The good old days

I was listening to a left-wing radio show hosted by Stephanie Miller and friends, during which for fun they asked callers to pitch-in their recollections of the worst songs they ever heard, most of which seem to come from the Seventies. Miller and company were particularly bothered by songs that celebrated having babies and heterosexual relationships, being icky and syrupy and “morally reprehensible.” I confess that the songs offered-up for sacrifice make me cringe when I hear them, because they are icky and syrupy, but not because I find them morally reprehensible. To me, a “morally reprehensible” song is one like Mary McGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers,” in which the singer asks the husband/lover not to leave her just because she has another regular customer on the side who she won’t give up, because there is a part of her “that only he can fill.”

At any rate, this gives me an excuse to talk about the current state of music, or so it is called. I grew-up in the Seventies, and to me there is no question that during this period pop music (within the framework of the rock era) reached its peak both eclectically and musically. I was listening to an old AT40 show from March of 1974; virtually every song I found listenable on some level. Mainstream pop shared the stage with rock, soul, R&B, folk, country, novelty, comedy, instrumental, foreign-language and even spoken–language tunes. This was a time when listeners’ minds were open to different genres, and pop radio wasn’t as fragmented and closed-off as it is today. You could always count on the top-forty radio station to actually play all the top-forty songs. In 1974, 35 songs would hit number one on the Billboard chart; there was just too much competition. 1976 was another year where memorable songs flooded the charts, before the disco over-kill.

The odd thing was that since many of the artists of the Seventies were influenced by the music of the Sixties, and those of the Eighties still had the pop conventions of the Seventies ringing in their ears, there was a certain continuity in pop music for at last three decades; I enjoy the music of Sixties and Eighties just as much as the Seventies. But something has changed; what used to be “top forty” stations now play the same ten songs over and over again, and they are usually indistinguishable from each other, particularly hip-hop/rap which has been the predominate genre for at least a decade. Whenever there is a song that adheres to traditional song structure, if it is bad its banality would be easily exposed because of thin production values, particularly if there is no orchestration to give it an emotional push. Older music critics may praise the music of the past 15 years or so because they want to keep their jobs, while younger critics praise it because they have no sense of the reason why a classic tune is classic.

The reality is undeniable: pop music industry has become shackled by minds who are closed to new or even different sounds, and many singers—particularly female—have taken to singing in the same annoyingly unnatural fashion. There was a time you could readily identify a singer if not the song; now, if you don’t know the song, you don’t know who the singer is. I blame much of this on Mariah Carey, whose chart success has convinced many singers to ape her style, ad nauseam. Carey has eclipsed Elvis Presley as the solo artist (in Carey’s case, I use the word “artist” with some trepidation) with the most number one hits, and with her next album may overtake the Beatles. Anyone with some appreciation of the history of pop music could be excused with having difficulty in approaching the idea that Carey could be compared to either Presley or the Beatles with a straight face. But one thing is clear: the dynamics that determines what “sells” or not has become restricted. Once, pop radio threw out everything that sounded good, and if it struck a chord with the audience, record companies would churn-out 45s. Back then, the pop single drove the market, and if an artist wanted to be commercially viable, he or she had to have at least one song that might be a hit on their albums. Today, the tight and tuneful song is such a rarity that music really isn’t even the point anymore. It’s all about the “artist” and if they have “street cred” in whatever stilted genres that remain. People can sit in front of an electronic device and download a song for 99 cents to their IPod that they might not even have heard and subsequently discard, songs that in the past wouldn’t even have scratched the bottom of the Hot 100. But the sales charts count those songs as “hits,” and as long as it is the image of the artist is what drives sales, it doesn’t matter what the quality of the music is. Artist are not competing with each other to make good music, just in maintaining their “credibility” with a target audience.

The music industry can blame its continuing losses in sales to its failure to support artists or radio stations who want to break-out of the current stranglehold of “songs” that regurgitate the same note over and over again (although country music today maintains some of the conventions of soft rock, whenever I hear a twangy voice, images of dogs and fire hoses enter my mind). There is also the larger picture: Perhaps it is that we live in an era of where cynicism and narcissism predominate, that people have closed their minds. There was a time when music offered an alternative vision—not how the world was, but how we wanted it to be; it expressed our hopes, idealism and aspirations, it was about peace, love and social harmony. Now it is more often about conflict, whining and vulgarity. Instead of taking to the streets in protest, too often we hear of people being gunned down by “musical” rivals. What are young people saying today through the music they listen to? I’m not sure, but it doesn’t seem to me that it’s inspiring them to do much of anything that is positive on a community, political or social justice level.