2017 was a year that confirmed what many of us already knew: Rock music is losing ground in the world of pop music relevancy. We saw it happening in 2016 as the Knowles sisters dominated the “best album” polls and artists like The Weeknd, Frank Ocean, and Chance the Rapper grew in popularity. Some expected a rebound in 2017, and yet the most compelling music of this past year once again came from the Soul/R&B/Rap veins of popular music. Kendrick Lamar, SZA, and Vince Staples made some of the most creative, original, and bold music of last year while darlings of indie rock like Fleet Foxes and St. Vincent released solid albums that appeased many, yet were far from spurring a sort of renaissance in creativity- a creativity we haven’t seen since the late 00’s when we had stunning releases by the likes of Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, TV on the Radio, and Arcade Fire. You can see the shift in popular music in every facet of exposure, from the artists receiving high-billing at the music festivals, the music featured in television, in popular commercials, all the way to the critics’ picks for most important music that tasteful Americans should be listening to right now.
Just look at what happened to a band like Portugal. The Man. A Freak-Folk / Indie Rock band that now has decided to “go pop” in the most accessibly R&B/Soul way possible with the track “Feel It Still”, which is currently being played incessantly on the radio. Remember when the post-grunge fan-favorites Lifehouse, known for the big hit “Hanging By A Moment” (2000) came back with the big pop hit “First Time” in 2007? Or when Alt-Rock mainstays Silverchair sold-out and made truly awful falsetto-heavy electronic pop music in 2007 with “Straight Lines”? This is further evidence of how Rock n’ Roll groups that want to stay relevant try hard to adapt and make music that conforms to the genres, or blend of genres, most popular at the time.
For all those ready to place a flower at the grave of modern Rock n’ Roll…..do not despair, because it seems that great Rock Music isn’t necessarily being phased out, or replaced, but rather being absorbed and re-interpreted by the most relevant and visionary musicians of this decade. This doesn’t mean we won’t see new Rock artists emerge, or that an amazing Rock album won’t take us by surprise every once in a while, but I do think we are seeing the tides, or trends, moving irreversibly towards new forms of popular music. Some say we are seeing the future of pop music from artists like Charli XCX, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Lorde, all of whom make electronic and synth-heavy tunes with a dash of soul (but not nearly enough soul). I for one hope this isn’t a glimpse of the future, because Lorde is a one-trick pony, Carly Rae makes my ears bleed, and Charli XCX sounds like a bad Britney Spears version of the rave in a cave sequence from The Matrix Reloaded. At least it’s not as bad as the dumpster fire that is Ke$ha (I honestly don’t know if I got that name correct) or Ariana Grande. The truth is that bad pop music will never die, but neither will good pop music. Every year we have musical artists who meet both the criteria of being critically-acclaimed and financially successful, and nowadays the artists that check both boxes are blurring the lines between Rap, R&B, Electronica, and Rock n’ Roll.
It all began when we had the seamless fusion of electronic music and R&B, becoming most pronounced when Rock n’ Roll was declining and Electronica and R&B were ascending- let’s call it 2009. The fusion, or mashing, happened so quickly that to me it felt like an overnight occurrence, an effortless meeting and marriage about as unsuprising as the attraction of a Kardashian to a rapper. Together the genres birthed a heady concoction of popular music that is unrenouncibly addictive and took over the music industry rapidly. One year it was The Blueprint 3 (2009) by Jay-Z, and The Lady Killer (2010) by CeeLo Green, popular Rap and R&B that kept a stubborn foothold in well-defined genres, and the next we have Frank Ocean bursting onto the scene with Nostalgia, Ultra (2011) and Channel Orange (2012), and before we know it Kanye West is releasing the ultimate mash-up of heavy Electronica, synths, and Soul with Yeezus (2013) and FKA Twigs taking it even further into the deep end with her darkly rhapsodic album LP1 in 2014. The trendsetting and pioneering DJs of today like Kaytranada, Disclosure, and Jamie XX make music steeped deeply in the traditions of Electronica, Synth-Pop, Soul, and R&B and are influencing all of the other producers out there cutting tracks for popular artists. Now there’s very little to decipher between electronic music and R&B or Rap. Artists like The Weeknd, Future, and Beyonce’ make the genres nearly synonymous and I think it’s one of the primary reasons popular music is dominated by these kinds of artists.
