I’d just like to hear some better music, is all.

Referring to Lady Gaga specifically, I’m not necessarily saying artists are imitating her and “sacrificing” their own originality. I’m just saying pop music is a genre specifically designed to lack originality, for the most part.

Plus, it’s certainly fine if you think Lady Gaga’s music is less than interesting or amazing, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t original. It just means you don’t like it.

It also doesn’t mean that she is, as mentioned, eroding any particular artist’s originality or preventing their full potential form reaching its maximum capacity by spearheading a new style.

Lady Gaga isn’t doing anything different than, say, Madonna. Or Briteny. Or the Backstreet Boys. Pop is a genre designed to mimic what’s popular. So, yes, Beyonce is going to briefly spend some time working with Lady Gaga in order to keep up with needs of a hyper-consuming economy.

In my opinion and in all honesty, none of this means the genre is in trouble, or that anything “happened” to it. It’s been the same genre since its development twenty years ago. We’re just in the Gaga Era of Pop History. There will be plenty of other eras, and there will be plenty of other imitators, there to sell and be sold.

I guess my biggest qualm with Gaga is just what you mentioned, Chris. She forces other artists to try and catch up with her by recycling her ideas (at least the ones that don’t come off as random), thus sacrificing their own originality.

If Rihanna were to go back to the style she cultivated on “Music of the Sun,” she would not sell as many CDs as she does now. But I think she’d be respected for doing what she does best. Same with Beyonce. She was still sultry and attractive back in her “Crazy in Love” days, but not sleazy and gaudy in her current “Videophone” era—a part of her career clearly back seat-driven at one point by Gaga herself.

Artists are clamoring to do the thing that makes money and that fuels what most of us regard as capitalism. And that’s not always what pop has been. Hopefully someone will release something great in 2010!

However, pop music in general may not seem like an “original” genre because it’s just that - the popular music. Pop it’s necessarily reinventing itself or losing some initial quality we’ve since forgotten. It’s a style of music that fits well in a Capitalist economy and manages to make millions off of similar vibes, beats, themes, and styles that the general American consumer will buy and enjoy.

That being said, pop still provides different, new artists from time to time (again, Gaga), and of course, within pop music we may be able to interpret particular ideas, cultural values or social and political commentaries, but that doesn’t mean pop music is going to always seem variably new each year, nor does it mean pop has only recently become a genre that often favors recycled musical concepts if they prove successful in the market.