Great pieces. How would you typify these? You were not labeled an opinion columnist (I assume). These are not straight news articles. I don't read the culture pages of newspapers that deeply, but maybe these are typical of that section, but they're not the typical feature about a certain person, place, or thing, but rather more opinion essays. And these were syndicated. I suppose these articles were for newspapers to pick up; which ones did and how did they present them?
This type of journalism is the norm now in national and political news, but maybe 25 years ago it was restricted in newspapers to the culture, sports, and op-ed pages?
I was born in 1980, so I can confirm that it's not just a matter of age: The Boomers, and to a lesser extent Gen X, really did have better music.
I'm skeptical of the "Boomers picked all the low-hanging fruit" hypothesis, though. I have a fair degree of familiarity with 70s-80s Japanese and Taiwanese music, and there are a ton of great original songs coming out of that region in that era. I can accept that East Asians might have been familiar enough with American music not to accidentally crib melodies from the Anglosphere, but the fact that none of the greatest hits of Japan or Taiwan were independently rediscovered in the US suggests to me that songwriters have not come anywhere close to finding all the good melodies.
For my whole lifetime, it's been acknowledged the Brazil has great pop music. But there are only two Brazilian melodies Americans are familiar with: the superb "Girl from Ipanema" and the wretched "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" that Rod Stewart acknowledged he stole from some Brazilian mediocrity. The laws of probability suggest there must be more memorable Brazilian melodies, but few in America have heard them.
I was thinking Albert Morris's "Feelings" might be a third, but on looking it up to confirm, I learned that he cribbed it from a 50s French Song, Loulou Gasté's "Poir Toi." "Mas Que Nada" counts, I think. It was popular enough to get play time on oldies stations, anyway.
Mas Que Nada definitely qualifies as famous and since it was most popularly performed by Brasil '66 I would say counts as Brazilian although lead singer Lani Hall* was born in Chicago
*Hall (79) is married to Herb Alpert who turns 90 next month
I've told the story before about a local DJ in 2015 telling his audience that "The early 80s is Classic Rock". A big problem is also anything new that sounds good will get an immediate "they sound just like" from people.
When I was growing up, the 60s music was considered Classic Rock. Now the 80s is considered Classic Rock. Radio advertisers don't much care to sway the tastes of old fogies. People who consider 60s music classic are on their way to the graveyard.
When I was driving a lot in 2023, radio stations seemed to have a dividing line around 1973. E.g., L.A. radio stations played the Eagles' 1975 "Hotel California" a huge amount but the Eagles' 1971 "Take It Easy" hardly ever. I suspect they had a rule of thumb about when people retired and stopped driving to work.
"Hotel California" was the big album my last two years in high school. Whoever of my friends who didn't have dates on Saturday would just pile into a car and we'd listen to "Life in the Fast Lane" while downing Budweisers. Life was simpler then.
So much to comment on. The Rock and Roll of the 60s was great but the Beatles breakout in Britain in 1963 is over sixty years old. That music has been done, much of it was brilliant, and will be listened to for a long time. Rock evolved into the Nineties and seems to have died by about 2000. I never kept up with rock after college so my criticisms are a bit facile.
My biggest criticism of modern popular music is that it all sounds like mood music with childish lyrics. This banal sound seems to me to have started sometime in the 80s and has continued to this day. I often think that the average lyricist has the mind of a sixteen year old girl who got stood up by her high school quarterback at the homecoming dance. Many modern lyricists are probably homosexual. To compare, I think of the lyrics of my favorite singers- Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. Adult themes that tell stories.
Don't get me going on rap. The only music I despise more than rap is headbanger music which tend to have no lyrics at all. Music for the mentally ill.
The Great American Songbook songwriters were more professional. Even early rock composers like Chuck Berry or Sam Cooke clearly came from an era with higher standards for lyric writing than, say, Paul McCartney.
When I was a kid mom played the country station in the car because she liked music that told stories. Country music of the 50s-80s was like a master class in economical story telling. Rock music is almost entirely incoherent lyrically but it usually doesn't matter; the audience fills in with the assumption of depth to the vagueness. I'm often amused, in the YouTube age, to learn what many of the songs of my youth were actually about. The banality is crushing.
