MARCATo - Question-Specific Discussion for Popular Music

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

Hey all! This is the thread for question-specific discussion for the Popular Music questions in MARCATo. Lest you forget, this is what that entailed:

1 21st century pop music
1 1950-2000 pop music
1 rap, R&B, hip hop
1 post-1960 rock
1 blues, soul, folk, country, pre-1960 rock
5 misc / mixed / other popular music

(So, no, I did not write any of the video game, TV, etc. tossups, except with two exceptions, Lemonade Mouth and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, since their soundtracks are also treated as albums in their own right.)

Overall, I tried to be as varied with the types of pop music that were clued throughout the tournament, but I wanted to make sure that the proportions of different types of pop music were also representative of the pop music tastes of most general audiences. In other words, I wanted to make sure there was something for everybody, but I particularly wanted to reward people who keep a close finger on the pulse of the pop music mainstream, since general pop culture is most strongly defined by the mainstream.

I'm also aware that it may seem to some people that the pop music skewed more difficult than the classical. I do dispute this but I understand why it may feel that way –- most quizbowlers are attuned to a classical music canon, and popular music (like all popular culture in quizbowl) does not afford that same luxury. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the way that many quizbowlers (and many people in general) consume popular music is different from the way they consume classical music. When it comes to popular music, since there is no "canon," people are more likely to just listen to the things that they like and are familiar with and not listen to much outside of those things. Thus, the diversity of the popular music may have also made it seem more difficult to individuals, especially considering the solitary format of this tournament.

Finally, I understand that there were times that convertibility was made difficult by asking for albums rather than artists, and I rectified a couple of questions accordingly for the second mirror. The goal behind asking for albums was 1. to "fraud proof" questions and make sure people wouldn't buzz too early from recognizing someone's voice and 2. to give a chance for people who listen through albums (rather than individual songs or artist compilations) to get a leg up for engaging with those works in such a way. I do not deny that there were a few tossups that were made extremely difficult to buzz on because of that, but I took care of the most egregious culprits and overall wanted to strike that balance. In any case, questions that asked people to "name the album" took up only about a fifth of the popular music questions.

Anyways, I wanted to preemptively preface any further discussion with that to offer some clarity and so that there wouldn't be a need to rehash this matter excessively. Ask away!

(I also plan to drop a playlist containing almost all of the music that I used in the popular music questions once all mirrors have concluded. Stay tuned for that!)

[Cheynem]

I think your reasoning about using album tossups makes sense, but I'll just note in my experience:

-Usually about the midway point, I recognized the artist and then either just guessed their most prominent album OR guessed the name of the last song being played OR just guessed the name of the artist. I guess this could be doing what the questions were intended to do, but I also think in the cases in which I knew the names of prominent albums, I could still buzz at the point in which I just recognized the performer (like I couldn't remember "Rumours," but I certainly would have just buzzed and said that the moment I realized Fleetwood Mac was being played).

-The one album in the tournament that I had listened to cold and knew relatively early on was "Beyonce's self-titled album." (The clues for that question were very well done, by the way). I still didn't get a good buzz at all because I kept thinking to myself "what the hell was this called?" That's on me, obviously, and I don't know if other people shared my plight.

-I loved the common link questions.

[ryanrosenberg]

1 21st century pop music
1 1950-2000 pop music
1 rap, R&B, hip hop
1 post-1960 rock
1 blues, soul, folk, country, pre-1960 rock
5 misc / mixed / other popular music

When your distribution is 50% "whatever I want to write", I think there's generally a reasonable expectation that that distribution will be roughly distributed across the remaining categories. Instead, it felt like every day had at least 3-4 current pop music tossups, with the rap also skewing very current. Once I realized that this was how the tournament was going to be, I could adjust to it, but this was quite a surprise at first (and a not very welcome one considering my music knowledge).

Compounding that, there also seemed to be a big discrepancy in difficulty between the older and contemporary music. Comparing, for example, the tossups on Thriller and Dark Side of the Moon with the tossups on Rodeo or the tossup on Lady Gaga cluing solely from Chromatica, the contemporary music felt a lot harder, and I'd be interested to see if conversion stats bear that out.

[tpmorrison]

Even as someone who basically just twiddled my thumbs during the classical questions (which I’m sure were great), I had a really fun time playing this set, so thanks a lot to Wonyoung for all his hard work!

