Caught by the Hook

At the moment I'm working at a school for foreign kids learning English and I'm intrigued by their taste in music. There's this one track that I'm told was a big hit across Europe (always a bad sign) that has got me thinking...

On the face of it it's just another dodgy dance tune, but it has this hook which gets stuck in your head. It's very annoying. Needless to say they love it and play it on their phones constantly.

Nice euro-pop venue

There's a lot of other tunes with the same basic sound or tone colour, if you will, but this one knocks 'em bandy and it's all because of that simple hook.

It seems they are all so easily pleased, well, sonically anyway. Anything with a basic song structure and one little bit different from the rest, repeated every so often , is exciting.

I'm not saying we all have to listen to music that is ridiculously complex and subscribe to some Rick Wakeman ideal that the time and key signatures of a song have to be ever-changing and songs must be long and played by seriously skilled musicians, far from it, but I just think that it is a bit moronic to go wild about such simple sonic pleasures.

Looking good Rick

I mean, take a simple punk tune, for instance, or a great hip-hop tune. The music itself will be basic but there will be some form of intellectual pleasure in there such as a great lyric or a crashing drum pattern. Something stimulating.

This bloody awful euro-pop is just drivel. There is nothing. Richard Hell thought his generation was blank, on the evidence I've seen and heard: this generation of European kids is far blanker.