chesya

Nearly all music that is produced now in the West and is widely listened to it has some basis in the blues. I have liked a lot of it.

I recently played a friend who plays in a rock band a Shostakovich prelude and he put his hands to his ears, crying, "too many chord changes!" what to me was quite a diatonic little ditty was too much for him. Has he OD'ed on the mono-sodium glutamate of the twelve bar stuff?

OccultHawk

I get what you're saying. The blues have laid the foundation for lots of great music but it has also grown into volumes and volumes of horribly formulaic dull drivel

About the thing with Shostakovich. It's not even worth bothering. Being a musician doesn't mean a thing concerning taste. I actually think your typical competent musician is almos guaranteed to have horrendous taste in music.

In college, I wouldn't even bother to talk to the music majors. They all had such awful taste, they knew nothing, and had no imagination.

Wolfi65

Observations:
A lot of 'popular' music is indeed very formulaic, seems like every new style produces maybe a handful of artists/bands that are actually any good/innovative, the rest are clones.
Pretty much every female singer since the late 80's has tried to sound like Whitney Houston, musical style almost irrelevant.
My dad used to describe music that developed after the 1950's as 'nothing but crash-bang', I think he was referring to the (sometimes very heavy) overuse of drum sets. It is a little sad that EVERYONE has turn EVERYTHING up to '11' AT ALL TIMES just to be heard over the boom-boom.
When studying sheet music from different periods, most modern stuff is indeed almost embarrassingly simple, until you add 756 different electronic effects, that is.......
Have some middle-aged guy play a 30-minute Shostakovich sonata from memory on a harpsichord - only seniors will be interested.
Have a hot young guy strum 3 chords over & over while voicing 'oooohhh, Bay-Bee....' - millions of screaming, fainting fan gurls ('He's SOOOOOOO talented!!!!)

Wharrior

I grew up on classical music but my interest in composers begins to wane when atonality and chromaticism comes in. Complaining that there are too many chord changes though is a bit ridiculous. There's no accounting for that!

Pop music is definitely formulaic but I think that's to do with how it's marketed and consumed more than anything. Most people don't really have much of an attention spam when it comes to this stuff so it needs to catch the attention very quickly (it's probably only going to be heard in passing on the radio or tv). Quite often that means a song will have only one or two ideas and will heavily repeat them to drive them home and modern songwriters are actually extremely adept at doing this.

EPOCH6

Like Willie Dixon said, "The blues is the roots; everything else is the fruits".
Of course that's exaggerated, considering the bounty of music that came before the blues, but in terms of post-early 20th century popular music? May as well be true.

The reason most popular music is rooted in blues is probably because the blues is easier to work with than classical, jazz, or ethnic styles. And that shouldn't be perceived as a negative comment towards any of these roots styles, it's just that blues is more accessible, generally it's easier to approach and easier to absorb, easier to learn (although as with anything, immensely difficult to master), and easier to extract and build from.

For most listeners and consumers that can't be bothered to dive deeper into genres, blues rooted music is the happy middle ground. Everything else is either too dense (classical, jazz, avant-garde etc), or too dumb (dance music, mainstream rap and hip-hop).

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