"The Big Money (Or: Gotta Serve Somebody)" was written for a class assignment in WRT 305, a writing studio class at Syracuse University. The class focuses on the various styles of essay writing, and this particular assignment was written for our study of the cultural essay. The idea was to explore a cultural topic in essay form. I chose the state of popular music as my theme, because I felt comfortable in expressing my ideas and citing the examples therein, without feeling compelled to rigorously "prove" my viewpoint. Essayists such as James Baldwin and Douglas Atkins were studied in the process of understanding the form and style of the cultural essay. The point of writing this essay was to use the relatively free style of essay form to comment on, evaluate, and personalize a specific subject.
From the very first time that someone decided to experiment with a musical tradition, the cry has gone out that "true," "pure," and "good" music is dead to society, and that music itself is on a perpetual slide to oblivion. All apostrophe aside, this is a serious matter to consider. Music inhabits a significant place in all cultures. Musical style is very much a function of the Zeitgeist, reflecting the prevalent tone of the dynamics and pulse of a specific time. As an artistic medium, music has as much to do with the shaping of society, or as a shaped response to society, as do television, literature, language, or art. The fact that we find music pervading so many of our endeavors bears this out. There is nothing like music. A musical composition is a singular, tangible, emotional and intellectual outlet for our expression, so it should be no surprise that the direction of music resonates importance with so many people. Which brings us to the topic: Is the popular music of today of any value, and what does it bode for future music?
In the introduction, I have suggested that the style of popular music of a particular period reflects that period. The particular style that is chosen is the artist's response to the agony and ecstasy, or something in between, of the time. The great thing about music, though, is that it can express anything. The Zeitgeist serves as a filter for the form of the music. In this way, the artist can make his point in a medium that is both accessible and acceptable to the listener. Not unlike language, the artist wants to communicate with his audience, and in order to do that, must speak the audience's language. Of course, music, essentially, has only one language, and an artist is free to explore any avenue of expression, whether comprehensible or not, whether deliberate or not. So it may well be that a listener is completely unable to identify with, much less assimilate, a piece.
And this is the problem. Music is a personal, individual language, not collective, like the spoken language of words. Therefore, people have difficulty in determining and establishing value in music. What is good music to one, may not be to another, and for very good reasons. What constitutes positive and negative change in music? If music doesn't communicate in absolute terms, how is anyone to decide anything concrete about it? Doesn't that just make all music relative? Isn't one piece just as good as any other?
This quandary of indeterminacy can be seen in today's music and in people's responses to music in general. One always seems to hear the bemoaning of the present day's musical style. Today, it's that machines (i.e., computers, synthesizers, digital recorders, etc. . . . ) are the primary instrument of musical production. Popular music is characterized as boring, monotonous, stale, unoriginal, and simple. Complaints of this vein are nothing new. Viennese classicists like Mozart and Haydn were accused of destroying the nobler aspects of the Baroque, of Bach and Monteverdi. They, however, were criticized for dispensing with the single line melodies of earlier music, mostly folk songs and church hymns. Beethoven "desecrated" Viennese classicism; Verdi, traditional recitative opera; and Wagner, well . . . , everything. A definite pattern in people's attitudes towards music begins to congeal around the beginning of this century, when phonographs start to appear. Debussy made mincemeat out of intervals and dynamics; Schoenberg and Webern threw out tonality and consonance; and Stravinsky obfuscated tone color, range, and rhythm. More recently, tape recorders afforded such "blasphemy" as the likes of Memerolieux's "Bowery Bum", and "that bloody" John Cage and his "4'33."" "Utter rubbish", says the public. "Utter brilliance", say the artists.
Today is no different. Phillip Glass still drones away with his alpha waves, Laurie Anderson bewilders anyone and everyone, and Frank Zappa just freaks. For these artists, the tie that binds is not at all binding. They are all musical and artistic rebels, in their own way. Whether exasperated with the pap of popular music, or simply exploring their creative capacity, they all deviate from the norm. These deviations come in all shapes and sizes. People of the 1930's couldn't believe what Charlie Parker and Django Reinhardt were doing with music. Jean Baptiste Lully, Edgar Varese, and Miles Davis all had tremendous impact on the music of their time by "off-roading" it.
Yet, the common man of the time had difficulty in appreciating their respective gifts. Being a good music listener is work, in any period. It requires a knowledge of the context within which to place information derived from listening to, interpreting, and understanding music. One must know the experience of the artist and the time for which he is writing. After all, music does not and cannot exist in a vacuum. Or can it?
It seems to me that this is one of the major pitfalls in the criticism of popular music. Again, due to the ubiquity of computerized music today, and the ease with which it is produced, manipulated, and rehashed, one often hears of the lack of quality of today's music. "It isn't like it used to be," "it isn't as good," and "no one appreciates classical music anymore," are all commonly remarked. Popular targets are dance music, rap, country, and metal. Unfortunately, these styles encompass nearly all music that is commonly heard today. And critics are more zealous than ever in pointing this out. In the fifties, rock n' roll was the enemy. Littered with "unseemly" sexual innuendo (just look at "Good Golly, Miss Molly" or "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On") and overly simplified form, it was said to be the downfall of tasteful music. The sixties and seventies brought electronic "hogwash" and folk music to the forefront. Then, it was either a bunch of "drugged out lunatics slopping around in some quasi-bluesy soup of Mooged psychedelia," or just "some hippie and his guitar on a mission of protest." And never mind disco!! Now the squabble is over sampling and digital instrumentation. Today, any idiot with ten-thousand bucks and ten cubic feet of space can get his stuff on the radio, and attain instant credibility with the masses.