The other genre that often has good storytelling is the rap part of hip-hop. As for head banger music, I assume you mean metal. Not amazing lyrically but on average no worse than other rock music. Ozzie's first solo album is pretty great, has some catchy tunes, and a few tracks with good lyrics. "Mister Crowley" sure sent me down a rabbit hole.
I can recall a 30-something history professor at Rice U. asking me in 1979 if there were any better rock songs than "Light My Fire" in the stuff I liked.
I've been told second hand from people in the LA music scene at the time, that the Doors were terrible live and everyone was shocked when they had their first hit record.
The three actual musicians always struck me as serious guys who'd be happier tinkering in a studio. were just really not charismatic on stage. The showboat vocalist, Jim, was a soulful guy who wrote decent poetry but he was no Bob Dylan, nor even just an incredibly savvy Mick Jagger. I remember seeing an interview of The Doors in a documentary and Jim kept breaking in with his "sexual politics" thesis and Manzarek looked like he wanted to hide under his chair.
The Doors were great. I like Jim Morrison's pretentious poetry at least as much as Dylan's. The extra long songs most of the albums end with are more fun than most Dylan songs. I'm not impressed by Sir Mick's lyrics on average. They are serviceable and fit the songs but the only one I can think of off the top of my head that really gets to me is "Paint it Black" ...oh and "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown"
The deficit of new melodies seems to have led to hip-hop style sampling coming even to country music, a genre which prides itself on songwriting craftsmanship: e.g. the recent countrified remakes of “Fast Car” and Nirvana’s “In Bloom”.
There are a lot of EDM subgenres that have grown from the use of synths and digital audio workstations. Drum and Bass, Future Bass, etc, came out of techno and Kratwerks. A lot of interesting sounds.
I have read the Jagger-Richards story. Oldham locked them in a room and ordered them to write. And they did once they got down to it. That's why Jagger and Richards are worth $500 million and Charlie Watts was worth only $80 million when he died a few years back. John Lennon and Paul McCartney only started most of their original songwriting in 1963. I have the bootleg Beatles Christmas 1962 album taped in Hamburg at the Star Club. All the songs were covers except for McCartney's "I Saw Her Standing There." Lennon and McCartney exploded with new songs in 1963 and that's why McCartney is a billionaire and that the combined wealth of Yoko Ono, Julian Lennon and Sean Lennon is about a billion.
Yoko is worth over $700 million, Sean is worth about $200 million and Julian got the short-end of the stick. He's worth only $50 million. I am sure he doesn't have to worry about whether he can afford a vacation this Summer.
I don’t even listen to “classic rock” any longer since 80s and 90s stuff got included. I’ve moved to Singers and Swing on Comcast local channel 747. Nothing like some Fats Waller to brighten up my day…
Not sure if Steve or anyone else has seen it, but Netflix has a show called "This is Pop" and there was an episode called Stockholm Syndrome about how Swedish producers have generated an absurdly disproportionate share of music hits from ABBA up to the present. Although I think Beyonce's army of producers tend to be urban Americans, I think Taylor Swift has a fair number of songs with a Swedish producer attached.
I read a comment by a career Navy guy who said he'd been in every major port on every continent and the Pacific archipelago. He said no matter where he was you could hear an ABBA song playing somewhere.
“I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations."
As to John Stuart Mill's point, I was taken aback when George Harrison was successfully sued for copyright violation over his song "My Sweet Lord," which was found to have subconsciously plagiarized the Chiffons' hit "He's So Fine." Were the songs really that similar? Aren't a lot of songs somewhat similar? On the other hand, I can see Chuck Berry's assertion that Brian Wilson's "Surfin' USA" was a copy of his "Sweet Little Sixteen," a case he won and that set the pattern for such suits.
Ed Sheeran was sued not for violating the copyright of lyrics or melody, but for copying the rhythm and chord progression of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" in his song "Thinking Out Loud." Sheeran won that suit, playing guitar and singing to prove that the chord progression in question was so common as to be almost inescapable.
Mill is worried that are a limited number of tone combinations. Pinker says not to worry, and does some hand-wavey math to say, "trillions and trillions". But Pinker ignores Mill's point that most combinations are not pleasing to hear. And had Mill heard modern pop music, he might have added that the 'hook' of most songs rests on just a few notes. So if you're depending on four notes to make your song distinctive, you get 4096 possible combinations, or for five notes, 32 thousand combinations. But people will only pay to hear a tiny fraction of those, so maybe divide by ten or a hundred to get an actual number of listenable melodic hooks.
