March 1, 2012

Pop music stars can't hold together a group anymore











  1. I think a lot of cocooning is because of the infiltration of the working-class into public venues. Its reasonable to prefer doing your own thing, when those around you are rougher than you are.

    That being said, this explains the Starbucks phenomena. Its so expensive, it guarantees that the people there are at least reasonably self-disciplined and not overcome with raging jealousy(which, in my experience, is characteristic of blue-collar people).

  2. white-people music groups haven't splintered so badly

    Production changes? When you need a band with multiple roles and division of labour, even though there is still some degree to which membership is fluid (e.g. switching in and out of band member, for example Black Sabbath - might be interesting to look at frequencies in changes in band membership in major groups by time as a function of group cohesion, although this would be tougher) the band is still a unit with continuity because there is a minimal set of roles which the unit needs to meet (drummer, bass, lead guitar, lead vocal).

    If you're just some guy rapping with a producer actually doing the other music and when you team up with others you actually all contribute something relatively independent to the final product which is not actually necessarily for the final product in the way that a rock song needs a minimal set of precussion, bass, lead and vocals. That's gonna lower cohesion all on its own.

    Same thing for loner (?) dance music producers who can fill all the roles - earlier there were a minimum of Mike Oldfield types who were dedicated enough polymaths to literally just record loads of separate tracks themselves and layer them to make pieces of music which were just their own thing, but the advent of cheap synths, sequencers and multi track recordings really changes the dynamic of how many people you "need" to work with.

