Friday, July 29, 2011

Quality and Not

It's puzzling how some artists manage to become well-known, famous, even ubiquitous, that are not very talented or creative. I suppose industrialization is part of the explanation. In a music scene where more and more, music is produced like corn flakes in a factory, actual, you know, creativity is optional if not actually a problem. "Don't bother me, I'm trying to program the drum machine"!

I watched all of 1:25 of this and here's a list of the cliches:
  • synthesized string orchestra intro
  • advertising for BMW, jewelry (Swartowski?), clothes
  • elegant club
  • standard rap followed by
  • standard diva for contrast with synth-processed voice
  • sexy clothes with pelvic thrust and booty shake
Isn't EVERYONE tired of this by now? Apparently not. Not one element, musical or visual, that is going to be memorable for its originality.

Hey, that sounds like an actual drummer! This is a lot less industrialized. Unfortunately, the song isn't that great and desperately needs an actual tune.

Extremely industrialized, but without the expensive gloss of the J-Lo song. Excessive use of the auto-tuner on the voice, really bad drum machine, no tune--ah heck, you know, all the usual problems with industrialized music.

This one might almost be interesting. Not as many cliches. But not quite interesting enough to actually, you know, sort out.

This has been catty micro-reviews part three. Working my way through YouTube randomly by typing in a letter of the alphabet and looking at the first music video that comes up. For some odd reason that was 'm'. Now let's see if we can find some quality.

It was either this or Tupac. You can do interesting stuff in this genre. Musical genres, except for grindcore, are not inherently impoverished--it's just that few actually do interesting things with them. Creativity is rare, mindless repetition is common.

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