SW Knows A Thing Or Two About Music.

Interview With Steven Wilson by PopMatters

Just came across this interview with Steven Wilson on the web. This man seriously knows what he is talking about in all areas of music. Below is a small portion of the interview.
I had a hard time picking what I wanted to paste into this blog - but this particular response really resonated with me...


"You’ve declared your love for pop music such as Donna Summer or ABBA. What do you make of the contemporary pop music landscape dominated by Lady Gaga and Katy Perry?
Pretty depressing, because it’s all generic. You can buy boxes that can make you sound like you sing in tune, even if you can’t. You can buy boxes that, at the push of a button, can give you the drum sound from a record that you like or a particular keyboard. It’s too easy, now, to sound like other people.

The epitome of that is American Idol where everyone appears to want to sound like Mariah Carey or Kelly Clarkson. That kind of style of singing has become a blueprint and so many people try to emulate that. You ask yourself how well someone like Tom Waits or Neil Young or Nick Drake would do if they went on American Idol. They would be laughed out of the audition. So we have a generation of artists coming through now believing that they should aspire to being generic. What I loved about pop music of the past—particularly artists like ABBA or The Carpenters—was that they were so unbelievably distinctive. I’m thinking back to an era where Marvin Gaye sounded nothing like Stevie Wonder, nothing like Aretha Franklin, nothing like Otis Redding. Now, even the white singers want to sound like that generic black R&B Soul voice. It’s boring."

AMEN.