Rock n’ Roll has now been mixed into the concoction, mixed and absorbed into the structure of popular music, and it’s probably for the best that a genre that has begun to feel stale and uninspired gets a bit of a shake-up in identity. Take the amazing track “Heaven’s Only Wishful” (2018) featured at the top of the post. What I love about this track is how it starts as a fairly commonplace and even-keeled pop song. It’s got the good R&B rhythm and a steady dose of Soul-inspired vocals sung by the smooth and saccharine Seth Nyquist. The guitar chords propelling the song forward are also pretty typical for the first few stanzas, but then there’s the sense the song is peeling off layers and setting up for a big reveal. The reveal, after a few curious synth-pop interludes, is that the song has got a rocker’s heart. The bone-chilling screams from Nyquist at the climax of the song are epic and pure Rock n’ Roll. By the end of the song you realize it’s a composition of so many genres working together so well that it must be a future-vision of what pop music could be. Not surprisingly MorMor, the band that released this track and that Nyquist fronts, hails from the same fertile music scene that has brought us Drake, PARTYNEXTDOOR, Majid Jordan, and DVSN. The city is Toronto, and it’s become undeniable that the music scene in this city of “The Great White North” is blazing the trail for popular music. I am truly excited to hear an EP or full-length album from MorMor as this is the first, and basically only release out there on the interwebs from this group.
For me there will always be two clearly defined paths of popular music: the bad pop and the good pop. It’s pretty easy to sort the bad from the good, and it’s often in the first ten to fifteen seconds of a song that you can tell which one it is. Does it sound like the artist is trying to sell you a sound or does it sound like someone crafted you a song? Bad pop music feels like someone wants to give you a sound, and came up and tried to suffocate you with a dump-truck of sugar – from the incessant hooks to most notably the over-engineered, over-produced vocals of the singer. Take Ke$ha or Carly Rae Jepsen or Charli XCX; they sound about as manufactured and sugar-addled as a box of Nerds candies. Then there’s the good pop, which is absorbing, and bending, and mashing genres in the most creative and inspired ways possible. There is good pop music out there, and a lot of it has hints of absorbed Rock n’ Roll in it. Take the sultry song “After the Storm” by Kali Uchis, released earlier this year. It’s got the funk Bootsy Collins round-house kicked into most all of it, the Indie Rap swagger of Tyler the Creator, and the penchant Soul of Kali Uchis, but it also has a curious marker of Indie Garage Rock embedded throughout with the wailing and distorted guitars and keys that seem to repeat on a cycle.
The guest stars notwithstanding, this is a pop song that perfectly embodies the great genre-blending of modern music. And I think it can be neatly separated from all the Carly Rae, Ariana Grande, and Miley Cyrus songs, and placed into the “good pop song” category.
Another song I’ve heard recently that has made the rounds on Spotify and pop music radio is “The Times I’m Not There”. The song is an intriguing collaboration between two Chicago musical acts from very different parts of town. You’ve got Jamila Woods, the R&B songbird from Chicago’s South-Side African-American community mixing with a bunch of white boys from Chicago’s affluent north-side – the Indie Band Ne-Hi – to create an effervescent pop song that brims with both Garage Rock and Soul energy. It turned out to be one of those odd collaborations that somehow worked and made for a magical cut.
I hope songs, and eventually full-length albums, continue on this current path of combining all the best from the genres of Electronica, R&B, Rap, Soul, and Rock N’ Roll. The tracks in this post are some great examples, but there are a lot of great artists out there like Blood Orange and Nick Hakim pushing these new forms of genre absorption into innovative music that will hopefully serve to influence more and more musicians, and to birth more and more acts willing to carry the sounds of past generations into new future sounds.
