{"id":55229,"date":"2015-09-18T08:12:26","date_gmt":"2015-09-18T13:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55229"},"modified":"2015-09-18T08:54:29","modified_gmt":"2015-09-18T13:54:29","slug":"1963","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55229","title":{"rendered":"1963"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the orthodox rock ‘n’ roll canon spread in the late 70s and early 80s by the curia of rock critics \u2013 the likes of Dave Marsh, Griel Marcus, Robert Christgau\u00a0and the rest of Rolling Stone’s<\/em> round-table of critics \u2013 the nadir of popular music was the six-year stretch between Elvis departing for the army, and the Beatles landing in New York.<\/p>\n

The reason \u2013 this according to a claque of people who build careers “criticizing” an art form that was immune to criticism \u2013 was that for those six years, control of the pop music industry reverted back to what had it had been before\u00a0the rise of\u00a0Sun records and “black” radio; groups of full-time, professional “song pluggers” cranking out music by the bushel basket in the Mad Men-<\/em>era equivalent of Tin Pan Alley, in places like the legendary Brill Building, where is songwriters cranked out songs\u00a0in bulk lots, matched them up with casting-agency generic\u00a0singers, who recorded the songs with\u00a0groups of anonymous studio musicians with all of the ceremony of running groceries past\u00a0the scanner, applying mass production tactics not much different than Eli Whitney or Henry Ford had brought to their products.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

According to their orthodoxy, music in the early 70s started slipping, with the creative process falling into the hands of \u00a0“corporations ” , From which it was saved first by the punks, then by the “new wave” and then\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026 well, it doesn’t matter. History has gone\u00a0on. The curia has obsolesced itself; who on earth reads\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/em> anymore, much less remembers, much less pays attention, to Greil Marcus or Robert Christgau or Dave Marsh?<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0And plucky independents have always existed and upset the machine on occasion.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It’s not just a curmudgeonly illusion; it does\u00a0<\/i>largely sound\u00a0the same, because most of what passes for popular music today is written and produced by, literally, the same five people.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the orthodox rock ‘n’ roll canon spread in the late 70s and early 80s by the curia of rock critics \u2013 the likes of Dave Marsh, Griel Marcus, Robert Christgau\u00a0and the rest of Rolling Stone’s round-table of critics \u2013 the nadir of popular music was the six-year stretch between Elvis departing for the army, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55229"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55260,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55229\/revisions\/55260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}