In the orthodox rock ‘n’ roll canon spread in the late 70s and early 80s by the curia of rock critics – the likes of Dave Marsh, Griel Marcus, Robert Christgau and the rest of Rolling Stone’s round-table of critics – the nadir of popular music was the six-year stretch between Elvis departing for the army, and the Beatles landing in New York.
The reason – this according to a claque of people who build careers “criticizing” an art form that was immune to criticism – was that for those six years, control of the pop music industry reverted back to what had it had been before the rise of Sun records and “black” radio; groups of full-time, professional “song pluggers” cranking out music by the bushel basket in the Mad Men-era equivalent of Tin Pan Alley, in places like the legendary Brill Building, where is songwriters cranked out songs in bulk lots, matched them up with casting-agency generic singers, who recorded the songs with groups of anonymous studio musicians with all of the ceremony of running groceries past the scanner, applying mass production tactics not much different than Eli Whitney or Henry Ford had brought to their products.
According to this mythology, on the other hand, 1954-58, and again after 1964, music was the production of legions of plucky songwriter-performers, during Elvis’ heyday, and again from the Beatles through roughly Woodstock.
According to their orthodoxy, music in the early 70s started slipping, with the creative process falling into the hands of “corporations ” , From which it was saved first by the punks, then by the “new wave” and then…
… well, it doesn’t matter. History has gone on. The curia has obsolesced itself; who on earth reads Rolling Stone anymore, much less remembers, much less pays attention, to Greil Marcus or Robert Christgau or Dave Marsh?
Of course, both impressions were an illusion; a few songwriters, whether working in a song mill in Manhattan or in a row house in Liverpool, have always hoarded a disproportionate share of talent and sales. And plucky independents have always existed and upset the machine on occasion.
I list all of that background by way of saying something that would otherwise sound like the ravings of a curmudgeon; for all of the “critics” caterwauling about music before ’54, from ’54-’58, or during the early ’70s, the notion that every generation of parents has held – that all music sounds the same – has never been more true.
It’s not just a curmudgeonly illusion; it does largely sound the same, because most of what passes for popular music today is written and produced by, literally, the same five people.
I like Christgau — he’s full of balloon juice on politics, of course, but he’s an entertaining read. He wrote the best one-word dismissal of a musical group I’ve ever seen — you might remember the band Yello of “Oh Yeah” fame from the 80s. His description of them? Chickenshi.
Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten older, but the music of that 1958-1964 era sounds better to me now. There’s nothing inherently wrong with craft and professionalism and the folks in the Brill Building had both. Yeah, they produced some schlock, but the Goffin-King songbook is pretty damned good. If you’re interested in the history of that era, I strongly recommend the book I’ve linked.
Now I know why much of the pop music of today just doesn’t speak to me. I knew that there were songwriting boiler-rooms, I just didn’t consciously know that it effectively boiled down to 5 guys who are cynically shameless in ripping themselves off.
Oh well, back to the Corelli and Haydn I just downloaded. Much better to work to anyway.
I can’t help remembering the scene in “1984” where Julia opperates a machine that litterally cranked out popular songs for the prols.
Operates. Why can’t you edit or even delete a post?
DMA wrote:
“Operates. Why can’t you edit or even delete a post?”
Some things are beyond the reach of even 2015 web technology.
The few times I’ve tuned into a top 40 station to see what is trendy today…..yeah…maybe I sound old, but all the music sounds identical. Trends in music is one thing (its fun to listen to the 60s station on Sirius Radio and guess the year the song came out), but monolithic sound is something else.
““Operates. Why can’t you edit or even delete a post?”
Some things are beyond the reach of even 2015 web technology.”
I could probably install a plugin that allows editing of comments. I’m just not sure it’s something I wanna spend time maintaining, or a moving part I want to add, given the really low demand for comment-editing.
you might remember the band Yello of “Oh Yeah” fame from the 80s. His description of them? Chickenshi
I do remember that.
Along those lines – in 1986, one of my favorite critics of the day, Michael Considine of “Musician” magazine, reviewed the first album by GTR (a “supergroup” with Steve Howe and Steve Hackett, formerly of Yes and Genesis respectively).
Considine’s review of GTR: “SHT”.
Ok, from now on if you see misspellings in my posts blame Berg not me.