It pops up constantly. It never truly goes away. This week, it came at me again in an email from my friend Ken Corsbie, living in North Carolina, as he relayed a collection of complaints from folks in his generation; their problem was dissatisfaction with the state of popular music today, and the language was on the strong side. “Musicians today have become lazy; they’re producing garbage.” “Hip hop is not music; it’s just noise.” “Melody has disappeared; today we have four or five words repeated over and over; how could that be a song?”
Vehemently as it is expressed, the subject really does not engage musicians because they know what is going on, and what is going on is simply the process of change in popular music. It has always been there, and it will remain with us because the change is propelled by the times in which we live. The folks quoted by Ken, for example, have short memories.
I know without asking that in their youth, when they were engaged with the popular music of that time, they were hearing the same criticisms of that genre back then, just as they, today, are attacking the current fare.
6To step back as adults today and look at our world now is to see how completely differently we live compared to our teenage years. We watch different movies (compare Gravity to a John Wayne Western); we eat different foods; we dress differently; we move now at a different pace where speed and a short attention span are the norm; look at the transformation in the way we communicate; the entire tempo of our life has been cranked up.
Against that, it would then be incongruous to find that our tastes in popular music have remained static.
In the light of the protests like the one relayed by Ken, it’s interesting to look back at the time and see the shifts in the popular music fare paralleling the transformations in society, and we see right away the era when melody was king, when huge orchestras such as Stanley Black and Norrie Paramour enjoyed record sales, when Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole ruled, and we see that coming to an end as World War Two ended and renewed optimism and verve returned. The music later reflected that when Elvis Presley burst on the scene bringing to the popular arena the raw energy and vibrant dance moves drawn from the black music community.
Indeed, to look back at that time is to see that whereas popular music had previously been a rather languorous exercise, with the bunny hop and the two-step, it had morphed into far more energetic forms, and, most tellingly of all, that shift has continued in the same vein up to today.
Simply put, popular music, both on the stage and in the crowd, is now a function of energetic dance moves, rather than a couple in an embrace, and the changes in the music (some would say deteriorations) are designed to create that expression.
Taking the lens closer in, and looking back at the music technically, one can recognize the change as musicians in both live performances and recording studios, had begun to emphasize drums and bass in the music, bringing to the front what had been previously been in the rear, to propel people to the more frenetic dance moves. In popular music shows, sound generation was reflecting change, too, as we saw the advent of huge powerful sound systems, rarely seen before and leading to the monster systems of today with walls of speakers and banks of amplifiers.
In the actual notation, too, songwriters were simplifying, moving away from sweeping melodies, and writing short, punchy phrases more given to creating rhythm to make us dance. Indeed, the short phrase repeated over and over, long a feature of African music, is precisely the kind of construction that creates the rhythm that today’s listener craves.
Andy Williams singing ‘Moon River’ may captivate a few love birds, but Little Richard’s stripped down ‘Tutti Fruiti’ has the entire dance floor rocking. Notice also, in recent times, the same technique has come into Caribbean music with the lyrical calypso genre giving way to soca with its simple wording and high tempos, with drums and bass dominant. The change is easy to spot. Even in the tiny Cayman Islands, in the 1980s, the hit of the season was my song ‘Pirate Party’ with the chorus tag line of just three essential words, “Party, party, party.”
From a purely musical perspective, it is interesting to note the concept of the drum in all this. Going back to reggae, for instance, we see for the first time in popular music, the creation of a music where both bass and drums were operating purely under a drum concept. I remember a learning exchange in Cayman with a Jamaican musician talking to me about a song, and enquiring “What’s the riddim?” When I answered, “Reggae”, he said, pointing to his bass, “No, the riddim.” To him, he wasn’t playing a bass line, he was playing a drum pattern, and he was right.
Indeed, many music observers in North America suggest that early US hip hop writers borrowed from the reggae experience by stripping down their studio bands to often just bass, drums, and only one chording instrument, to emphasize beat; to bring intensity to their music. On the lyrical side, as well, the shift has been to replace the long, sweeping phrases usually needed to convey melody with short, punchy phrases – when you break them down you notice that each of them is essentially a drum pattern. In a real sense, many of our dancehall and hip hop singers are making a clear contribution to rhythm with their vocals.
One can sympathize to some degree with the irritations, but those complaining need to accept that the function of popular music today – the kind you hear on the radio and the video and in the nightclubs – has changed.
It’s no longer a hug-up dance with your lady, or a sweeping melody from Cole Porter; these days, it’s the newest dance move and party, party, party until they call time.
