Posted on 12/03/2023 12:31:19 PM PST by Squawk 8888
If you’re of a certain vintage, you’ll remember how inflexibly tribal music fans used to be. If you were, say, an alternative kid, you wouldn’t dream of listening to anything the rock kids were. It just wasn’t done.
Admitting you liked the odd Black Sabbath or Van Halen song risked jeopardizing your relationship with the other alt kids. And because you were already known as someone who preferred Joy Division over Judas Priest, the rockers would have nothing to do with you. Might as well go die on an iceberg somewhere.
There are still silos among music fans, but they’re nowhere near as rigidly peer-reviewed and enforced. In fact, I can’t remember ever seeing this much fluidity when it comes to music preferences.
I started to notice this several years ago when I did some guest lecturing on Canadian music history at Toronto’s Humber College. To get a better idea of who I was talking to, I asked all the 20-somethings in the class to recite the last five songs they played on their phones. It was illuminating.
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We went to a tribute/cover band rendition of that event about 6 months ago. It was fun.
As I rant from time to time, there IS great new music. I go to Bandcamp to find new music. What the Sony et al want us to think is good, sucks bigly. Bandcamp has a searchable front end where you can find quality, unsigned new music in whatever genre you want.
Going further, commerce works. Get off yer assez, go out to a bar/club, plunk down $10 for a cover charge and hear 4 bands play their guts out. Two bands will suck. One will be ok. But then you'll find that one band that blows your socks off, and renews your hope in youth and humanity...you just then buy their merch because capitalism.
All of, in some way, is a nod to what Zappa said in 1988:
Q: Do you think that's a reason why guitar is becoming less of a prominent instrument in pop today? Do you think other people are experiencing what you're experiencing?
FZ: Well, pop music is not the end of the world. There's a whole substructure of what they call pop music which is heavy metal, in which the guitar rules. And that's never going to change. That's a style that's probably going to be with us until hell freezes over, to use a rock and roll term. But if you're talking about Whitney Houston, that other kind of pop music, they try to keep those blasphemous elements out of it. There's nothing AOR or MOR about a fuzz-tone guitar. They try to make the orchestration on those songs as neutral and comfortable as possible. And I think the listening public is, to a certain extent, deceived by what is broadcast. Because what is broadcast is not necessarily an accurate indication of what people are writing or recording. Now, what usually goes on the radio is the most banal product that every record company can manage to put together. In the United States, radio truly is a cultural embarrassment. The only creative radio you can listen to is what they call shock radio, where people are talking and making things up. There's a little spark of creativity there. But most of the music that's broadcast is harmful to your mental health.
I always wondered why people would get obliterated at concerts. You spend all this money and effort to go to a show just to pass out or black out and miss the whole experience? Seems kind of stupid, actually.
I imagine with some of this stuff you’d have to be obliterated to put up with it.
The Rolling Stones tour in 1964 found them the opening act for Bobby Goldsboro and George Jones. Mixing of genres has been going on a long time.
I don’t like jazz, those guys play like they’re just making it up as they go.
“I don’t like jazz, those guys play like they’re just making it up as they go.”
Because they are. There’s no structure.
I call it the musical answer to Tourette Syndrome.
The organist and pianist at a former church was really good. He would do his own arrangements of familiar hymns that were great. One time I asked him how long it took him to write the arrangements.
He said years previously he would spend hours and hours over the course of a week or more working on an arrangement. But then he learned the basic concepts of jazz and he said he now could do it in an afternoon.
I went to a concert with Phil Keaggy and he had a bunch of musicians with him that he had just sort of thrown together for some shows on the west coast. Someone from the audience requested a song.
“Well - just me (he plays guitar) and the drummer know that one of mine. But the others can chime in when they get a feel for it.”
It was unbelievable how the others (4 or 5 others?) figured it out. I have no idea if it sounded like the original song, but it sounded great.
I recall one gal started playing one instrument (a violin?) and after a short time set it down and picked up a flute to play instead. I guess she figured the flute was more compatible to the song.
Yep. I had to learn to play that.
Pretty much every song you hear sounds the same.
“The majority of chart-topping music is written by just two people.”
https://youtu.be/oVME_l4IwII?si=W6hQAvImx1M89BRo
I never understood the mass hysteria I witnessed at concerts. I felt like an outsider — like an anthropologist observing a strange phenomenon.
☺
It has a lot to do with all music now being equally available and accessible with the same minimal effort. Until fairly recently, if you wanted to hear a musical recording from the moderately distant past, you had to work a little harder. It was less likely to be on the radio, less likely to be in the stacks at the record store. To a 22 year old, hearing John Coltrane and hearing the highest streaming song is the same thing. Everything “old” is equally old.
Radio for me now is sports, news, and talk format. I can pick my own music to listen to. You are right, music radio is dead.
Jazz died when players (and music “experts”) decided that quality was measured by the number of unrelated notes you can pack into a given unit of time.
“quality was measured by the number of unrelated notes you can pack into a given unit of time.”
That’s a good description. Also, it would be impossible to assign a time signature to it. Doing “music dictation” was my strong suit in college, and when I hear most jazz, there is no timing. Just a mish-mosh of random notes.
We’re big “Bosch” fans, but I have to mute it sometimes because of the music.
Genres were always problematic. Especially within rock and roll. Because rock is always evolving, somebody is always pushing the boundaries, doing things a little different. I dare anybody to truly define were thrash metal ends and extreme metal begins, not to mention how progressive metal fits in there. Working on a convention I get involved in this discussion a lot when it comes to books, where do the various genres begin and end. I think the olden times had it right with books, 3 genres: happy endings (romance), sad endings (tragedy), and funny (comedy). Of course even that runs into problems with tragic comedies. Not sure how we’d do it with music.
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