Of course you can jump it up a it by varying rhythm, skipping octaves, or even abandoning standard chromatic scales or Pythagorean intervals entirely, but ... most of the latter sounds weird to us, while we can still hear the basic tone combinations within the former rhythmic and harmonic disguising.
So Mill might be right about available melodies being a limited resource.
There is some evidence that as time, or perhaps civilization or human consciousness, progresses, the tone combinations we like change, so what sounds discordant in one age sounds pleasing in another. So we might think of it more as a pastoral tribe migrating to fresh pastures with new flora and fauna. Early innovators discover new ways to use the new audial awareness (flora and fauna) until everything gets turned over and a new evolution must occur.
Before this melts into a Music-Was-Better-When-I-Was-Young pissing match, isn't there a way to be objective about this?
Music is, after all, at bottom just audial mathematics, so it lends itself to quantitive analysis well. I seem to recall several surveys analyzing the complexity of popular music over time. I also seem to recall that all such surveys show the same thing: musical complexity has been declining on a more or less straight line for as long as anyone cares to analyze, which is about a century.
This probably coincides with the declining intelligence of the people producing and consuming it. Which also means everyone is right: music really was better when you were younger, but the people older than you are already dead so they they don't get a vote, while the people younger than you are stupider, so their their opinion doesn't count because they can't appreciate what you appreciate.
I think Steve even covered one of these surveys either here or at Unz last year, not the intelligence part but the music analysis part.
Would it be fair to say that the Great Bifurcation began around the turn of the twentieth century when highbrow Composers began wafting up into ever greater abstraction and de-standardization, while the lowbrow popularizers were left to work with an ever diminishing musical vocabulary to maintain accessibility?
I think there is a natural creativity cycle in any genre. It can be long or short.
I’ll limit myself to what I am a little bit, mainly jazz and rock.
For me, jazz peaked about 1959 in the hard bop era. The beauty of jazz is that the best musicians more or less all got to play together There has been nothing hugely original in jazz since about 1970.
For me, it’s harder to time the death of rock but there has been a steady decline since the turn of the century. I don’t think anyone original today is going to write one of the 50 ever greatest rock songs.
I sometimes wonder why a singer who has his or her moment in the sun, like Britney Spears, is suddenly no longer able to get hits. After all, she doesn't write her own songs. Aren't there songwriters available to write hits for her? The musical mockumentary "Walk Hard" has several songs so catchy that I have them on my playlist, the title song and "Guilty as Charged" among them. Evidently there are still people who can write catchy tunes.
Give John Landis credit for winning the fight with Universal in order to put Aretha, James Brown, et al in The Blues Brothers when they were on the balls of their asses. That movie revitalized their careers
The fight over "great songs" by singers is actually kind of a fun music-insider rabbit hole to go down.
For example, Celine Dion scored a career-defining hit with "It's All Coming Back to Me Now." However, the songwriter (who wrote lots of other big-time power ballad-type songs) had promised the song to....MeatLoaf. So when Dion got to sing it first and knocked it out of the park Meatloaf sued the writer and won some money back. But apparently this wasn't so contentious, as Meatloaf and the songwriter collaborated after the lawsuit was finished.
Or how everyone associates "I Will Always Love You" with Whitney Houston and The BoydGuard, but originally the song was a minor country hit for....Dolly Parton. Now, Dolly has always been an expert business woman (and WNBA fan....), so I'm sure Dolly somehow made sure to get paid for Whitney's second version somehow (even if she didn't write it), but I'm sure Diva Dolly was more than a bit miffed it was Whitney and not Dolly who became associated with its success.
If not for Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf would have been chopped liver. Steinman has been gone for almost four years now and when he died I listed to Tony Kornheiser's podcast the following day, as he and Steinman went to high school together. Tony wryly noted that Steinman's parents named their children James and William and then asked (paraphrasing) "Who the fuck did they think they were kidding?"
Music with an actual melody and meaningful lyrics coincided with a typical boomer’s hormonal peak and first slow dance. This left a powerful memory for some of us…even more powerful for those of us who attended a boy’s boarding school!
As a youth I messed around with guitars in the 90s. Back then you needed to learn rock music by ear or have a very good teacher. It led to a lot of messing around and improvisation.
