Something new for me--

Dunno why, but last night I clicked on Billboard.com/"The Hot 100," and, when I'd read the description printed under that Rubric--

The week's most popular current songs across all genres, ranked by radio airplay audience impressions as measured by Nielsen BDS, sales data as compiled by Nielsen SoundScan and streaming activity data from online music sources tracked by Nielsen BDS.  Songs are defined as current if they are newly released titles, or songs receiving widespread airplay and/or sales activity for the first time--

I clicked on the first twenty or so and played (with my fine Boze sound system) a couple of minutes from each of the first eight or nine "songs" by male (I mean, why punish myself?) "artists" (singers).  This was the first time in 63 years that I have deliberately listened to popular music, chosen in the narrowest and vulgarest sense as the music that the many-headed, at just this point in time, will pay money to listen to.  My impressions:

Well, first of all, I'd like to congratulate these earnest and comely young men for their humane, congruent tonalism, for their sparing use of cacophony and atonalism, and for singing their simple "songs" quite nicely on pitch.  But, on the negative side, I have a couple of major criticisms:  (1) They are over-miked and much, much louder than they need to be.  And (2) the lyrics--the words--of the "songs" they sing (as near as I can make them out) are bathetically neurotic, ill-conceived, badly written, and quite plainly stupid--simply to recite them, without "music" to half-drown them out, would be as embarrassing as reading aloud, for all to hear, from the works of J.K. Rowling or Danielle Steele. Which is why none of these "songs" has an honest tune that you could hum or whistle--much less an interesting harmonic progression: because, as Wagner sort of said, you can't write a good song to bad lyrics (If it wasn't Wagner who said so, it was me).  And that's why I put quotes around their vocal effusions: Because songs, in the sense of such songs as I (literally) have written, or of 'Das Veilchen' or 'Die Lotosblume,' they ain't.

I suppose that I do accept, in a general sort of way, Pablo Casals' verdict that "Rock 'n Roll is poison put to sound; a brutalization both of life and art."  But more precisely, as a perceptive teenager said to me a couple of decades ago, "The music I like--like to dance to--is just nothing to you--nothing at all."  And I'd say that's a fair summation of my judgement on it.  Particularly, for example, the so-called "music" of Lady Gaga:  utterly nothing, nothing at all.  However, I found it ironic (in fact I was laughing my butt off) that when, a few years ago, as the year's top-selling "artists," Eminem (whose strongly rhythmical, slant-rhymed poetry I admire, without particularly liking it) and Lady Gaga were put together as co-hosts of a television music awards program, the former could not, and did not, even in his official capacity, conceal his utter contempt of, and complete disdain for, the actual person and the supposed "artistry" of the latter.  And she, poor, insipid cannibal lizard de haute Crèche that I believe her to be, was insufficiently galvanizable to evince the least sign that she understood, much less resented, his brutal, masterly, total rejection of her.