Tag Archives: mainstream

Momentous Mondays: Influential artists of the next 5-10 years – Week 44: Apollo LTD

Motivational pop-rock isn’t necessarily all the rage, nowadays that is. Gone are the days of artists like the Goo Goo Dolls, Train and to some extent, Coldplay. Yes, these artists during their heyday (which unfortunately, isn’t really now) dominated the sonic landscape and created music with an inspirational edge, all the while utilising the mainstream music market and delivering songs of poignancy and fun, reminding us that it is ok to have a deep song right next to a jovial, fun track on a track-list on an album. Coldplay brought to us one of the 2000s best in ‘Fix You’, quite possibly for me, one of the top 5 songs to ever grace our ears in that decade. Also in the same decade was both Train and Goo Goo Dolls- Train brought to us the quirky and often nonsensical ‘Drops of Jupiter’ (but we all didn’t care, it’s still a classic song, all these years later), and even the thought-provoking ‘Calling All Angels’, ‘Marry Me’, ‘When I Look to the Sky’ and ‘If It’s Love’. And while the Goo Goo Dolls’ biggest hit ‘Iris’ was unveiled in the 1990s (1998 to be precise), the band still had relative success during the 2000s, with songs like ‘Big Machine’, ‘Here is Gone’, ‘Better Days’, ‘Give a Little Bit’, ‘Stay With You’ and ‘Sympathy’. Coldplay, Train and Goo Goo Dolls were all delivering what was considered to be popular during that era- motivational pop-rock, and while that type of branding has always been able to strike a chord with me (considering my own love of CCM and worship music, this umbrella of motivational pop-rock is something in the mainstream that can be very closely attributed to CCM/worship if ever someone was able to find a proverbial link there!), it seemed that as though time went on and music changed, the artists that changed with them seemed to not as care as much for the ‘motivational’ genre as the next guy, and started to place more emphasis on the glitz and glamour of the music, than the lyrics and music themselves. Which is a bit of a shame though- but when you do look around at the music of today, it can be hard pressed to find artists that seem to embrace the motivational pop-rock umbrella as well as bands like Train, Goo Goo Dolls and Coldplay did, way back in the 2000s. Sure, these three bands are still at it today, and are still delivering motivational pop-rock anthems for the masses, but there is where it all stops.

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MOMENTOUS MONDAYS: INFLUENTIAL ARTISTS OF THE NEXT 5-10 YEARS – WEEK 2: LAUREN DAIGLE

Recently, I have started to become a bit more reflective and introspective- and more specially, the more and more I think about life in general, and the way it has gone for myself and maybe for others I have come in contact with; the more grateful I am to be living in Australia. And I’m sure the same goes for anyone living in the U.S, England, New Zealand, and other English-speaking countries I reckon. Not that other developing countries are ‘bad’ or anything like that, but I’ve recently noticed something. For all of the faults of Trump, for all of the issues to do with Brexit and for all of the turmoil and fallout with the Israel Falou saga; one thing remains constant. And it’s the wide range of music available to us via Spotify, iTunes, Youtube, Google Play, Amazon and other streaming services. In stores where we can buy physical CD’s (yep, they still exist!), the range for albums of different genres is quite varied, and it is in my own opinion that if you were to search for an album to listen to, you’d probably find at least one, but maybe two or three, that you could like straight away. Are there luxuries of music and the wide variety of artists available in countries like China, India and other countries in Africa?

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Sentimental Saturdays and Message Mondays (How Fast do we Consume Music?)

Gone are the days when you can appreciate music for what it really is- a song to be savoured, a song to be listened to again and again, with every listen a new meaning is imparted to whomever listens. With the advent of Spotify, youtube, iTunes, Amazon, Pandora and every other musical service at your fingertips, skipping songs seems to be the norm nowadays. Listening to a song to death, until another track comes along, seems to be all the rage, when in fact sometimes we are called to just sit and mull over a song more than usual. Often, we may be so hasty to move onto the next new song, that we may skip over things that God may even want to say to us. We may be in fact rushing so fast from one thing to the next (music is a clear example) that we may miss what God may have in store entirely. Which is why this new post for Sentimental Saturdays is about lament, lamenting that how we have listened to music in the past (really listening to the tracks, because without the ease of access of music, we are forced to focus on what the lyrics really mean for us as people) is sadly how listeners of music don’t listen to music now. We live in a now-centred (and me-centred) society, that any hint of anything taking longer than expected is shafted, for the new, quick and convenient.

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