Now you can learn thousands of songs with the fretwork carefully shown on YouTube. In my sons’s class at school there is an 11 year old boy who can play “Master of Puppets “ quite competently.
Rock is perhaps becoming a bit like classical where conscientious children are pushed into it by overbearing parents. The net result will be technical genius but very little original.
Old-timers like Neil Young are amazingly still touring but won’t be in five years let alone ten. Live rock music is going to be largely purveyed by very good cover bands very soon.
I think it's one of God's little jokes that such an unexpectedly expansive set of pop stars in their late-70s/80s is still doddering about and croaking out their hit tunes. I guess some/most of them will be checking out in the coming decade -- or maybe they'll all make it to 100.
In the unlikely event I live long enough, I look forward to the headline: "With Death of Juanita Benitez, Age 116, Rolling Stone Keith Richards Is Now World's Oldest Living Human."
Here’s Keef in 1973 being asked by a characteristically tactful Dutch journalist whether he knows he’s on a list of Top 10 rock stars about to die soon.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Great pieces. How would you typify these? You were not labeled an opinion columnist (I assume). These are not straight news articles. I don't read the culture pages of newspapers that deeply, but maybe these are typical of that section, but they're not the typical feature about a certain person, place, or thing, but rather more opinion essays. And these were syndicated. I suppose these articles were for newspapers to pick up; which ones did and how did they present them?
This type of journalism is the norm now in national and political news, but maybe 25 years ago it was restricted in newspapers to the culture, sports, and op-ed pages?
I was ahead of my time!
Yes, how rare today - a writer who knows what they are writing about.
I was born in 1980, so I can confirm that it's not just a matter of age: The Boomers, and to a lesser extent Gen X, really did have better music.
I'm skeptical of the "Boomers picked all the low-hanging fruit" hypothesis, though. I have a fair degree of familiarity with 70s-80s Japanese and Taiwanese music, and there are a ton of great original songs coming out of that region in that era. I can accept that East Asians might have been familiar enough with American music not to accidentally crib melodies from the Anglosphere, but the fact that none of the greatest hits of Japan or Taiwan were independently rediscovered in the US suggests to me that songwriters have not come anywhere close to finding all the good melodies.
For my whole lifetime, it's been acknowledged the Brazil has great pop music. But there are only two Brazilian melodies Americans are familiar with: the superb "Girl from Ipanema" and the wretched "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" that Rod Stewart acknowledged he stole from some Brazilian mediocrity. The laws of probability suggest there must be more memorable Brazilian melodies, but few in America have heard them.
I was thinking Albert Morris's "Feelings" might be a third, but on looking it up to confirm, I learned that he cribbed it from a 50s French Song, Loulou Gasté's "Poir Toi." "Mas Que Nada" counts, I think. It was popular enough to get play time on oldies stations, anyway.
Mas Que Nada definitely qualifies as famous and since it was most popularly performed by Brasil '66 I would say counts as Brazilian although lead singer Lani Hall* was born in Chicago
*Hall (79) is married to Herb Alpert who turns 90 next month
Samba de Orfeu?
I've told the story before about a local DJ in 2015 telling his audience that "The early 80s is Classic Rock". A big problem is also anything new that sounds good will get an immediate "they sound just like" from people.
When I was growing up, the 60s music was considered Classic Rock. Now the 80s is considered Classic Rock. Radio advertisers don't much care to sway the tastes of old fogies. People who consider 60s music classic are on their way to the graveyard.
When I was driving a lot in 2023, radio stations seemed to have a dividing line around 1973. E.g., L.A. radio stations played the Eagles' 1975 "Hotel California" a huge amount but the Eagles' 1971 "Take It Easy" hardly ever. I suspect they had a rule of thumb about when people retired and stopped driving to work.
"Hotel California" was the big album my last two years in high school. Whoever of my friends who didn't have dates on Saturday would just pile into a car and we'd listen to "Life in the Fast Lane" while downing Budweisers. Life was simpler then.
So much to comment on. The Rock and Roll of the 60s was great but the Beatles breakout in Britain in 1963 is over sixty years old. That music has been done, much of it was brilliant, and will be listened to for a long time. Rock evolved into the Nineties and seems to have died by about 2000. I never kept up with rock after college so my criticisms are a bit facile.
