Durn kids! Git off my lawn!
A short clip from Churchill’s speech into Aces High...
My parents to me: Turn that crap down!
Me to my parents: You listen to old fogey music.
Me to my kids: You call that music?!?!
My kids to me: You listen to old fogey music.
This might be the worst:
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday”.
Screw Cole Porter.
Remember that the Beatles were simply emulating and re-packaging their heros in America - Delta Blues, Elvis, Buddy Holly.
Today, you can listen to Rap (contemporary) or you can listen to Motown classics, or the Beatles, or Led Zeppelin, etc. Sure, it's 40 years old, but who cares?
Truthfully, I think it's odd that music has become somewhat stagnant and that many kids today listen to the music of their grandparents because nothing better seems to have come along lately.
You can actually sing along with a Beatle song. I’d like to see this guy sing along with what passes as music now without rupturing a vocal chord screaming or a brain cell trying to understand the words.
Cold Cape Cod clams, 'gainst their wish, do it
Even lazy jellyfish do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love." -Cole Porter
Yeah, his songs were so deep. One can cherry-pick songs and lyrics for comparison, but the fact is they all have the same thing in mind: put together a little ditty that will make listeners want to buy it for their own collection.
“In My Life” by The Beatles is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. period.
There has been no decline in music. The decline is in the delivery system. “Modern Rock” radio plays AC/DC all day long. That band is 30 years old!
If you take a look at the 20 biggest tours of this summer, 18 of those are headlined by acts whose careers started over 20 years ago. All of whom were exposed to the population by a new thing called MTV in the 80’s.
To be honest, corporate owned radio is too risk averse to fulfill the role they once provided.
Cole Porter wrote about cocaine as did Eric Clapner...everything old is new again.
They also experimented. Because of their commercial success, they could get away with doing things other artists couldn't. In the sixties, the song was supposed to be 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 minutes, and there was supposed to be a fade in and fade out so the DJ could talk over the intro and exit. Songs should talk about being in love or something else rather innocuous. Album covers had a (usually bad) photograph of the star, or an attractive girl dancing. The back of the cover had a biography of the group, a list of other albums, and the names of the songs with the time. The Beatles developed enough clout to flaunt industry rules, and they did it.
Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, with their expensive inserts and custom books built into open folding album covers, couldn't have been done by other musicians because they didn't have the sales clout to demand that kind of expense in packaging from the record companies.
On the negative side, the Beatles really show the decline of western culture. In the White Album, the four 8X10 photos show a group of worn out, ill-kept, guys who can't bother to shave or wear decent clothes. Only Ringo Starr looks like he's vaguely conscious.
While there's a lot of creativity in the later albums, there's also evidence of the sloppiness that comes when drugs and alcohol start to take their toll. Missed notes and stray guitar chords creep in. Compare the Beatles later work to something tight, like Herb Alpert or the steel guitar and fiddle work on Buck Owens albums, and it's clear that whatever you think of the songs, the production work got very sloppy, and the band didn't do the repetition necessary to get a tight recording. Lennon's lead vocals on "Across the Universe" from the Let it Be album are awful, and the background instrumentals include quite a few missed notes.
The Beatles were largely hacks whose “talent” was for commercial promotion. Other bands of the time — notably the Rolling Stones and The Who — had vastly greater musical ability. In exploiting the maniacal gullibility of teenagers for commercial gain, the Beatles gave rise to every talentless boy band and schlockmeister from the Backstreet Boys to Michael Jackson.
That fact alone makes them the mortal enemies of decent music.
Don’t look for brilliance in pop music. Even when a little bit happens, it is just a little bit. However, music at least has a market driving it, unlike pop art, which has been in the doldrums for most of the 20th Century, and continues to be lame.
But at the same time, if you look beyond pop music, you see some truly extraordinary and lasting innovation. I like to point out that Frank Zappa produced music in the US that for most people was close to chaotic and grotesque. But at the same time, his reputation in Europe was as one of the great 20th Century composers of chamber music.
I also like to cite the eclectic group Dead Can Dance, whose very name was a multiple play on words, as their music was a strange blend of ancient and modern forms, highlighting their vocalists, a contralto who at times sang in glossolalia, and a baritone. The furthest thing from pop music, yet their music transfixed young audiences who normally listened to punk, Goth and other such simplistic shrieking. They couldn’t say why it had such a hypnotic effect on them, just that it did.
Other groups, like Tangerine Dream, have assumed the mantle of classical composition, at least in complexity and depth, going beyond traditional instrumentation, leaving the more traditional classical style compositions to become more pop oriented, with things like movie soundtracks.
Years ago, I asked the question to some Beatles fans that, comparing the Beatles to Mozart, which do you think will be remembered in 200 years? Even then, they knew that Mozart will still be appreciated, but the best they could hope for is that the Beatles wouldn’t have been completely forgotten.
Well that article was a waste of internet digits.
This blog could have been written by my late father, who was a professional musician. He liked to predict that in 40 years nobody would even remember the Beatles. He was very obsessed with his opinions about popular music of the day.
Wow, I don’t even like the Beatles and I think this guy is whiny. There’s plenty of good music out there, just gotta go find it.
The fluff of the previous generation is always better than the fluff of the current generation!