Only Idiots Think Kendrick Lamar Is "Pop"

blizzard man

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Wu-Tang is pop though. My 65 year old cac Math teacher in high school once quoted C.R.E.A.M. in class. :francis:

Dolla dolla bill y'all :troll:

By your criteria if 40 year old soccer moms know about it, its pop. :mjpls:


40 year old soccer moms grew up on wu tang though

but if these same soccer moms know about famous dex and lil uzi and playboi carti, then they are definitely pop
 

blizzard man

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It's quite a difficult convo because it's not really clear what "pop" actually is. There's the popular angle and the music type.

until this gets defined by all parties debating, the argument gonna go nowhere.

in a similar thread, a poster and i were debating this same stuff. but it turns out, he was arguing the popular angle, not the actual music type. under that angle of popular music, his idea makes sense, but in terms of music type, his idea makes no sense. so that clear definition is important.

its a distinction that should be made up front, cuz when i think pop, i think specific pop genre/music type, over just whatever is popular/charting/well known.
 

Black White Sox Hat

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He got one of them annoying voices like Ma$e or Cannibus.You can't listen to him for too long or the Mighty Mouse voice will drive you crazy.
 

blizzard man

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He's undoubtedly a pop artist...The only arguments against this are some antiquated rap smark semantics which put negative connotations on the term "pop" .... Hip hop has largely dominated "pop music" since inarguably the Death Row/Bad Boy era

thats why we have the term hip-pop

but since rap has dominated pop music, is rap catering to pop? or is it the other way around? is pop trying to cater more to rap since rap has been the one changing music so much?
 

hex

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Pop music - Wikipedia

^^^ Based on this, how isn't "Humble" not a Pop song?

How is it? :gucci:

rhythmic element, a mainstream style and a simple traditional structure.

No.

Common variants include the verse-chorus form and the thirty-two-bar format

It doesn't have 32-bar verses....again....what?

The lyrics of modern pop songs typically focus on simple themes – often love and romantic relationships

Again, no.

with a focus on melodies and catchy chorus that contrasts melodically, rhythmically and harmonically with the verse.

By your logic every rap song with a verse/hook/verse format is pop from the last 30 years.

And I'm :dead: at you editing out the section on chord progression completely.

Harmony and chord progressions in pop music are often "that of classical European tonality, only more simple-minded."Clichés include the barbershop quartet-style harmony (i.e. ii – V – I) and blues scale-influenced harmony. There was a lessening of the influence of traditional views of the circle of fifths between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, including less predominance for the dominant function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_music#cite_note-22
You do realize most pop songs from the last 30+ years have damn near the same chord progression, right? Literally dozens of songs. It's a hallmark of pop music....which is absent from "Humble".

I–V–vi–IV progression - Wikipedia

Stop cherry picking pieces from Wikipedia man. You're better than this.

Fred.
 

hex

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This shyt way too crazy, aye
You do not amaze me, aye
I blew cool from AC, aye
Obama just paged me, aye
I don't fabricate it, aye
Most of ya'll be fakin, aye
I stay modest bout it, aye
She elaborate it, aye
This that Grey Poupon, that Evian, that Ted Talk, aye
Watch my soul speak, you let the meds talk, aye



^^^^ If any "mumble rapper" would've rapped these watered down lyrics, threads would've been made discussing the lack of lyrical content and how basic the bars were:sas1:



Because it's Kendrick, they give him a pass:sas2:

:gucci:

This is like saying if a mumble rapper spit "she's a pole-tician" he'd be crucified but Nas got a pass. It's an awful line but we know what he's capable of....and they can't produce an "Illmatic". Or a "IWW" for that matter. All they can do is the skill level Nas got mocked for.

They give Kendrick a pass because that's obviously not his normal skill level. When a mumble rapper makes an album like "GKMC", let me know.

Fred.
 

JustCKing

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How is it? :gucci:



No.



It doesn't have 32-bar verses....again....what?



Again, no.



By your logic every rap song with a verse/hook/verse format is pop from the last 30 years.

And I'm :dead: at you editing out the section on chord progression completely.


You do realize most pop songs from the last 30+ years have damn near the same chord progression, right? Literally dozens of songs. It's a hallmark of pop music....which is absent from "Humble".

