Is it that cursed to listen to pop songs? I am not Snow White and they are not poison apples. Even if they turned out to be so, all that would happen is me falling into a coma and waking up to a Happily Ever After, complete with a royal husband and a multi-million dollar property, no?
I mean, why NOT this 4-chord genre? Because it is a blemish to the oh-so-complex minds of the musically inclined; because it stunts and deteriorates our musicality; because it is too mainstream and minions who are outliers of our music world could tune in to it, diluting any specialty it has?
So what happened to ‘music is an expression’? And that there is no such thing as a bad music, just a differently expressed one? I am sure this theory applies not just to jazz, fusion, latin, funk and all that lot a commoner would find incomprehensible, but simple, no brainer pop as well.
No two people in the world listen to music for the same reason, much less the same songs. Let me tell you this: I am a language person; I am more sensitive to strings of alphabets and their structure and meanings than those of notes; I am a weaver of words. I spend my free time sifting through thesaurus, not lead sheets. So, the foremost thing I would look for is lyrics.
Danceable groove? Cool. Lustrous harmony? Cool. Demanding technicality? Cool. Blinding chord changes? Cool. No lyrics? Go write yourself out. Because if a song ain’t got no meaningful lyrics, it ain’t no story I wanna hear.
No wonder I hate transcribing those mind-boggling songs. They are always either instrumental or the lyrics is plain mad babbling. Then again, ALL of my graduation pieces are instrumental. The irony. Huh.
It is not to say I am disrespecting the genres of music I am learning throughout my course, God knows I could feel the weight of their history and could do nothing more but be awed by how they came to be and how they are. And I have developed an affiliation for the tranquility of bossa nova, the zest of latin and the serenity of jazz ballad.
But I have also maintained my ties to pop. English pop, that is. Partially due to the fact that I grew up with it (I never knew Sesame Street was so educational in music), though mostly because it saw me through my journey to where I am now. Many occasions were celebrated with a helluva off-pitched serenading of pop songs; It Ends Tonight for after-examinations in high school, I Gotta Feeling for pool parties, Fergalicious for the mockery of a certain teacher, We Are All In This Together for choir and the list dwindles on to where my memory lost grasp.
Plus, without my shameless playlist of pop songs, you would not be reading this post, nor any of my previous articles/journals/stories/writings. Maybe it is the simple chord progression or rhythm or the set of mood or the play of psychology, I do not know. It helped me pen my thoughts and would continue to do so for a long time more.
So who are you to judge when you do not even bother to understand what songs or music mean to me?
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