In casual conversation yesterday, a friend mentioned someone named “Avril Levigne.” “Avril what?” I replied. “Is that like Emeril, the chef?” My friend was aghast: apparently everyone else knows who this person is. And a quick trip to the Kazaa network confirmed that she is, in fact, a standard issue teenybopper pop singer.
I have to confess being impressed with the song I downloaded for the purpose of en-loopening myself slightly, “Complicated.” Not, mind you, because it was any good; it wasn’t. No, I was impressed by the shameless, yet brilliant construction of the thing. Every moment of it was recognizably lifted from another song — usually the hook. I couldn’t peg all of the constitutent parts, but at no time did I doubt that I was listening to a pastiche of other hits from the past ten years or so.
This prompted a sort of epiphany. The biggest obstacle facing your average musician, assuming he/she is primarily into being a big rich star, is the pretense of originality. Yet the overwhelming majority of new artists are just recycling subconscious detritus from far superior bands of the past — and to the extent that they do “find their own voices,” it turns out that those voices aren’t particularly good. Levigne, at least, has the insight to dispense with such posturing. She can look back at the charts for the last few decades and see what people demonstrably like. Then, like Kramer in that Seinfeld episode, she discards the body of the muffin and retains the tasty muffin-top: the hook.
Plenty of the music we all enjoy listening to well enough is not Great Art, and needn’t be. Mostly it’s just peppy background music to set the mood while you’re out and about or puttering around doing something else at home. So let’s dispense with the farce: why pay fat royalties to some faux artiste when we’ve got decades of fine music to use as fodder for a potentially purely automatic, computerized recombination process. Keep a couple decent vocalists on staff, and maybe a few hack writers to throw down lyrics — voila. Fun music that’s no worse than the mainstream chart-toppers, but without the cult-of-personality overhead.
