Cultural Progress?

Thoughts:

Part of what's happened is that the music business has turned into a business of marketing singers, not songs. It's no longer about songs. You hype the singer (or group) so that their albums will sell on their name, even if there is not a single memorable song on it. So, you get a Garth Brooks who sells umpteen billion records, and not an outstanding song in the bunch. I like Lisa Gerrard, but she will never have a Greatest Hits album. There is a reason Oldies stations are such a success, and fogies like Bob Dylan and Linda Ronstadt can still draw an audience touring. What would you pay for 'The Very, Very Best of Bon Jovi?' How about 'The Genius of NWA'? A buck apiece in the remainder bin?

Music has become very stylistically personal. About the most popular show on TV in the 50s was "Your Hit Parade", where they sang the Billboard top songs for that week. It died when R&R arrived, because nobody wanted to hear Snooky Lansen sing "Hound Dog" -- no Elvis style, no song. Think Bryan Ferry, Lisa Gerrard, etc. Now, any good singer can do a decent job on the songs on that 1935 list. But who is going to sing most of today's stuff besides the original singer? So, when the singer falls out of favor, his songs die too -- they have little independent appeal and no independent shelf life. The Grammy show really is unwatchable. I tried 2-3 years ago, and this guy Moby got up there to great adoration, and he was incredibly, unbelievably bad. Then next year it was this other guy, wish I could remember his name (Bork?), and he was even worse, like a parody of a singer, an embarrassment.

I'm overstating things here, of course, but it really has gone downhill. The music industry has been blaming illegal downloading for their poor sales, but the real problem is the product. Most of it just isn't worth buying, and if your radio station plays it, people don't listen and you can't sell advertising. In the car I can usually scan through the 15 or so contemporary music FM stations here, and not find a single thing playing that is better than silence.

This is why when somebody comes along, like Nora Jones, who actually can sing a little, and who actually sings songs, she's treated like the Second Coming and instantly sells about a trillion albums. She's only special in today's peculiar song wasteland; in most eras, she'd be just one decent singer/stylist among many.

Finally, a lot of those 1935 songs came from Broadway musicals. That's not a common form any more, at least musicals built around songs instead of costumes (cf. "Cats"), and ditto movies. I don't know why. The great songwriters and lyricists died and weren't replaced. The Gershwins, Lerner and Lowe, etc. don't come around very often (subtract Andrew Lloyd Webber from the musical scene of the last 20 years, and what is left?). Tin Pan Alley is now a guy with a synthesizer and no talent. Even disco could produce "Stayin' Alive" with some decent BeeGees songs; ecstasy and raves can't produce anything but ephemeral mindless techno hypnosis -- no lyrics, no story, no tune, no nothing.

Byron