Steven Wilson - "Why I'm Making Pop Music Now"

This poppy direction shouldn't have been entirely unexpected at some point. I mean, there were pop pieces all the way back on the first proper Porcupine Tree album `On The Sunday of Life' (`Jupiter Island', anyone? , and some of us were probably at "ground-zero" when Porcupine Tree fully started moving in the song-based direction with `Stupid Dream' and can vividly recall the cries of `sell-out' even back then, and especially when `Lightbulb Sun' went even further in that direction. Now, they're often considered very special PT/SW albums from the fanbase!

Steven said even back at the time of those albums that trying to craft successful accessible tunes was a great challenge that he was fascinated by (probably not his exact words, but I'm sure others remember those kind of quotes from the time), so this seems like even more a natural evolving pattern from him as an artist. Very curious to see how it pans out.

Besides, there's a massive difference between well-crafted catchy songs that still show intelligence, and blatantly commercial vacuous teenybopper fluff. Some people seem to confuse simply being catchy and commercial as being instantly a disgraceful sin!

The song is rather catchy, would make a competitive Eurovision entry. In any case I think when a musician makes such a radical U-turn in his style, it usually means he currently can't come up with notable material belonging to the genre he's associated with or that he's bored of it. 

It's obviously NOT prog, not his first non-prog material and there's nothing wrong or strange with that and no need to say sorry.

"Musical categories/genres are for sissies."

You are acting like an immature and contradictory fanboy (or fangirl) of class II (of class I are those who blindly diss their beloved artist simply because he changed direction and style): On the one hand you reject genres and on the other hand you use adjectives to describe and hence categorize music…. 

Blaqua wrote: It's obviously NOT prog, not his first non-prog material and there's nothing wrong or strange with that and no need to say sorry.

If Wilson achieves a burst of raised status and/or greater commercial/financial success with this single and album, which would mean new audiences coming to his shows, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd model a set-list around his more accessible solo tunes and PT tracks. So we'd get things like `The Rest Will Flow', `Piano Lessons', `Where We Would Be', `Trains', `Feel So Low' etc etc....which wouldn't be so bad considering he wouldn't have played some of them for quite a while/ever...and they would be the best options to avoid freaking out the `muggles'/non-proggies!

He's done a lot of other things in the past, that wasn't Porcupine Tree. I don't see the issue

I guess he's doing what he thinks is better for his career, and that's ok. I hope he finds enough people who get interested in his music and buy his record/song, since I won't, and I'm guessing many of the prog lovers who used to buy his music, won't buy it either.

[QUOTE=aliano]He just rips off, whether it's prog or pop.
[/QUOTE

This isn't much pop from what I am hearing so far - Permanating and Song of I.   Might have been pop a long time ago, but sounds way too complicated to be pop in today's market, even accounting for such dreary songs like Take Me to Church being pop hits now.  He has always had these sort of songs, like Postcard on Grace for Drowning.  Pariah sounds more 'commercial' but lot less so than Bent Knee's Hands Up.

Edited by cemego - July 04 2017 at 12:27