I–V–vi–IV progression - Wikipedia

Stop cherry picking pieces from Wikipedia man. You're better than this.

Fred.

I didn't edit anuthing out. "Humble" meets the criteria of a Pop song based on:

- song length
- a consistent, noticeable rhythmic element
- a mainstream style, and a simple, traditional structure
- verse-chorus structure

It doesn't have to cintain a 32 bar verse. It can be 32 bars total.

Harmony and chird progressions are often that of classical European, but we know that style isn't dominant anymore given where music is.
 

IllmaticDelta

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If WTF sold 20 million it still wouldn't have been pop. So @hex point stands. Sales don't make a song/album "pop".


yes they do...

Fixing the Charts

S.F.J.: Who are Billboard’s charts for?

C.M.: Billboards stock answer is that the charts are for the industry. But I have long argued that the Hot 100 is not actually useful, day to day, for a record executive trying to do his job. It is an amalgam of a bunch of streams of data to produce one authoritative barometer of the biggest hits in the U.S.A. That’s enormously useful to the public—or, at least as long as that chart remains authoritative, it’s a handy benchmark. But if you’re, say, a radio programmer trying to figure out what to program, the Hot 100 will only get you so far before you have to kind of figure out, “O.K., but what works for my market? Or what works for the eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old females that I’m targeting?” But, for the public, the Hot 100 is an excellent Dow Jones Industrial Average of pop music for America.

I would say that, to some extent, the R. & B./Hip-Hop chart is the same thing. It’s more useful as a gut check or a benchmark for the industry on the biggest, most credible black, or urban—pick your euphemism—records in the United States.

So, how do you come up with a pop-chart metric, like R. & B. and hip-hop, that’s neither arbitrary nor overly narrow?

One of the big reasons the Hot 100 has it easy is because it’s all genres; we call it the pop chart, but anything can appear on the Hot 100. If a catchy Gregorian chant came out tomorrow—in fact, about twenty years ago, a catchy Gregorian chant did appear on the Hot 100—it would chart there. Whereas the genre charts that I speak about in this article all have this definitional problem.

Why not get rid of all the genre charts, publish a Hot 500, and add genre tag to each song? The chart would lean more heavily on better data, and let the reader sort out the relevant groupings. It’s not as if charts are a challenging read, especially in an age of constant data visualization.

I mean, sure, that would do an end-run around the problem of not being able to isolate genre-specific data in the digital age—one big chart for everybody. But I think it’d be a shame. I think it’s still useful to track the music a subculture is consuming, separate from the mass audience, and that it should still be possible—even in an era of big data—to pinpoint and pry apart that subculture.

I think the way Billboard solves this problem—and they had it right for about forty years, before they changed the chart methodology in 2012—is to make these genres about the audience, not about the definition of music. And as long as there’s broad agreement over what the center of a genre is, you don’t have to agree about all of the boundaries, because that’s impossible and ever-shifting. But as long we can more or less agree about what the center of country is, what the center of R. & B. and hip-hop is, then you sort of say, “O.K., now let’s identify people who are fans of that center of the music and track what they like.” Then the boundaries to some extent take care of themselves. Because if people who congregate in black record stores or listen to Hot 97 suddenly decide that they like Lorde, it’s okay for Lorde to appear on the R. & B./Hip-Hop chart, because that group of people is actually consuming that song.

On the other hand, we’ve actually got a system now whereby, in order for something to appear on the charts, there’s a gatekeeper in the sky, which in this case is Billboard, saying that the Lorde record is R. & B., but this Bruno Mars song is not. In this system, you get into the quicksand of who qualifies, what are the edges, what are the boundaries? And that’s a mess.

If you’re going to come up with a credible chart, I feel like you don’t want to be in the business of defining what the boundaries of that genre are. Like, just to pick something off the top of my head, twenty-four years ago, the British duo DNA remixed Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” and it actually charted in the Top 10 of the R. & B. chart. It didn’t just make the top five of the Hot 100; it actually made the Top 10 on the R. & B. chart. Why? Did some gatekeeper in the sky say, “Suzanne Vega is now black enough for us to put her on this chart?” No, of course not. What actually happened was that black radio stations and black-owned or R. & B.-centric record stores were playing and selling that record in quantity; ergo it appeared on the R. & B. chart.