My main nitpick was the album issue, which Wonyoung already brought up. I guess the biggest thing I’d add is that a number of the album tossups (Fine Line, Hollywood’s Bleeding, etc.) were by very mainstream artists who, in my experience, are much more likely to be engaged with on a song level than on an album level (e.g. on the radio and in other commercial uses). I don’t think asking for an album like Fine Line rather than Harry Styles is really eliminating the chance to “fraud,” as opposed to just deflating the buzz distributions and conversion rates unnecessarily. Similarly, among less radio-friendly artists, I'm not sure why the Ventura tossup couldn't have been on Anderson.Paak, or the Tidal tossup on Fiona Apple.

Another possible issue with album tossups is that they can flatten the buzz distribution relative to cluing from a variety of albums by the artist, since people often either know the album in question very well or almost not at all. From the buzz data, it looks like this might have happened on some other album tossups (e.g. IGOR and Blackstar).

Another comment I had is that a handful of the non-album tossups (Lemonade Mouth and Rex Orange County come to mind as examples) just seemed too hard to have as answer lines and predictably did not play very well. I think this is a situation where, if this content comes up, it should be in the form of common links (say, “Lemonade” and “Orange,” respectively). If a question is going to go unanswered in the vast majority of rooms, and there is a way to make it play better by converting it to a common link, I think that’s generally the right way to go. I thought a lot of the common links that were in the set did this really well, my favorite probably being the “jailhouse” one.

I also felt that the recent music leaned very heavily toward mainstream, radio-friendly pop, but this is just a personal preference. I agree with Ryan that the recent stuff tended to be far harder than the older content, though this is of course partly a function of the audience.

A few scattered thoughts on specific questions, just in case there are more mirrors and any of these are helpful:

-the lead-in to the Frank Ocean tossup seemed far too early, as this is a very memorable skit from one of his two most famous albums
-similar issue on the Talking Heads tossup, whose lead-in was the very memorable opening notes of their most famous album
-I could hear Michael Jackson’s voice in the first clue of the Thriller tossup, which could lead to some guesses with his most famous album
-similarly, the Coldplay tossup dropped Chris Martin's voice 25 seconds in, which it looks like most people were able to buzz on
-“Beautiful Day” by U2 appears to be too famous to be a lead-in
-The Tame Impala question asked for the “lead artist,” which confused me because the main answer was in fact just the band (edit: oops, I see he also goes by that name, ignore me)

To reiterate, these are fairly minor comments, and I really enjoyed the questions overall!

[Asterias Wrathbunny]

I want to preface this by thanking you for your hard work at making this tournament happen. I enjoyed most of the pop music questions, and really appreciate the diverse array of artists represented in the set.

My main criticism of the pop music echoes what Ryan said. Many answerlines for pop music more recent than 2010 were significantly more difficult than those of previous decades. This doesn't just pertain to albums as answerlines, as some non-album answerlines also had poor convertibility: FKA Twigs and Maggie come to mind. They are accomplished and important artists, and I'm not saying the answerlines should have been different, but just that answerlines this difficult should have been more evenly distributed to music from other decades. I recall answers like Beatles White Album, Stevie Wonder, London Calling, etc., which were among the most famous artists and albums of that time. Wham! might be an exception, but it still converted well by the end. It did feel at times like the many questions on modern pop in the "other" category did shut out opportunities to represent other genres, like punk, alternative, and folk, which I did not feel were represented well at this tournament.

Some thoughts on specific questions:
- I agree with Tim that Beautiful Day is too famous for a lead-in
- Higher Ground is too easy for a second clue on Stevie Wonder
- Lead Belly's distinct voice was revealed too early in the question. Even though there weren't many buzzes on it, I frauded it without knowing any of the clues.

[weebyjeebys]

I'm going to echo the sentiments of all of the various other commenters and say that distribution skewed harder as the years became more recent, while other, older content in the rock and pop categories were very canonical albums and artists.

However, one thing I will mention is how little 90s content there was throughout the set. Nevermind is the only prominent example I can think of where an artist or album was clued from that era. Not cluing something like Radiohead or Britney Spears across the whole tournament was incredibly surprising, and I think in future efforts, more concentration towards temporal subdistributions in the rock/pop content should be considered. I think this also might balance out the variety/difficulty problems that people felt towards the later, 2010s-era music, as there'd be more focus on balance in terms of content and difficulty across all the decades.

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

I'm going to echo the sentiments of all of the various other commenters and say that distribution skewed harder as the years became more recent, while other, older content in the rock and pop categories were very canonical albums and artists.

However, one thing I will mention is how little 90s content there was throughout the set. Nevermind is the only prominent example I can think of where an artist or album was clued from that era. Not cluing something like Radiohead or Britney Spears across the whole tournament was incredibly surprising, and I think in future efforts, more concentration towards temporal subdistributions in the rock/pop content should be considered. I think this also might balance out the variety/difficulty problems that people felt towards the later, 2010s-era music, as there'd be more focus on balance in terms of content and difficulty across all the decades.

