Complaints about the banality of popular culture are nothing dramatically new.
Working against the uniformity of early 20th century American culture, social critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote the provocative essay "On Popular Music." In it, he rails against popular music's numbing and monotonous tendency - identifying with prophetic precision the lack of originality and mental vitalization it offers its listeners. Bear in mind that Adorno was writing in the early 1940s.
As an avid popular music fan, I don't claim to be above Adorno's diagnosis of popular music, but I also must admit to harboring its influence when digesting my fair share of today's music. It is rather difficult not to be disheartened by the inane state of popular music - its frequently trite, tired and uninspired quality - but at the same time, it is equally hard to find another outlet of mass culture untouched by the same affliction. The majority of the books, films, television and magazines that we, as a culture, consume on a daily basis are relentlessly glib - offering an outlet of vapid leisure instead of more complex, well thought out, and completely possible, alternatives.
If we are to take the music industry as an example, we must understand that although it professes the partially true and cursory duty of promoting the most talented artists, its chief duty is profit production. As most are acutely aware, the two can be difficult to combine.
With its primary responsibility as a business, the music industry is rarely concerned with the avant-garde, the truly experimental and, often times most progressive and interesting artists. Why is that? What is it about the mediocre that is so popular? For the most part, we are not an undereducated culture, yet we persistently glamorize, overstate and invest in bland and thoughtless forms of media. But the avant-garde is difficult, abstruse. In other words, it is often seen as a foreign object - an unknown collection of noise. Popular music, on the other hand, functions precisely in the opposite fashion by remaining familiar, safe and innocuous.
The music industry, in maneuvering the direction of popular music, understands that it must never veer too far away from familiar themes, melodies, chorus structures and song lengths if it is to remain appealing and readily accessible to the public. Try to remember the last time you were challenged or shocked, aesthetically, by the music of the Goo Goo Dolls or any other modern rock band consistently played on the radio.
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If the music resists all or any of these time-tested conventions, it runs the risk of being rejected by masses of listeners and is ultimately labeled as mere noise, an impenetrable cacophony.
This isn't to say that all pop music is boring and evil. There are, of course, degrees of talent working within the music industry to expand and renovate the face of popular music. Musicians such as Tom Waits, the Red House Painters, Mogwai and, more recently, Radiohead, are emblematic of caches of unknown artists that eschew many of pop music's formal habits. Unfortunately, these artists - in redefining the elements of pop music - must work against the strong and rigid tide of pop orthodoxy and fan expectation.
In the end, just think about the true variety of songs on a Britney Spears album or the novelty of a Backstreet Boys ballad. Now think of their respective popularity.