My biggest criticism of modern popular music is that it all sounds like mood music with childish lyrics. This banal sound seems to me to have started sometime in the 80s and has continued to this day. I often think that the average lyricist has the mind of a sixteen year old girl who got stood up by her high school quarterback at the homecoming dance. Many modern lyricists are probably homosexual. To compare, I think of the lyrics of my favorite singers- Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. Adult themes that tell stories.
Don't get me going on rap. The only music I despise more than rap is headbanger music which tend to have no lyrics at all. Music for the mentally ill.
I dunno, were Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim all that straight?
Here’s an interesting fact: Stephen Sondheim and Donald Trump both attended New York Military Academy.
I'm talking 1980s and to the present time. The songwriters of the early-to-mid 20th Century were excellent.
The Great American Songbook songwriters were more professional. Even early rock composers like Chuck Berry or Sam Cooke clearly came from an era with higher standards for lyric writing than, say, Paul McCartney.
As you know, Chuck Berry was vital to Lennon and McCartney.
When I was a kid mom played the country station in the car because she liked music that told stories. Country music of the 50s-80s was like a master class in economical story telling. Rock music is almost entirely incoherent lyrically but it usually doesn't matter; the audience fills in with the assumption of depth to the vagueness. I'm often amused, in the YouTube age, to learn what many of the songs of my youth were actually about. The banality is crushing.
The other genre that often has good storytelling is the rap part of hip-hop. As for head banger music, I assume you mean metal. Not amazing lyrically but on average no worse than other rock music. Ozzie's first solo album is pretty great, has some catchy tunes, and a few tracks with good lyrics. "Mister Crowley" sure sent me down a rabbit hole.
The weirdest part is that we haven't seen any new genres emerge since 2001. Even niche genres like black metal have been around for decades.
Dubstep emerged perhaps a few years later, but it's a notoriously bad genre.
They used to invent genres like baroque rock:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJxpKlTID2Q
I can recall a 30-something history professor at Rice U. asking me in 1979 if there were any better rock songs than "Light My Fire" in the stuff I liked.
"Nah, not really..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq8k-ZbsXDI
I heard Ray Manzarek play with X in about 1981: "Wow, these old guys are really good," I thought:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ey5agy1blc
I've been told second hand from people in the LA music scene at the time, that the Doors were terrible live and everyone was shocked when they had their first hit record.
The three actual musicians always struck me as serious guys who'd be happier tinkering in a studio. were just really not charismatic on stage. The showboat vocalist, Jim, was a soulful guy who wrote decent poetry but he was no Bob Dylan, nor even just an incredibly savvy Mick Jagger. I remember seeing an interview of The Doors in a documentary and Jim kept breaking in with his "sexual politics" thesis and Manzarek looked like he wanted to hide under his chair.
Apologies for the obvious edits. For some reason the app doesn't show an edit option on my Chinese device.
The Doors were great. I like Jim Morrison's pretentious poetry at least as much as Dylan's. The extra long songs most of the albums end with are more fun than most Dylan songs. I'm not impressed by Sir Mick's lyrics on average. They are serviceable and fit the songs but the only one I can think of off the top of my head that really gets to me is "Paint it Black" ...oh and "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown"
The deficit of new melodies seems to have led to hip-hop style sampling coming even to country music, a genre which prides itself on songwriting craftsmanship: e.g. the recent countrified remakes of “Fast Car” and Nirvana’s “In Bloom”.
There are a lot of EDM subgenres that have grown from the use of synths and digital audio workstations. Drum and Bass, Future Bass, etc, came out of techno and Kratwerks. A lot of interesting sounds.
I have read the Jagger-Richards story. Oldham locked them in a room and ordered them to write. And they did once they got down to it. That's why Jagger and Richards are worth $500 million and Charlie Watts was worth only $80 million when he died a few years back. John Lennon and Paul McCartney only started most of their original songwriting in 1963. I have the bootleg Beatles Christmas 1962 album taped in Hamburg at the Star Club. All the songs were covers except for McCartney's "I Saw Her Standing There." Lennon and McCartney exploded with new songs in 1963 and that's why McCartney is a billionaire and that the combined wealth of Yoko Ono, Julian Lennon and Sean Lennon is about a billion.
Sean Ono Lennon is a cool guy, so I'm glad to hear he's doing well.
Yoko is worth over $700 million, Sean is worth about $200 million and Julian got the short-end of the stick. He's worth only $50 million. I am sure he doesn't have to worry about whether he can afford a vacation this Summer.
