Lately I've heard increasing talk of a crazy doomsday theory: that the cavernous stockyard of pop music is drying up. Several music blogs, as well as a slightly more notable discussion on NPR's All Things Considered,"" have presented a very interesting question about whether there exists a limit to how many different melodies and structure schemes can theoretically exist or be conjured up by songwriters. Some folks think that we are rapidly approaching a point of no return, in which every possible melody and respective chord progression will have been used up and spit out by the big old hit factory.
This seems most often presented as a handy and feasible way to understand why it's difficult for modern artists to not wear some sort of blatant influence(s) on their sleeve - in other words, the reason why true innovation is getting near-impossible. At first glance this seems logical enough. It strikes me as a bit of a stretch to think about this matter in a finite sense though, since outright mimicry, homage and forefather reverence have been built into the pop music idiom since day one, with each individual musician's method being the determining factor between those three rather dubious possibilities.
Most rock, at its core, is based around formula, repetition and simplicity - you know, ""it's only rock 'n' roll, but we like it"" - and the massive genre itself was, after all, the bastard child of country and blues. Plenty of pop melodies and structures are only minutely different from one another, but, used in different contexts, can be worlds apart. Honestly, if the melting pot of ideas is supposedly drying up now, then surely it must have dried up sometime in the late sixties, and we've just been huffing the residual fumes ever since.
What struck me as I realized that Bob Dylan's ""Knockin' on Heaven's Door"" and Neil Young's ""Helpless"" are completely identical songs in everything but lyrics, is that rock music is a communal art. A rock song's success is not dependent on newness so much as freshness of interpretation, and whether it can ultimately stand alone in its own right - which each of those do.
On the other end of the spectrum are the hackneyed acts go so far as to repeatedly plagiarize themselves. Both Linkin Park and Nickleback - two of the few rock acts who still sell lots of records - rely on an absolute formula for their success. Some guy actually made an MP3 lining up two unchanged Nickleback hits with each other and found that not only do they fit perfectly with each other, but the ebb and flow of the quiet verse/loud chorus shtick comes at exactly the same time. The same thing has been done with two Linkin Park songs. In response, Nickleback croaker Chad Kroeger was quoted as saying: ""When you have a distinct style, you run the risk of sounding similar,"" which really just goes to show how delusional some people really are.
In the end, I'll admit those NPR guys are probably on to something; it appears as if there's less fodder for musical ground-breaking now, and true originality is harder to come by than ever. But allow me to be overly optimistic and say this has often been an issue. In the mid '70s, amidst bloated up prog rock, before punk hit, people thought pop music had run its course. Likewise in the early '90s before grunge rock and then around the turn of the millennium before the Strokes and the other ""the"" bands exploded. It's easy to imagine finality without the foresight of the future. Let's hope, yet again, that we're on the outside looking in, and that another revolution is just around the corner.
Think the possible supply of music is truly running out? Have an unbridled hatred for Chad Kroeger? Send comments to bpeterson1@wisc.edu.
