I thought, you know what, what is it that really differentiates rock artists ( examples Pink Floyd, Rush, Jimi Hendrix) vs. pop artists (examples Madonna, Kendrick Lamar and other modern stars, maybe even Fleetwood Mac kinda) and why are rock artists struggling to compete with pop artists nowadays.
O.K. so then I had an epiphany. I thought, maybe the core difference between rock artists and pop artists is complexity vs. simplicity. Pink Floyd, Rush, and Jimi Hendrix are obviously all very complicated and heady if you listen to them, while when I looked at a 2015-2016 chart hits handbook, I found pages of major triads and hardly a flat or sharp in sight. This basically mean to me that the music is simple.
Then I thought maybe simplicity is what people want. Jazz and Classical Music are famously complex (lots of flats and sharps on the page, for example) and you can't find that on the billboard charts anymore. Maybe rock artists like Jimi Hendrix are simply intermediaries between the complicated music of times past and what sells the most due to its simplicity, and that now that we have made the transition, rock will go the way of disco and we will be permanently stuck with super-selling simple music (I don't want this to happen, but maybe that's just the way it is.)
Complexity is important for music. Complexity allows for the possibility of musical "depth."
The specifics of how much complexity is needed to make good music is subjective of course, but only an idiot would imply that complexity is unimportant. After all, how good of an album could you make using only one note?
So to sum up: complexity doesn't guarantee music's goodness, it allows for the possibility of goodness.
As for your theories on the relationship between complexity and popularity, you are mostly right. The vast majority of people don't care about musical depth and don't care to put in the effort to understand "deep" music. But this shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone, since this relationship generally carries through in almost any art form.
just because something is complex doesn't make it good, likewise simple music isn't always bad, aesthetics are a huge factor in good music as well take my bloody valentine, very simple music, yet critically acclaimed and pretty much universally praised the complexity of rock and prog isn't much compared to classical really, not that that makes prog bad at all
Noah Richardson
i also agree with this, this user puts it better than me t.
Gavin Howard
Most rock music is made with some variation of pentatonics usually a blues scale. This is especially true for someone like Hendrix. Even most prog artists weren't super adventurous with their keys or chord progressions either.
Ed Sheeran's hit single Shape Of You came out last year, was in a very uncommon key of C#minor, and manages to have a 4:3 polyrhythm (which is among the tougher polyrhythmic patterns to work with.)
Most of Beyonce's newer tracks have the kind of harmonic complexity to them which causes all sorts of uncommon intervals to show up (6ths, 7ths, 11ths, etc.) and constantly change up as well as there will be an easy to pick up bass line or something that Beyonce's more technical vocal skills interplay with.
You mentioned Kendrick Lamar, who is more hip hop than pop, but has managed to show aspects of polyphony (on the song u with its chaotic horn parts) and insane levels of polyrhythm (on the song Hood Politics where Kendrick switches the flow of his raps to match each of the separate polyrhythms already happening in the accompaniment.) This is without mentioning just how much versatility he has in his delivery and how rhythmically complex his raps can be.
There's ways to make complex music, but input it into something the average layman can more easily digest initially. It's very hard to pull off, but that's why when it is pulled off (the works people praise of musicians like Beatles, , Beach Boys, Steely Dan, Justin Timberlake, Kendrick Lamar, etc.) it's ranked very highly while also being very popular as well.
Josiah Thomas
I think this is just an obvious progression, as music has become easier and easier for the average person to create. Shit, anyone with a Macbook and a simple MIDI controller has been able to make halfway decent music since like 2005. Couple bedroom creativity with a bit of luck and pop culture understanding, and you've got something that has potential these days.
I would, however, argue that there is still some complexity in pop music. Justin Timberlake makes some interesting choices when it comes to arrangement. Additionally, there is a lot of "complexity" in some of the current "lo-fi" stuff but that's really just coming from people chopping up old samples. I don't think they have any musical understanding of it outside of "it sounds cool".
Jordan Foster
Kendrick Lamar basically always sounds the same, not sure what you're talking about there. His flow is rarely anything but generic and the voice he puts on is fucking stupid. Also, talking about muh jesus in 2018 is fucking mongoloid bullshit.
