I remember it well! - it was on Not the Nine O'Clock News. You can see it again here. (do you remember 'The Memory Kinda Lingers'? ).

Sure - I suppose one might ask why the pop video is any less important a genre, but then also whether those videos really were so 'nice'?

Since the fifties, 'pop' has arguably been as much about lifestyle choice as it has about music.

The thing is, though, there has been no innovation in pop or rock music since the early seventies.  'Progressive' rock took the rock template about as far as it could be taken.  Everything that followed was just a variation on an existing style. John Lennon, in one of his very few perceptive comments, accurately described glam rock as 'rockabilly with lipstick' (or something like that).  And punk was nothing but a return to the demotic ethos of the skiffle days (anyone can play, you don't actually have to be any good, attitude and enthusiasm matter over ability, blah, blah, blah.) 

As to the Beatles, I think it's fair to say they owe a large part of their reputation to George Martin, who gave their records a sophistication that they wouldn't otherwise have had.  Personally, I think he could have legitimately claimed a co-writer's credit on a lot of their work.  Just imagine what Sergeant Pepper would have sounded like without his input.

You might be forgetting that members of boards like this are not typical of wider society, roslynmuse.  There is most certainly a type of person who espouses 'classical music' as a whole with, quite often, an appalling ignorance of the kind of music they claim to love.  And there is a huge industry based on selling to them:

http://www.whsmith.co.uk/whs/go.asp?Menu=Music&pagedef=/music/charts/classical_1.htm&promotion=music_slot6_classchart

As for teenagers, I'm sure there are plenty who blindly (or deafly?) claim to love the music that goes with their chosen image - there certainly were when I was a teenager; but I'm often surprised by the depth of knowledge some teenagers have of different kinds of popular music and of the history of that music.  I know people in their early twenties who could lose me in a discussion on The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground etc - and leave me in no doubt about their genuine appreciation of those artists.  Artists like those were, of course, packaged and marketed commercially; but so were their vastly inferior contemporaries.  The teenagers of later generations don't seem to have much trouble working out which ones are worth remembering.


I think you're right there.  I suspect that 'being seen' at prestgious venues is a far more conscious form of social posturing than just being drawn into an adolescent sub-group.  I've often seen people in corporate hospitality parties who not only know nothing about the music (or the sport etc) but quite clearly dislike it!


I came to the conclusion in the 1970s that pop/rock had reached a dead end with bands like Pink Floyd basically failing to take the genre any further after 'The Dark Side of the Moon'.  When I'm obliged to listen to pop radio I'm often surprised not by how shocking & incomprehensible the music is (which would have been my parents' complaint) but by how familiar & stale it seems.  Probably it's got a lot to do with my age but I can't, for example, see much difference between the massive 'Rhythm 'n' Blues' sector and what we used to call 'Soul'.  I do, however, have limited experience of anything in the last 25 years so I'd hesitate to say "Everything that followed was just a variation on an existing style", Swan_Knight

Thank you roslynmuse for your reply#30 on the subject of melody,which I found very informative.

From Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell:

[Donna Anna has died and gone to Hell; she is outraged and determined to get back to Heaven.  The Devil and the Commendatore are trying to persuade her otherwise]

THE STATUE:  At every one of these [classical] concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in Heaven.  A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in Heaven.  They are almost all English.

THE DEVIL:  Yes: the Southerners give it up and join me just as you have done.  But the English really do not seem to know when they are thoroughly miserable.  An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

 

In a similar vein, there's the story of when Solti's Das Rheingold first appeared and was played to an audience made up of members from a Wagner appreciation society. Solti and Culshaw, the producer, were there and they fielded various questions from these enthusiasts, who were insisting on what they should have done and what should be done next. Then Solti asked how many of them intended to buy the recording, and very few hands went up.

The crudeness of the dichotomies set up in these sorts of debates is very familiar: music can be either (a) some sort of pious ritual, only for the worthy or (b) purely for entertainment, preferably with lots of cheap sensationalist tactics thrown in. Certainly in the UK little else seems to be considered viable. If (b) we might as well accept that the Three Tenors, Vanessa-Mae, Kennedy, Michael Nyman, Karl Jenkins, opera productions with plenty of tits and bums, Classic FM, and so on and so forth have succeeded as well as anyone else at doing so. In the UK, commonplace anti-intellectualism makes seriousness into little more than a middle-class affectation; but the situation was very different with Wagner, Brahms, Liszt, Berlioz and Verdi, all of whom were very serious about what they did, and all of whom were doing more than simply producing entertainment. And there are plenty of listeners to popular music for whom this is a very serious matter as well. As far as the debate being referred to, it can be found here. Actually quite a few people there do know Handel's Agrippina, and some including myself think there is rather more to it than the trashy plot (such as the refinement and sophistication of the music, the subtlety of the characterisation, and so on). Let's have a bit from 'La mia sorte fortunata':