The pop music of the last 50 years really has become progressively bereft of musical variety. So says this Spanish analysis of gobs of pop songs.
So Martha Bayles is right. Geoffrey O’Brien’s nightmare last chapter of Sonata for Jukebox is right. And me too, I think. See my Rock Songbook #52, especially the part that says:
“A1: The pop-song form has definite limits.
A2: Modern intellectual classes, getting caught-up in 20th-century historicist hope, impressed by remarkable breakthroughs in Afro-American music and recording/amplification technology, and charged by the initial novelty of certain mid-60s musical experiments, lost sight of this, and placed a great deal of expectation on rock’s advancement of the pop form.
A3: Continual efforts to break out into something new reaped diminishing returns, and resulted in ever more finely-wrought recyle-ment and mixture of the existing possibilities.”
August 1st, 2012 | 12:26 pm
I would agree with this if the figure was the last *40* years. Those of us codgers who were alive in the 50s and grew up in the 60s can well remember how the post-war efflorescence of American jazz, pop and folk continued into the early seventies. Lots of new, fresh and good things in the late Sixties, such as the second Miles quintet followed by Bitches Brew, the late Coltrane work, Hendrix really staking out new ground for the electric guitar, the mature Beatles, the Stax artists, etc. Plus recording standards were in general much better then (this has to do with the premature commercial rise of digital sound in the 80s) — not only, as your reference reports, are things recorded louder, but they are compressed to have less dynamic range and are more strident. The young’uns who listen only on hand-held devices with crappy earbuds don’t even know what recorded music can sound like, and the industry doesn’t care at all.
If anyone thought this stuff was only going to get better, they have been proved wrong, but it was wonderful while it lasted, and we still have the recordings.
August 2nd, 2012 | 12:14 am
That’s why “The Rest is Noise” as Alex Ross says. That is, it is noise as long as historicism defines musical production.
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