What music seems to be is a sonic expression of those elemental forces that move us. A musical idea takes its shape from the intention of the musician, whether to communicate an emotion such as love, anger, despair or what have you, share a form of meditation, express movement and vitality and etc. The idea also takes its shape in accordance with the people relations that are necessary to make a collective musical piece. Music is not only an act of communication between the artist and the audience, but an act of communication between the artists themselves; of course this only holds if the power relations are relatively even.
It takes time to assemble a musical idea. At first there is chaos. Not only is each individual trying to find their voice, but each individual is striving to establish a musical connection to the other individuals involved in the musical group, as well as a connection to the aggregation of these connections which becomes something beyond the sum of its parts.
Over time as a music genre matures, the actual process of arriving at a coherent musical idea within the genre becomes more and more truncated, due to the repetitive reproduction of the rhythms, structures and aesthetics that have been found to work together. The process of assembling a given musical idea is then mastered and refined, allowing for careful work on the actual composition and architecture of the musical idea, as opposed to trying to perfect the process of assembling it.
Pop music (today's meaning of the word anyways) then is the deliberate assembly of a collection of musical elements that are found to be favorable for a large proportion of the consuming population. It is the complete short circuit of the organic music-making process, an artificial extraction and re-assembly of musical units, not unlike the production of fast food or the conducting of modern agriculture. Like processed food, some pop music is irresistible due to superficial sensations alone, and then some of it is pretty good, and then most of the rest of it is pretty bad; most of it is rarely nutritious.
It takes time to relearn the actual art of making music after the hyperconcentration and corruption of assembled music necessitates a return to the fundamentals.
