perfidy

In response to my defense from yesterday of the Truck Driver Gear Change, Tom of Crooked Timber has let me know that he is unpersuaded by my counter-examples of the Gear Change's quality, writing

I suppose my rather hifallutin worry is to do with what I take to be a pretty obvious fall in the musical sophistication of pop. Clearly it's unfair to take the Beatles as representative, but it really does seem to my ears that popular music was a lot more adventurous, harmonically and melodically, in the 'sixties than it ever has been in my lifetime. Never mind going back to the era of the Great American Songbook, which was in another league entirely... And yes, you're quite right about the importance of being able to accept moderately trashy music for what it is and enjoying it none the less. But I guess I fear that one day there will be almost nothing but Truck Driver changes, and because the musical atmosphere will have become so thin, that hardly anyone will notice.

Now, there is definitely something to this. Pop music always goes through its fallow periods. Worse yet, it's often hard to see the good bits until well afterward because the crap drowns it out.

There are two arguments at work here: first that pop music is on a maybe perpetual decline into permanent mediocrity; and that pop music is cyclical, with periods of good music punctuated by stretches of bad. While I agree with aspects of both, and share Tom's fears, his thoughts have triggered a sort of, erm, ok, rant on the subject that has been gestating for some time. In short: I say "not so!" 

The arguments advanced by Tom are more or less permanent features of the landscape of music criticism. Classical composers dismissed romanticism as crap. Baroque composers dismissed music in the rococo style as crap, with some justification. Although not exactly pop music, Stravinsky was famously booed. French critics dismissed the "pounding of the Jazz machine," presumably preferring the elevated pleasures of the Moulin Rouge. Elvis, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Madonna (three times!), Marilyn Manson, rap, bebob, jazz fusion, and techno have all been heralded as harbingers of the end of civilization, or at least of worthwhile music.

And it's never been true. What IS true is that pop music is on a decades-long journey from emphasis on tune and harmony to an emphasis on rhythm. The "Great American Song Book" so justly referred to by Tom as beyond reproach contains tunes of fantastic elegance and beauty, but with the rhythmic complexity of nursery rhymes. Conversely, Eminem's biggest hit of last year contained the chorus "na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-nyaaaaaaaaaagh," and was still one of the most melodically complex rap songs to hit the charts. Yet Eminem's song contained some incredible displays of rhythmic complexity.

Of course, there are outliers. Dizzy Gillespie had an insane way with rhythm and melody. Certain modern pop singers, for example Mary J. Blige and En Vogue, marry hip-hop rhythms to relatively complex harmonic structures, at least as passing chords.

Pop music has always been mediocre-- the Great American Song Book is now almost three quarters of a century old, so that the wheat has been separated from the chaff. Of the great era of the early jazz age songwriter, this stuff is the best. You never hear the insipid ballads and hackneyed jump-blues, because they did not withstand the test of time. There's now a canon.

The same thing has also happened with early rock and roll, though it must be measured by different standards. Rock and roll, though it boasts some excellent songwriting, is generally more harmonically simple than the golden age songs that came before. This places more stress on performance, which is why we venerate Elvis Presley and not, say, Gamble & Huff. In an earlier age, the parallel would be to remember a pianist for his way with an Ellington chart, rather than to remember Ellington himself.

A side note about the Sixties: The Beatles are a special case entirely. They managed to re-introduce harmony and melody into rock song forms, and hence we remember Lennon/McCartney. Others did the same thing-- Motown, Brian Wilson, even Queen-- but the Beatles were the FIRST band to understand how to combine the songwriting conventions of the 1930s with the rhythmic conventions of rock, and still maintain a sense of adventure. It's true that the Sixties can boast some very fine songwriters, but this statistic is skewed by the dominance of the Baby Boomers in popular culture keeping alive the music of their youth. But don't forget: the Sixties were also the era of the Dave Clark Five.

The trend in pop music has always been not so much a cycle of quality, but rather a cycle of markets. This has two effects: to bring to light a previously unheralded subgenre, giving the illusion that everything has changed overnight; and to actually drive innovation by drawing attention to said subgenre. So although the quality of music itself is not so cyclical, the market cycle effect caused by the spotlight makes it appear that it is.

A good example is Nirvana in 1991. The hair-metal trend which gripped the US in 1987 had totally played itself out by 1991, and rap, apart from Run-DMC and MC Hammer, had not yet taken over the Top 40. When Nirvana came along, the market realigned itself to find more things like that, making it seem that music had emerged from The Long Dark Night Of Poodle Hair. The great music was there all along-- it just took a hit to make finding it and putting it on the radio worthwhile. Remember: Soul Asylum had their first hit in 1992, on their EIGHTH album thanks to Nirvana turning the attention to the kind of music they made. (History is filled with such examples: Bix Biederbecke became better known after his death; Robert Johnson was totally unknown in life.)

Moreover, for every bit of good, there's a legion of bad. For every Bach there were ten thousand talentless hacks knocking off a mass a week at a penny per line. For every Mozart, there is a Salieri. For every Frank Sinatra there is a Jim Nabors. For every Nirvana there is a Candlebox. For every Christina Aguilera (or, if you like, Kylie Minogue), there is a Britney Spears and an estrogen army of fifteen thousand clones.

So what's cyclical is not quality, but collective tastes. What's pleasing one year might be horrid ten year s later. For example, jazz-heads can quite justifiably look at the music of Poison and, hearing nothing but a 4/4 beat with the bass holding a pedal tone and the guitar soloing completely inside the simple changes, conclude that such a song is lamentably simple. Conversely, Poison fans can listen to John Scofield play through some crazy post-bop changes and conclude that jazz is incomprehensible garbage.

But I digress. I'm starting to sermonize, and that's not particularly courteous. I actually agree with Tom's worries that the Truck Driver Change and its ilk will become the norm and that nobody will notice or care. It's one reason I loathe the piping in of house music into every store in the world-- every song is EXACTLY the same. EXACTLY.