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Article: The day the music died: Dumb Britannia 4. Pop Music Look what they've done to our songs... Was pop music always this trite, or have we just lost our innocence?
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- March 5, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1999 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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To some people, the question "Has pop music been dumbed down?"
will read like a tautological joke. Pop music, they will tell you,
is inherently dumb, made by dummies for dummies. It lacks, if not
the power of actual speech, the ability to communicate anything
meaningful. Take the good Gilbert Adair, a holdout from an age when
intellectuals took it for granted that Godard was superior to
Hollywood, and a critic who a mere five years ago could fogeyishly
declare that pop music was "not just trite and monotonous but
actually stupefying". For Adair, the "public ubiquity" of pop music
was helping to make Britain "an increasingly `stupid' country", and
its omnipresence was all of a piece with the ...