Talkin' 'bout pop music.

Acoustics, they are a-changin', complains unhappy Dylan

Bob Dylan rags on modern recording and studio production. This article isn't all that great, but this one excerpt sums up my general disdain for major label/big studio pop music production.

"[Dylan's] main criticism of contemporary CDs is the lack of sound clarity arising when producers try to make each strand of a recording as uniformly loud as possible. 'You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just, like ... static.'"

This is something I've noticed in pop radio tunes over the last 10 years or so. Most pop-rock songs seem to have this haze of background rhythmic filler that makes them all sound same-y. It's like the studio thinks a couple of guitars, a bass, and some drums are not enough, so they have to add a wall of tambourines and shakers to fill in any "black" space. The real problem is that what should be background filler is pumped up into the foreground creating the "static" that old Bob is griping about.

Black space is golden.

Maybe I'm just getting old.