Keeping fresh ears is always a struggle for professionals! I try as hard as I can, but lay appreciation of music has taken such a downturn in the last 20 years or so, I refuse to be swayed by modern lay acceptance.

The charts are dominated by horrible little ditties with absolutely no harmonic interest in them, anything with more than four chords is shunned, choruses sound like the verses, precious few actual bridges, and heaven help you if you use a diminished or augmented chord or even stray far from diatonic simplicity…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of good popular music, it isn’t all Bill Evan’s and Oscar Peterson for me! I like rock, reggae, punk, grunge, you name it. But today’s dumbed down pop just does little for me. It’s no coincidence that the kids still revere great bands from the 70’s and 80’s, 40-50 year old music, when we (as a generation) didn’t exactly embrace music from the 20’s and 30’s back in the era when pop WAS ‘great’!

Pop lost its doorkeepers. There’s so little real money in pop any more, social media allows any hack to promote themselves almost as well as major acts, and we have lost the ‘filters’ that sieved out the garbage back when A&R men and the cost of music production kept it a field where actual talent was needed to even stand a faint chance of being heard.

The bar just keeps getting lower. And it keeps getting easier to impress nonprofessionals with music that wouldn’t even get past the talent scouts in the 70’s.

Be honest… what artist from today is likely to still get widespread airplay in 50 year’s time? Bet you they’re still playing Zeppelin, the Police, Journey, Marley etc in another 50 years.