Someone approached me out of the blue this week outside a store on Sheriff Street to ask for advice on the music business; he was not a musician, but interested in recording and was wondering how to proceed. We got into a short but intensive chat about the music industry today confirming once again, something I’m always prattling about, how much the content of what we call popular music has changed in the last 30 years or so. Most of the popular music of this time, the songs we hear on the radio, and from the DJs, and from neighbourhood music sets playing for parties, in other words what is popular now, is a very condensed and stripped down form of song production where the emphasis, in many cases, is a powerful drum track, often with very few other instruments, sometimes not even a bass, and very rhythmic vocal renditions, often with just a single voice, and this is where the young man’s interest lay.
Flowing from that, of course, one is reminded indeed of how far removed the popular music of today is from that of 30 or 40 years ago, and music lovers are very quick to cite examples to prove their point; I hear it all the time. The fact remains, however, that the musical fare we have now is what the folks in their twenties or younger want, and that’s the end of that story, but to reflect on the popular music style of long ago is very enlightening.
I recall a man outside National Hardware who had me, as we say in Guyana, hol’ down, making his music criticism by referring to Tammy Wynette’s country classic ‘Stand By Your Man’, with its intimations of “soul” music and a very dramatic vocal. It’s a good example of the kind of song we don’t hear young people producing today, and without knocking the present fare, the man outside National Hardware had a point. “They don’t make them like that anymore,” he said. (An exception would be John Legend’s hit song, ‘All of Me’ which is as soulful as you would want, as is the music of Adele, but the word ‘exception’ pertains.)
In much of popular music today, with drums in and almost all else out, people coming to the current songs are missing out, for example, on the bass playing of Vic Wooten, who in a number of groups, including Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, was responsible for producing tones and runs on an electric bass that sounded impossible when first you heard them. Wooten, and a couple other US bassists, transformed the instrument in both style and sound and it is truly a pity that such arts glory is not that much in the popular mix these days. To hear, Wooten, for instance, play a bass guitar solo of the song ‘Amazing Grace’, is an experience that is most amazing and unforgettable.
In that same Bela Fleck and the Flecktones the resident genius leader of the group, Bela Fleck, was also a remarkable innovator because the lead instrument he was playing in the jazz numbers the group is famous for is a 5-string banjo. Yes, a banjo. I remember hearing the group, totally by accident, in Boston, when I turned on the TV in my hotel room late one night and heard the band for the first time. The array of musical talent and invention that comes out of that band is the kind that sends many senior folks almost to tears that such fare is not on the charts these days.
I admire the intensity and push created in many of the current pop songs, but I must admit that the loss of instrumentation in today’s stripped down hits is something I regret; there was a wider texture and flavour to the music in the earlier recordings. As an example, I offer you the organ riff that is a key ingredient in Van Morrison’s song ‘Cleaning Windows’ that just lifts the song up beautifully and moves it along. If you imagine the recording without it, you feel the loss. Similarly, Bob Marley uses a low note phrase, also on the organ, that precedes the ‘No Woman No Cry’ line in his classic song by that name. The way the music is used to set up, or emphasise what is coming (one of key features of music construction running through Marley’s music) is achieved beautifully there; you can’t imagine the words without the line.
The fall away in popular music of that wider presentation, with a variety of instruments and styles of playing, is one of the things the music lovers bemoan, though they may not articulate it that way. We have shrunk the bands and narrowed the genre.
Another prime example is David Rudder’s ‘Praise’ – a song I consider in the top five of Caribbean music, ever. I will never forget seeing the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica do a Rex Nettleford choreography of that song in an awards show in Barbados with a performance that remains the high point of Caribbean talent for me; one could almost feel the theatre lifting up, with that big music sound behind David’s highly spiritual music. The music of today has high intensity drive and excitement, in the pursuit of getting us to dance, and, obviously, it often succeeds but I look back on that other wider, more textured music, and wish more of it was still being produced.
If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, let me cite some examples. One is an Old Bomber calypso called ‘Pitching Marble’ where he puts in an unusual pause between “pitching” and “marble” in a way I can only call delicious. Modern music would have the whole thing rolling downhill…no sweet pause. Another gem is the Nat King Cole version of ‘Stardust’ that is simply vocal gold. To listen to that magical rendition, with those long buttery phrases, is to get the feeling that the song is singing Nat, instead of the other way around. Give a listen, too, to Eddie Lovett’s version of ‘Sometimes When We Touch’ where the orchestration of the song takes it into the goose bumps category. Also, worth your time is K D Lang singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ – this underground hit that never made the charts. Don’t get me wrong; I get the pull of today’s “party music”, but I can also see the point of the man outside National Hardware; we’ve gone down the progression road in popular music, but we’ve lost something called texture along the way. And yes, he’s right; ‘Stand By Your Man’ is definitely gold.