Steve, if I may venture a guess as to what the "tuneless" track on Never Mind the Bollocks is, is it Seventeen?
Relistening to "Never Mind the Bollocks," all the tracks sound pretty catchy. E.g., here's "Seventeen" done Muzak style:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXbZAPnTUBM
Agreed. I love the whole thing.
I think the best song is the closer, EMI.
Skimming the album again, I kept waiting for the bad song I talked about in in 2001, but they kept getting better. Here's EMI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD2i99QPVI0
Probably Liar, Problems, and New York are the weakest tracks, but they are still pretty good.
I don’t even listen to “classic rock” any longer since 80s and 90s stuff got included. I’ve moved to Singers and Swing on Comcast local channel 747. Nothing like some Fats Waller to brighten up my day…
Not sure if Steve or anyone else has seen it, but Netflix has a show called "This is Pop" and there was an episode called Stockholm Syndrome about how Swedish producers have generated an absurdly disproportionate share of music hits from ABBA up to the present. Although I think Beyonce's army of producers tend to be urban Americans, I think Taylor Swift has a fair number of songs with a Swedish producer attached.
I read a comment by a career Navy guy who said he'd been in every major port on every continent and the Pacific archipelago. He said no matter where he was you could hear an ABBA song playing somewhere.
“I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations."
As to John Stuart Mill's point, I was taken aback when George Harrison was successfully sued for copyright violation over his song "My Sweet Lord," which was found to have subconsciously plagiarized the Chiffons' hit "He's So Fine." Were the songs really that similar? Aren't a lot of songs somewhat similar? On the other hand, I can see Chuck Berry's assertion that Brian Wilson's "Surfin' USA" was a copy of his "Sweet Little Sixteen," a case he won and that set the pattern for such suits.
Ed Sheeran was sued not for violating the copyright of lyrics or melody, but for copying the rhythm and chord progression of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" in his song "Thinking Out Loud." Sheeran won that suit, playing guitar and singing to prove that the chord progression in question was so common as to be almost inescapable.
Mill is worried that are a limited number of tone combinations. Pinker says not to worry, and does some hand-wavey math to say, "trillions and trillions". But Pinker ignores Mill's point that most combinations are not pleasing to hear. And had Mill heard modern pop music, he might have added that the 'hook' of most songs rests on just a few notes. So if you're depending on four notes to make your song distinctive, you get 4096 possible combinations, or for five notes, 32 thousand combinations. But people will only pay to hear a tiny fraction of those, so maybe divide by ten or a hundred to get an actual number of listenable melodic hooks.
Of course you can jump it up a it by varying rhythm, skipping octaves, or even abandoning standard chromatic scales or Pythagorean intervals entirely, but ... most of the latter sounds weird to us, while we can still hear the basic tone combinations within the former rhythmic and harmonic disguising.
So Mill might be right about available melodies being a limited resource.
There is some evidence that as time, or perhaps civilization or human consciousness, progresses, the tone combinations we like change, so what sounds discordant in one age sounds pleasing in another. So we might think of it more as a pastoral tribe migrating to fresh pastures with new flora and fauna. Early innovators discover new ways to use the new audial awareness (flora and fauna) until everything gets turned over and a new evolution must occur.
Before this melts into a Music-Was-Better-When-I-Was-Young pissing match, isn't there a way to be objective about this?
Music is, after all, at bottom just audial mathematics, so it lends itself to quantitive analysis well. I seem to recall several surveys analyzing the complexity of popular music over time. I also seem to recall that all such surveys show the same thing: musical complexity has been declining on a more or less straight line for as long as anyone cares to analyze, which is about a century.
This probably coincides with the declining intelligence of the people producing and consuming it. Which also means everyone is right: music really was better when you were younger, but the people older than you are already dead so they they don't get a vote, while the people younger than you are stupider, so their their opinion doesn't count because they can't appreciate what you appreciate.
I think Steve even covered one of these surveys either here or at Unz last year, not the intelligence part but the music analysis part.
There was less of a divide between highbrow art music and lowbrow popular music two centuries ago.
Would it be fair to say that the Great Bifurcation began around the turn of the twentieth century when highbrow Composers began wafting up into ever greater abstraction and de-standardization, while the lowbrow popularizers were left to work with an ever diminishing musical vocabulary to maintain accessibility?
