Very false.

Tribute to JJ & On the Corner >>>>> Bitches Brew & Silent Way

There are different possible definitions for "pop music". Eric's version would be a short term for "popular music", so all music that is popular with a broad mainstream audience. You could also define "pop music" as encompassing all music that evolved from pop cultural influences (as opposed to high cultural ones), which then would include music that is not actually all that popular, and even exclude music that may be very popular. By this second definition it definitely makes sense to study pop music from a stylistic or social viewpoint without looking at economic factors.

First of all "middle class" was too specific.

How can you define pop music as music coming from pop culture influences? Isn't that just circular logic? Where did the pop culture come from?

corrections, how would you define "pop music"?

RE: the Bob Dylan/lyrics discussion a few pages back, Bob Dylan has a mastery of the English language never seen before or since in the history of rock music (or probably music as a whole). Like, it's never even been approached.

Good Lyrics, just like music, is subjective.

Whether someone likes something is subjective, obviously, but Bob Dylan's lyrics are objectively more complex and show a greater command of the English language than pretty much any other lyricist that I can think of. The way he uses rhythm, rhyme, repetition of sounds, contrast of sounds, metaphor, innuendo, imagery, and pretty much everything else you can do with words is beyond compare in rock lyricists.

It is possible to like something without being sensitive to valid aesthetic reasons. Hyper-radical subjectivism about taste is worse than creationism.

What's "valid"? Who decides valid? Who decides who decides valid? Why? How?

townes van zandt does the same job without the wordiness.

You changed your post.

In any case, aesthetic validity is no different from rational validity in scientific discourse in that competent but fallible people put forth the best reasons they can and work through them together. Only in the case of aesthetic reasoning there is a substantial subjective component that science excludes, which makes it complicated but doesn't change the importance of validity.

Well I decided I'd rather continue drama than try to stop it. Plus I forget this is supposed to be about music discussion. But I have as much interest in the subjective/objective conversation as I do in whatever the hell they talk about in the vocalists forum.

In that case, I preferred your first post.

I'll have to check him out. Heard the name, but don't think I've listened to more than a song or two.

Sounds like someone doesn't have much familiarity with English music from the renaissance through the baroque (not that I have much either but I think you'd definitely have to dig in there to say that with any certainty).