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "90s content" then, considering that Tina Turner, Californication, Tom Petty, and Lauryn Hill are also squarely "90s content" (and this is still excluding the "90s content" clued in common-links, such as the Destiny's Child clue in the brown eyes TU, as well as borderline "90s content" like Stankonia). I understand and agree with the general point made by most people in this thread that there was more 21st century pop music than not, but I don't think that certain decades of the 20th century were more lacking than others. If anything, the 2000s probably had the least content represented of all decades.

As far as the difficulty disparity between the older and newer content goes, I agree that the newer content definitely played harder. I think this was exacerbated by the relatively larger amount of newer content (necessitating deeper and more diverse cuts) as well as the fact that, like you said, the older content was inherently more "canonical." Older pop music has more of a defined "canon" because of how long it's had to become deeply ingrained in our culture (I found that, while I was selecting clues for older pop music, it was thus extremely difficult to find appropriately difficult hard clues -- many of the acceptably hard clues would either be a little too easy or obscenely obscure). On the other hand, a lot of currently relevant pop music may not have the same lasting relevance of the Beatles or Michael Jackson. Artists like Maggie Rogers and Rex Orange County may not be remembered significantly decades from now, but they are topical today and I think it's important to ask about things that are currently important but may not be important even a few years down. (None of this is to deny that the newer pop music questions were more difficult, and I could've managed that better. But, as Tim said, that difficulty disparity is also a function of audiences as well.)

[Quinctilius Varus]

I don't want to pile on, but I agree with the posts above. There was as much 2010s content in 2-3 packets as there was content from any other decade throughout the whole set. If someone wasn't familiar with music from the last few years, then they wouldn't have been able to convert half of the pop questions in some rounds. I don't mind a tournament that skews recent in its content, but I don't think music from 2010 onward should take up the same amount of space as music from the previous fifty years.

A few genres seemed to have little to no representation in this tournament. I only remember two tossups on hip hop before 2010 in this tournament (Stankonia and Biggie Smalls, with another OutKast clue in the roses tossup), and there was no metal (unless you count Def Leppard). The common link questions were a good opportunity to clue music from a wide variety of time periods and genres, but they seemed to overwhelmingly dip back into the well of pop and hip hop from the last few years. Some of the common links I thought were well-executed include prisons, diamonds, and roads.

Despite the complaints above, I very much enjoyed the pop music (and MARCATo as a whole). Most questions had a good difficulty gradient, and the answerlines for pre-2010 content were well chosen. Non-English language music was also represented well. As mentioned in the initial post, there isn't a defined canon for pop like there is for classical, so it's challenging to consistently keep questions accessible, which this tournament did fairly successfully.

[gimmedatguudsuccrose]

I only remember two tossups on hip hop before 2010 in this tournament (Stankonia and Biggie Smalls, with another OutKast clue in the roses tossup), and there was no metal (unless you count Def Leppard).

I agree completely but just want to point out that there was at least 1 other metal clue (the Black Sabbath song in the common link on 'Die Young').

One slight issue I want to highlight is regarding the tossups on Mandarin and Spanish. In the Mandarin tossup, which was completely instrumental until the giveaway, almost all of the clips had a distinct 'latin' flavor, leading a decent number of people who decided to 'take the plunge' to neg with Spanish. However, just a couple of rounds later, there was a tossup on Spanish that also used very 'latin' instrumentals quite early in the tossup! I understand the idea that some questions are designed to punish players for 'frauding' too much, but then to essentially have the exact same question structure later seems to be a bit too cruel, especially given the difficulty of the tossup on Mandarin (I've attached the buzzcurve for Mandarin below).

As a question writer, I prioritize allowing people with real knowledge to get points over deterring people from frauding who only have 'fake knowlegde' or are just guessing. As I see it (and correct me if I am wrong Wonyoung), this pair of questions seems to be subscribing to the opposite order in its goal of dissuading fraud on the Spanish tossup by punishing fraud on the Mandarin tossup. If there is no way to construct a tossup on 'Spanish' without it being fraudable, I personally would've preferred to see the tossup replaced and the clues used in a common link elsewhere. This is just my personal philosophy on question writing however and I am eager to hear what other people think about this.

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6HOFS ... fJKnALgvHQ

This should be everything, with all songs in order of their cluing within their questions. I believe that the only song this is missing is the giveaway to the Mandarin Chinese tossup, which is unfortunately not on Spotify.

Er, and obviously Ys is also not on Spotify... :(