music.  From "Hot n Cold" to "California Gurls", you get overly simple and repetitive messes of music.  While it's true they're dance worthy, so's this song by UK band Belleruche.  Almost annoyingly so though, her first few songs, namely "I Kissed a Girl" and "Ur so Gay", look them up if you don't know them, which made her famous are full of little tidbits of interesting things.  There's textural contrast and an almost out of place electronic sound in the latter.

But let's even get away from simply shitty overly simple pop music.  I think the real root to my anger towards pop music is the idolatry surrounding vocalists.  For whatever reason, no matter how famous of a guitarist or cellist or drummer you are, you are never going to be more famous than an arguably shitty singer.  However, this didn't used to be the case.  In days past we had the Jimi Hendrixes, the Pablo Casals and Jacqueline Du Pres, the Louis Armstrongs, and Scott Joplins of the world.  Nowadays, ask anyone for a famous musician that's active.  I can almost guarantee you that they'll pick a singer or a group focused on a singer like the way Maroon 5 is focused around Adam Levine.  Yea, sure you might get the odd answer from an electronic music buff who'll say Deadmau5 or Avicii or Pretty Lights, but for the greater populace, the only musicians are singers.  Where and when did we stop caring for the instrumentals that truly make music special?

I understand that the human voice is special to us.  After all, with a little practice anyone and everyone can sing.  The barrier to entry is so very low in comparison to playing an instrument.  What is it though that makes us revere and look up to singers the way we do?  I find myself enthralled in music more often when the background to a song is more engaging.  Pop music just sounds so stale and almost robotic in its cleanliness and distinction between vocals and background.  In the end, a human voice is just another vessel, another canvas with which we can paint music with.  This ridiculous fixation and obsession with individual singers needs to end.  When it does I think that pop music can make a step forward and stop being the shallow mess of overly used tropes where it currently festers like a pus filled boil popping disgusting slop over our ears.  Sorry if you like pop music, there are hidden gems but honestly they're almost not worth it.

--CsMiREK

Rant Corner - Online Game Launches

So, I'm imagining you might think this post should've been something music related or coding related.  If so, maybe you have the wrong impression of why I started this site.  This site is almost purely the actualization of random thoughts that come to me.  Now while most of these are indeed about music or coding, not everything is.  For example, I am a relatively avid gamer.  If you give me a bunch of time to do nothing you can pretty well bet I'm gonna spend a good chunk of it playing games.

Now onto this post in particular.  I'm not aware if you know but EA has released with Maxis a new SimCity game.  Now while I have many things against EA, for example this, I said to myself, "I like SimCity more than I hate EA".  Well...EA if you look at the article beat out AT&T, Comcast, and Bank of America to be the worst company in America last year.  With the release of SimCity, we might be looking at a repeat winner for worst company in America.

Rant Corner - Time to Start Coding

I'm not sure whether this is particularly unique to me or whether it's a common occurrence with everyone, but I'm a huge fan of starting projects.  Now this doesn't mean that I get a lot done.  On the contrary, most of the people you talk to about me would say that I am quite lazy.  However, I enjoy starting things without any regard as to necessarily finishing them.

To that end I am starting up yet another feature called "Rant Corner".  This one's mainly just for me to voice my various opinions on any number of things.  So, the intro isn't completely useless.  I'm not so scatterbrained to begin writing and suddenly change my thoughts...  Anyways, this episode of "Rant Corner" is about coding, a topic close to my heart.

It is my opinion that computer programming, coding, hacking, or whatever you want to call it is not that hard.  People make coding out to be difficult and cumbersome.  However, I think that that's a misconception.  While it isn't necessarily easy, coding, like anything worth doing, is about the work you put into it.  Of course there are people better than you, but that goes for everything else as well.  My thought is that through whatever experience, people get this notion that coding is hard and that there's no way that they can get better or understand it.  This obviously doesn't apply solely to coding, but it is definitely a factor in how people react to coding.  Of course I'm biased but I really do think that anyone can learn how to code and others do too.