the journalistic takeaway on this recent study of pop music from 1960-2010 offers a great example in the popular distortions of scientific
investigation. the study's authors admit they only sampled a tiny
fraction of American music: "Given that the Hot 100 is certainly a
biased subset of [new singles released in the USA], our conclusions
*cannot be extended to the population of all releases*"
(asterisk-emphasis ours). yet that
didn't stop editors from publishing headlines such as "Computer
scientists prove 80s pop music is boring" (PBS News) or "The Beatles and
Rolling Stones didn't revolutionize music" (NME). what the study
actually showed (not proved) was that the charts in the late 80s became
more homogenous ('boring' is subjective) and that the British Invasion
built on a dramatic but already on-going turn in musical tastes ...but
never mind these pesky details, newspaper readers. even more galling is
the soft bigotry of burying the lead: "The rise of RAP and related
genres appears, then, to be *the single most important event* that has
shaped the musical structure of the American charts in the period that
we studied". not even a plurality of the headlines I read trumpeted
this, and when mentioned, it was almost always presented as something
along the lines of "It's Official: Hip-Hop Is More Important Than the
Beatles" (Esquire) or "Busta Rhymes, Snoop Dog put the Beatles, Rolling
Stones in shade" (The Australian) - a comparison the study never
explicated! WHAT to the THE to the FUCK! to us, that's just quasi-racist
click-bait for the Bill O'Reillys of the world, meant to compel
crotchety white Baby Boomers to leave nasty comments on how
sophisticated Beatlemania was when juxtaposed with the downfall of
Western civilization that is hip-hop. what's more, if we can't even
trust the press to report accurately on entertainment news, how can we
trust them to get their facts straight on climate change or
international crises? same ol' song and dance.