As we move away from terrestrial radio stations with very specific themes—hot R. & B. and hip-hop, hot modern rock, hot bags of songs with singing—to self-defining online stations that mimic radio using various algorithms, the data is becoming more bountiful (thanks, computerized life!), but also more chaotic. The cohort is being defined from all sides, none of them in sync. How is Billboard going to track all of this?

I often have to defend Billboard in writing about their charts. The very first comment I get on almost everything article I publish is, “Why are we even talking about this? The Billboard charts are bullshyt, they’re bought and sold, they measure nothing.”

My counterargument is usually something along the lines of, “The more data we have, the more credible these charts are going to be.” You can quibble with the one retailer that got bought off by somebody, or you can quibble with Clear Channel being pressured into playing this record more. But (a) Clear Channel actually has to play the record now for it to get measured by Billboard and (b) the play by Clear Channel is going to be counteracted by literally millions of people clicking on the video on YouTube (or not), by hundreds of thousands of people buying it on iTunes (or not).

The days prior to the launch of SoundScan, in 1991—of the labels really buying a hit record lock, stock, and barrel—while not entirely gone, are mostly gone, because it’s just too damned hard to buy off that much data. It is now more difficult than ever for corruption to make the charts irrelevant, or useless, or a measurement of nothing. Even before 1991—if you went back to the summer of 1983 and asked me, “What’s playing everywhere?” I’d say “Billie Jean” and “Every Breath You Take,” and sure enough, those were the two biggest No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100. So it wasn’t like the Hot 100 measured nothing back then. But now, even more so, the more data you pour into this chart, the more useful and the more accurate it actually is.

The problem with the genre charts is different: we don’t just need more data; we need better data. The ghastly discovery that fans of these genres made after Billboard changed their genre methodology in 2012 is that Billboard is taking the exact same massive pools of data they use for the Hot 100, which is all genres, and just cutting it down to the songs that it thinks qualifies.

To be fair to Billboard, I’m sure that when they decide that “TKO” by Justin Timberlake is an R. & B. song but “Treasure” by Bruno Mars is not, they’re taking their cues from the fact that R. & B. radio is playing one and not the other. But once they’ve made that call, they’re piling in all of the sales of the Justin Timberlake song into an R. & B. chart, which is fundamentally unhelpful. If I’m looking at an R. & B. chart, I don’t want to know that, one week, a hundred and fifty thousand people nationwide bought the Justin Timberlake track, and while they were at it, they also bought something by Britney Spears. I want to know, did the person who bought a Kendrick Lamar track also buy the Justin Timberlake track? That’s interesting to me. That’s telling that there is genre commonality there.

But aren’t there Britney tracks that are more relevant to the R. & B. audience than one of Lamar’s weirder tracks? Isn’t that part of the problem here? If any of this is determined solely by race, things get ugly fast.

Right, and I would never want it to be about race alone. Again, there’s precious little argument about the center of R. & B. and hip-hop. We can all agree Britney isn’t at the center; Kendrick is. But then, to your point, once you have a good working definition of the center of the genre and of the audience—regardless of ethnicity—that listens to that genre, then you can start slicing and dicing the occasional Britney track that the R. & B. audience likes, and the occasional Kendrick track that they don’t.

My main point is simply this: for a genre chart to be credible, it needs a different pool of data. It needs to be large enough to be meaningful. You don’t want to narrow the data so finely that it can be swayed by just a handful of people, because then you get into the bought-off situation that we remember from the pre-SoundScan charts. But you do want it limited enough so it’s not just trolling for any sentient being in America who might, one day out of the year, buy a Macklemore song. I do want that person’s purchase of a Macklemore song tracked, and reflected on the Hot 100. I don’t want it reflected on the R. & B. chart if this is the only R. & B. track he or she is buying all year.

That’s the challenge for Billboard. I’m a longtime Billboard-chart fan, and I absolutely ascribe the best motives to them&. The data problems are by and large not of their making. It’s not their fault that everybody goes to the same sites to purchase and stream music. But it seems to me that, if Billboard wants its genre charts to continue to be credible, it is fundamentally a mistake for them to be miniature versions of the Hot 100.

Talk to me about your proposed solution for the cohort problem. I don’t know that I trust streaming—those numbers are so small, especially if you cut them down to just a few lovers of R. & B. and hip-hop in every city.

