Studies Show My Rock Songbook Is Right

The pop music of the last 50 years really has become progressively bereft of musical variety.  So says this Spanish analysis of gobs of pop songs .

So Martha Bayles is right.  Geoffrey O’Brien’s nightmare last chapter of Sonata for Jukebox is right.   And me too, I think.  See my Rock Songbook #52 , especially the part that says:

“A1: The pop-song form has definite limits.

A2: Modern intellectual classes, getting caught-up in 20th-century historicist hope, impressed by remarkable breakthroughs in Afro-American music and recording/amplification technology, and charged by the initial novelty of certain mid-60s musical experiments, lost sight of this, and placed a great deal of expectation on rock’s advancement of the pop form.

A3: Continual efforts to break out into something new reaped diminishing returns, and resulted in ever more finely-wrought recyle-ment and mixture of the existing possibilities.”