Well, music in general is addictive. We use it to feel better. It's sorta like, an emotional food, if you will. Try not listening to music for a week. Hard as hell, right? Pop music has been around, for, well, ever. Even ret*d songs about nothing, just for the sake of partying/etc have been around forever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leck_mich_im_Arsch Mozart wrote that, for example. So, nothing new under the sun...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOswjwx1QKw
There's a pop song from the 50s, pre-rock music.
I fail to see how it's more like, deep or artistic than say, "Call Me Maybe" I guess in some ways it is, and obviously Dean Martin is like, better, but still, pop music is pop music. Songs about love, stuff like that.
I think the only way it has a negative effect on the youth is first off the subject matter of the music and the image of the recording artist, and the image is probably more of a positive or negative effect than the actual music subject matter, thanks to the advent of music videos, or just people generally knowing more about an artist than just seeing the face on an album cover (websites and twitters and all that fun newfangled technology.) In this case, I really do believe pop music has gotten worse in both those regards. The musical content has on the whole gotten raunchier and more blatant, and things that would possibly be innuendos before are now just blatantly obvious in the lyrics.
It comes down I think in some ways to this, a lot of times raunchier songs would more or less be like "secret" music, if you would. You'd have to seek it out. Even in the era of Sinatra, Como, Dean Martin, all those people, there were songs that were raunchy and nasty as all hell, just you'd have to seek them out. You wouldn't just turn on the radio and hear them. http://www.cracked.com/article_17625_7- ... blush.html Here's some examples. So there was just a higher degree of self censorship back then, so all we as the general public remember is the Comos and Sinatras of that era. Also, one thing to keep in mind, we've pretty much only been able to listen to recorded music for about a hundred years. It was about 1880 or so when the phonograph was invented, iirc.
I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. Those are my beefs with pop music. The fact that it's catchy? Who cares! Good music should be memorable. The only issue with pop music in that regard is that sometimes people will be left uncultured regarding music, but people can become narrowminded and uncultured with any type of music they choose, not just pop music. And as far as if Britney Spears could have become Adele (I don't see why people think she's so great, but OK) or Diana Ross? Well, nobody abducted her (well maybe it was a Masonic New World Order plot, but that cannot be proved or disproved) if she didn't wanna sing what she was singing, she could have just...not sang it.
So the fact that good musicians get "stolen" for pop music, well, maybe so, but would they have gone on and made anything of more artistic merit if they didn't make pop music? The other thing too, regarding the artistic merit of pop music, it's all in the eye of the beholder with that sorta thing. Art is entirely subjective, without much objective standards in the judging of it. But, for a neat example to me, italodisco is one of the pop music styles I like a lot. I've shown this on here before, but Miko Mission, italodisco artist. This song is from the 80s, and was a popular song and likely made him some cash.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPA6uYNdOTs
This song here is from 2011.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DVT6qzGxkY
No difference really between it and 1980s. Why? Because he likes it. Nobody really likes italodisco anymore, it's pretty much for all intents and purposes a dead genre. That video has like 36K views, whereas his old song has like 200K. But he decided to make a new song anyway. He could have moved on to "better things" but he legitimately liked italodisco, and stubbornly stuck to making it.
So I dunno, long rambly post by me, but I hope you get my points.