I think there is a natural creativity cycle in any genre. It can be long or short.
I’ll limit myself to what I am a little bit, mainly jazz and rock.
For me, jazz peaked about 1959 in the hard bop era. The beauty of jazz is that the best musicians more or less all got to play together There has been nothing hugely original in jazz since about 1970.
For me, it’s harder to time the death of rock but there has been a steady decline since the turn of the century. I don’t think anyone original today is going to write one of the 50 ever greatest rock songs.
I sometimes wonder why a singer who has his or her moment in the sun, like Britney Spears, is suddenly no longer able to get hits. After all, she doesn't write her own songs. Aren't there songwriters available to write hits for her? The musical mockumentary "Walk Hard" has several songs so catchy that I have them on my playlist, the title song and "Guilty as Charged" among them. Evidently there are still people who can write catchy tunes.
They lose their youthful looks and mojo. Often they lose their vocal depth, range and projection. Singing for a living is really difficult.
In the 1980s, the greats of the 1960s like Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin tended to be granted one or two comeback hits.
Give John Landis credit for winning the fight with Universal in order to put Aretha, James Brown, et al in The Blues Brothers when they were on the balls of their asses. That movie revitalized their careers
The fight over "great songs" by singers is actually kind of a fun music-insider rabbit hole to go down.
For example, Celine Dion scored a career-defining hit with "It's All Coming Back to Me Now." However, the songwriter (who wrote lots of other big-time power ballad-type songs) had promised the song to....MeatLoaf. So when Dion got to sing it first and knocked it out of the park Meatloaf sued the writer and won some money back. But apparently this wasn't so contentious, as Meatloaf and the songwriter collaborated after the lawsuit was finished.
Or how everyone associates "I Will Always Love You" with Whitney Houston and The BoydGuard, but originally the song was a minor country hit for....Dolly Parton. Now, Dolly has always been an expert business woman (and WNBA fan....), so I'm sure Dolly somehow made sure to get paid for Whitney's second version somehow (even if she didn't write it), but I'm sure Diva Dolly was more than a bit miffed it was Whitney and not Dolly who became associated with its success.
Meatloaf wanted to record it, but the writer Jim Steinman thought the song should be sung by a woman.
IIRC Meatloaf wanted it to be a duet, like Paradise By A Dashboard Light.
If not for Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf would have been chopped liver. Steinman has been gone for almost four years now and when he died I listed to Tony Kornheiser's podcast the following day, as he and Steinman went to high school together. Tony wryly noted that Steinman's parents named their children James and William and then asked (paraphrasing) "Who the fuck did they think they were kidding?"
Music with an actual melody and meaningful lyrics coincided with a typical boomer’s hormonal peak and first slow dance. This left a powerful memory for some of us…even more powerful for those of us who attended a boy’s boarding school!
Very fine articles Steve.
Thanks.
Still, it's not that hard at age 42 to write a bunch of articles you've been thinking about for 25 years.
In a similar vein, a band has their entire lives to write their first albums, but if it hits they only have six months to write their second
As a youth I messed around with guitars in the 90s. Back then you needed to learn rock music by ear or have a very good teacher. It led to a lot of messing around and improvisation.
Now you can learn thousands of songs with the fretwork carefully shown on YouTube. In my sons’s class at school there is an 11 year old boy who can play “Master of Puppets “ quite competently.
Rock is perhaps becoming a bit like classical where conscientious children are pushed into it by overbearing parents. The net result will be technical genius but very little original.
Old-timers like Neil Young are amazingly still touring but won’t be in five years let alone ten. Live rock music is going to be largely purveyed by very good cover bands very soon.
I think it's one of God's little jokes that such an unexpectedly expansive set of pop stars in their late-70s/80s is still doddering about and croaking out their hit tunes. I guess some/most of them will be checking out in the coming decade -- or maybe they'll all make it to 100.
In the unlikely event I live long enough, I look forward to the headline: "With Death of Juanita Benitez, Age 116, Rolling Stone Keith Richards Is Now World's Oldest Living Human."
Here’s Keef in 1973 being asked by a characteristically tactful Dutch journalist whether he knows he’s on a list of Top 10 rock stars about to die soon.
https://youtube.com/shorts/E6IHhIFk2Cs?si=VXV9dEqOcouXrs-S