I don't like contemporary popular music. I don't listen to it or take that much interest in it. I don't know any currently popular artists besides Taylor Swift, I don't know who won what at the most recent Grammy's, and I don't know what the most popular song of the week is without looking it up. I tend to stick to more niche music from independent artists, songs from random creators on YouTube, remixes of well-known and obscure songs, and very often musical scores from video games and movies. Of course, for a class all about Popular Culture, not being up to date on current popular music might be a problem. Fortunately, the information I learned from Sellnow about how to do a rhetorical analysis of music, be it the virtual time/experience, the congruity of the lyrics to the music, or the intensity and release patterns within the music, are applicable to all music, not just popular music. But rather than analyzing an obscure piece of modern music or pulling out a classic 80s rock tune to analyze, I instead want to explain why I don't listen to contemporary pop music: my synesthesia.
Synesthesia is a neurological condition caused by some of my sensory neurons being cross wired. This results in me experiencing multiple sensory events from a single sensory or cognitive stimulus. Synesthesia varies between each synesthete, but in my case, it results in me seeing color when listening to music, as well as numbers and letters having specific colors that I involuntarily associated with them (for example, the letter E and number 4 are both green). What this means for music is that I don’t just hear music, I see music as well. I don’t just hear the virtual time and virtual experience, I also see a rippling kaleidoscope of colors. In terms of rhetorical analysis, this makes listening to music fascinating for me, especially when it comes to congruity. Because of my synesthesia, there’s an extra layer to the congruity or incongruity of a song. Sometimes the colors I see are congruent with the tone of the music or lyrics, other times they’re off color and incongruent with one another.
So, why don’t I like listening to contemporary pop music then? Well, the answer is simple: Magenta. The vast majority of contemporary songs that are popular feature magenta. Not a little magenta, an unhealthy dose of magenta. It’s everywhere. It’s so prevalent that magenta has become the only color that I genuinely hate. And the sad reality is that I know why it’s happening. Modern music suffers from artists becoming lacking in talent and creativity, and filling those gaps with technological advances or by copying what everyone else is doing. I’m not saying this is true for all modern music, and not even all contemporary pop music, but a large majority of contemporary pop music features similar instruments, similar beats and rhythms, similar lyrical subject matter, and a dose of autotune for the vocals and instruments to make it sound perfect. Most modern songs sound the same to me, so it’s only natural that they all look the same. That’s what the magenta represents. It’s lazy artifice designed to fill the holes where creativity should be.
Do you think modern music suffers from sounding the same? Or do you think that modern music is much more varied than what I’ve experienced?
Evan, your whole post was fascinating. I know nothing about synesthesia, so this was an interesting read. I would have never guessed that songs appear magenta and are consistent for almost all popular songs out there. I think modern music sounds the same, at least to a point, but I will say it is not for a lack of creativity but instead being inspired. A few famous artists have mentioned that they like to sample some of their favorite artist's songs in their songs. For example, Olivia Rodrigo sampled one of Taylor's melodies in one of her songs because she loved it so much that it inspired her to write a song based on it alone. While that song initially does start similarly to Taylor's, it is also clear that Olivia made the song her own. Music is ever changing, and while there are songs that sound familiar to one another, every once in a while, a new song will come out and completely change the current sound of music.
ReplyDeleteSynesthesia is very interesting and I do think that it makes sense that the color is the same for the popular and modern music. I think that modern music has tended to sound the same, but I think a lot of this is because it sells. If something is working and people are listening to it at a high rate, then putting out something that is new or unlike the norm would be risky. That is why I think it is less common to stray away from the norm and why a lot of popular music sounds the same. I do think, however, recently since the rise of instagram reels and Tik Tok that people are starting to move away from this. Independent artists are starting to release new and experimental things and new genres and sounds are starting to become more popular, steering away from the same generic sounds and beats. The rise of self advertising on social media has made rejecting the status quo of popular music more widely accepted, and I wouldn't be surprised if this continued so things will begin to sound hopefully less repetitive.
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