h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In years past, I've tried to heed advice from LanzaBaby, Pierce the Pirate, and others. Lanzababy recommended listening to music from pretty much all the rest of the world. This would have included a lot of contemporary music, I imagined. As far as World Music is concerned, I have representative CDs from about 50 other countries, spread over every hemisphere and continent. I also, for a while, listened regularly to streaming music from radio stations in Argentina, Africa, and Asia. (Then I realized that some of them were just playing American or English top-40 hits that I had elsewhere, so I discontinued the stations.)

I created a collection of Pop CDs, nearly 300 of them, and put them in rotation with my other collections so I would hear them regularly. Being fair to every artist/band in the collection meant focusing on greatest hits or best efforts, with an occasional album that had outsold every other album on the planet. Sales figures were factored into my efforts. Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson had sold the most albums historically, so I made sure that these titans were well represented, though not so as to eclipse less successful but still wildly popular groups.

It worked for about three years. Now the ground under my feet is moving again, and I may need to reconsider. On a personal level, I find that most pop music can't be listened to while I'm reading, as there are lyrics that I'm apt to be paying attention to, slowing down the reading. For the last month, I've gone to the default mode of a classical music station that rarely plays vocal music. I get weary of some of the music, but least I can read while I'm listening.

Then, recently, I read that worldwide streaming and other innovations are changing the sales figures as well. I will have to get a different take on what is most popular. Given that there is so much going on, I won't be able to listen very much to any one song or performer, but at least I will have some inkling about what is happening.

I'm happy with most of the results of my effort. I enjoy singers or groups that I hadn't even ehard of before. Some of them are very much current, such as Lady Gaga, Adele, Taylor Swift, and Usher. I wanted to include something by Rihanna, and still might do so. In the meantime, I keep hearing her songs during some of the movies I watch.

So, I'm not hunkered in some cave or monastery far from the world. I see new sides even of groups that I thought I already knew -- ABBA, the Beach Boys, the Eagles, etc.

What I cannot do is recognize every great song that the Beatles recorded. Likewise the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Queen Latifa, Pink Floyd, etc.

I'm not going to do very well if I get enticed into taking a quiz about any one group.

I'd like to have a general idea of what's going on. It just won't be very specific.

Movies help. I enjoyed "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Rocketman," and "A Star is born." Every Spring I learn new :old" songs in my choral outreach group.

I'm trying. I'm not going away. If new genres become popular, I'll try to listen to the best that they can reocmmend.

It's fun discovering new stuff. I've just spent three days trawling through Turkish songs to find one I liked on holiday.....only to find it's not actually in Turkish!

Fountains in Vegas and Barcelona led to other paths. Also a good way to get into learning a few words in a new language, una palabra over and over again after Mexico!

Thank goodness the interwebs has opened up a literal whole world of different music to us all! ( I won't recommend Mongolian heavy metal to an Adele fan though....)

Thanks for understanding.

I like the chance to stream music, too. I've discovered some wonderful performers on Youtube.

Peter Hollens
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0KQLJwMDzc

{Granted, "Loch Lomond is traditional, but Hollens also does a lot of contemporary pop stuff, usually singing all the tracks himself. His visuals are lively and a lot of fun)

Julien Neel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqg6OYaez9s

The harmony and blend give me goose-bumps. As with Hollens, Neel has a wide range of genres, though maybe not as much in the 21st century pop arena. Oh, well. I'm a choral fan anyway.

Also, for what it's worth, the advent of Internet recording capacity has allowed people to write, record, and post songs so quickly that they can create thousands of them in just a year's time. It's a brave new world.

At the end of the day! No matter how many types/themes etc you listen to or like in music! You'll always "lean" in one direction as such to your "preferred" music

That's true, prof. I've been a minority opinion as long as I've lived. Still, I'm happy to be surprised by something enjoyable that I didn't expect.

I've noticed that, over the centuries, genres have enjoyed their greatest popularity for roughly as long as one person's lifespan -- somewhere between 70 and 85 years.

Jazz seems to have been born some time between 1902 and 1917. It's not dead, but I read somewhere that jazz lost half of its audience in the 1980s. By the early 21st Century, it was remarked that 99% of the most popular recorded jazz artists were deceased.

Let's add, say, 80 years to the year that is credited with the first official rock music recordings: 1949. That gives us 2029 as the year when rock music would see the bottom drop out from under it, if my theory is correct.

If my theory is not correct, what factors would combine to undermine it? Would the lengthening human lifespan prolong the influence of rock-loving people? Or, would there be nothing more enticing to replace rock as the most popular genre? Or would there be a period in which no clear trend exists? Sort of a musical balkanization, with small groups clustered around a lot of different music?

I will be 81 in 2029. Will I still care about the route that music is traveling in? Maybe my hearing will be so bad by then that I don't listen to anything except loud heavy metal or large choruses
(The Halleluiah Chorus") or Ethel Merman. In order to ehar any music at all, I will need to adjust the kind of things I listen to.

(I think Adele sings loud enough that I will still be able to hear her. )

music changed so rapid once electronics came out for musical instruments, from just 8 notes - there's now thousands of variations

Maybe some genres will stay popular longer, because we have more than a century of music recordings to listen to.

That's why predicting the future is so hard .

I know I've ruffled some feathers elsewhere by talking about the decline of rock music.

Here's a link about that.
http://spinditty.com/genres/rock-music-comeback

I'm afraid I'm a bit passive about pop music. I won't sample it until I know what's been popular for some time. I'm not digging into it very deeply; that would be more work than I want to do. My exposure is a mile wide but an inch deep, if that.

I get behind in almost everything else, too. I read the thirty or forty most touted books of every year, but don't get to them for a few years, because there are long waiting lists for copies of them at my library. I'm not going to buy many books, so I have to wait.

"Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny." [Frank Zappa]

You could be right about "longevity of popularity of popular music". If you are I am looking forward to rap and hiphop and the like becoming less popular

Paul, you should check out https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP2-S6-M9ZvlY8t7cRn4O6A Admittedly, you'll need to watch the screen for the songs you don't already know... What she does, and has been doing for years longer than Jimmy Fallon (I think it is) is she runs a song through Google Translate many many times, then back to English, and sings that. And she can REALLY sing. She's got some original songs and normal covers on that channel, too. Most of the translated songs have the original lyrics and the translated lyrics running at the top and bottom of the screen (some of the earlier ones don't).

I never really saw much in rap and hip hop. My theory is that the two genres didn't attract the most talented people in society, except for the likes of Lin-Manuel Miranda. It's almost impossible not to like him.

The best rap compares well with the best in any other genre.

Schoenberg and his followers didn't attract much love, but when Leonard Bernstein tried much the same strategy in "West Side Story" it was electrifying.

Listen to any of the average composers from the late 18th century and you will wonder how that style ever managed to survive for long. Then listen to Mozart or Haydn or early Beethoven.

We need geniuses. A genius can take mediocre material and craft masterwork from it.

I'm not saying rap and hiphop has less quality in general than other genres. And if people enjoy them that's quite alright with me. It's just not for me.

I have enjoyed listening to West Side Story for as long as I can remember.

"Hamilton" was not the first rap musical, in my opinion. That distinction goes to Rex Harrison's speech-singing in "My Fair Lady." Or maybe rap goes further back, to some of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

I can envisage a rap opera, maybe culled from some great classic like "Aida" or "Carmen," in which the words remain, and the tuens are carried by the orchestra, but the stars basically speak rather than singing.