For the genre charts, the thing that I’m looking for is a digital equivalent of what Billboard used to call a “core R. & B. store”: a place that primarily sold R. & B. and hip-hop. Maybe it sold the occasional rock record, but fundamentally its stock in trade was black music. So now, in the digital era, we’ve reached a point where the cohort—to use your term—is not organized by the stores they visit but rather by the Web sites they visit or the types of music they listen to, and you have to find a way to recreate the core-R.-&-B.-store model in the digital age. And probably the only way to do that is by creating what I call a pool of R. & B. or hip-hop “super users”: basically users who listen to all sorts of stuff, but the center of what they listen to is R. & B. and hip-hop. And then you track what this pool of users is consuming.

To your point, that’s not going to be terribly useful as long as the numbers are in the hundreds, right? But, the minute you get numbers that are in the hundreds of thousands, that starts to become meaningful. Right now, the No. 1 song on the Hot 100 any given week sells as few as two hundred thousand copies—at most maybe four or five hundred thousand copies. There’s never been a digital song that’s sold more than six hundred thousand and change copies in a week. So if you get a pool of users that numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands, that’s statistically meaningful for Billboard. Then, conceivably, you could recreate the core-R.-&-B.-store model by aggregating R. & B. and hip-hop super-consumers.

The beauty of a system like that is, once again, you’re defining this cohort by the center of the genre, not the edges. So if a core R. & B. and hip-hop listener—that user who normally listens to Kendrick Lamar—one day decides, “This Lorde record is cool to me—I’m going to stream that twelve times this week,” that’s worthy of the chart. Now what you’re tracking, finally, is crossover, which is the whole point of this exercise. You’re tracking both songs that start in a genre and eventually move outward to pop, and songs that start pop and later get adopted by genre fans. That’s been interesting for the past fifty years.

I wrote a piece for Slate back in December that seems relevant here. A couple of weeks before the end of the year, I noticed there had not been a single No. 1 record on the Hot 100 by a black person; 2013 was the first time that had happened. In the article, I alluded to the idea that we’re in a so-called “post-racial,” Obama-era America. There’s this sense that we, as Americans and as music fans, want to move beyond this and pretend that these genres don’t exist and good music is good music.

That’s bullshyt. Even if the definitions of these genres are harder to define than they were fifteen or twenty years ago, they’re still subcultures from which interesting music emerges and bubbles up, and also still subcultures where stuff from the top pushes down. I was careful in the piece not to merely talk about R. & B. music like it’s this farm team for big pop records that white people can consume. I’ve always been equally charmed by the R. & B. record that starts on the R. & B. chart and migrates to the Hot 100 and, say, a Hall and Oates record that starts pop but migrates back to the R. & B. chart. The way the R. & B. audience selectively decides, “We’re not interested in these five Hall and Oates tracks, but ‘I Can’t Go for That’? We’re very interested in that track.

Fixing the Charts - The New Yorker
 

IllmaticDelta

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You do realize most pop songs from the last 30+ years have damn near the same chord progression, right? Literally dozens of songs. It's a hallmark of pop music....which is absent from "Humble".

I–V–vi–IV progression - Wikipedia

Stop cherry picking pieces from Wikipedia man. You're better than this.

Fred.


a specific chord progression isn't what makes something "pop". It's the mass popularity of the/a song that makes it "pop"
 

IllmaticDelta

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thats why we have the term hip-pop

but since rap has dominated pop music, is rap catering to pop? or is it the other way around? is pop trying to cater more to rap since rap has been the one changing music so much?


rap is pop
 

mobbinfms

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yes they do...

Fixing the Charts





Fixing the Charts - The New Yorker
:gucci:
I read those quotes as supporting what I'm saying though :russ:

The beauty of a system like that is, once again, you’re defining this cohort by the center of the genre, not the edges. So if a core R. & B. and hip-hop listener—that user who normally listens to Kendrick Lamar—one day decides, “This Lorde record is cool to me—I’m going to stream that twelve times this week,” that’s worthy of the chart. Now what you’re tracking, finally, is crossover, which is the whole point of this exercise. You’re tracking both songs that start in a genre and eventually move outward to pop, and songs that start pop and later get adopted by genre fans. That’s been interesting for the past fifty years.
 
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