But if all of this has always been going on before, in some form or another, what's the big deal? So everyone doesn't dig King Crimson, or go to the symphony on Saturday evenings. "So what? Hey man, music has been through everything imaginable and has always come out fine. It will always be around, and people are entitled to listen to whatever they want, without the burden of some preconceived standards, right?" Besides, there is nothing to worry about if you believe, like many musicologists do, that trends in music are cyclical. The various qualities that articulate a musical period are always coming, going, and reappearing. So no problem.
Well, yes and no. There is a very convincing case to be made for the cyclical nature of musical style, again, because it is a function of society, and cultural trends, evaluated broadly, are often cyclical. People certainly are entitled to listen to whatever they wish, however debased and valueless. In fact, some of the greatest progress in music comes as a direct result of this. Everyone listens to the same garbage, someone gets bored, and decides to make something completely off the wall; all in all, a very healthy relation. It is also true that music as a whole will survive. It seems inconceivable that the basic three-chord, twelve-tone structure of today's music will ever be lost.
All of this is quite true. In the foreseeable future, music scrys to be pretty uniform. Here is the problem. The reason we listen to music, or indulge in any artistic endeavor, is that we receive value from it, both tangible and intangible. Music can be a device for communicating very concrete information, or simply for sublimating an emotional response. The fact that you listen to a piece of music just because you like it, is perhaps the best justification of all, the one containing the greatest value to you.
But this subjectivity is not necessarily license for the valuation of all musical work. Astonishingly, some would argue that even a person tapping out a rhythm completely at random has value. This calls into question the standards by which music is judged. Isn't John Cage's "4:17" just as good, or better, than Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony?
In order to properly evaluate a piece of music, it is necessary to establish a framework of objective criteria. However, let me make it absolutely clear that I hold both objective and subjective assessments of music as valid and relevant, the subjective being the personal reaction to a work. The result of this is that a piece, while achieving total adoration by the public, and defended as such, may validly be branded as tripe. A distinction must be made between objective and subjective values. One must be able to discriminate between good and bad music, and the various shades in between, so that one can gain a true appreciation for what music means. Each piece of music created supplants itself in the context of its environment. Not only that, but it enhances that context, for better or worse. Imagine the horror of being unable to compare works of music, to measure their value against one another. Or worse, to take the use of the objective valuation of music as a necessary threat to the intention and spirit of music.
It need not be so at all. Being able to objectively view music is a way, the only way, of having access to certain information that we subconsciously rely on to function in life. The skills that are necessary to properly interpret music are derivatives of many other skills that we have. Their common denominator is that they all serve to make sense out of what we experience as human beings. Music does not necessarily have to make sense, but the reasons for which we value it do. Otherwise, one piece is just as good as another, and the end result is that there is no reason to listen to music at all. Having experienced one piece of music would make additional experiences completely pointless.
This is the tragedy of solely subjective valuation of music. Objective properties of music can be ignored, and even refuted, but they exist nonetheless. They do not ask to be accepted or believed; that's why they're objective.
So where does that leave today's music, how does one evaluate it, and what can be expected from it? As I previously stated, one of the biggest problems with popular music is people's mindless reliance and acceptance of computerized music. Now, of course, bad music existed long before the Univac, and very, very good music can be created on computers, music often impossible to physically reproduce. We have digitalization to thank for innumerable possibilities of expression. The rub is found in the fact that in extending the range of musical facility, the easiest road has been taken in the creative process. With the advent of computers, one no longer needs to physically play an instrument or know anything at all about music. Top 40 radio certainly bears this out.
Hence the title, "The Big Money." The connection between radio and TV play and revenue is glaring, and except for the last twenty years, quite unprecedented. Sure, Mozart had to suffer through endless ten-year old brats of 18th century dilettantes to put food on the table, and Genesis had to wait until 1978, three years after Peter Gabriel left, to see any appreciable success, but their trials are nothing on the scale of what occurs today. Two major and complementary circumstances are the cause. The first: big, big bucks and status are to be found in the music industry, and nothing to match any previous time. The second: making good music is hard! It takes work, and the harder you work and the more you explore, the greater risk you take in isolating yourself from society, resulting in great personal and financial stress. I personally believe that Paul McCartney is virtually incapable of writing a bad song, even were he brain damaged. Why the hell would I say that? I don't even like everything he's written (probably only on the order of 55% like and 5% love). But I can make an objective evaluation of his work, based on skills that I have developed through studying music, as well as through other areas of my thinking; those skills that allow us to assess music are not exclusive of the rest of our cognition, they are all integrated.
Sad to say, there exists not one music critic that can point to a single artist today that has, over a long period of time, actually gotten better (again, by objective standards). That is, no one is producing better music as they age. The raw technicality and quality of the writing has not been improved. The state of music today can be summarized by "the gravitation towards the easy." Yet this would appear to be contradictory. If musical skill is, in part, a function of experience, how could one help but get better? The nature of this beast is the marriage of money to music production. Now, there is no incentive for an artist to improve on his work. Economics: If I can make more money and live better by doing less work, why should I work my ass off? Just as today's musical conventions reward stagnation; originality, as a diametric opposite, is viewed as anathema. This operation is reiterative. A lot of junk exists; the uneducated listener, having no incentive to educate himself, responds positively to the junk, reinforcing the incentive to produce junk.
How does one get out of this, or why should one? Left to its own devices, popular music will continue to decline into formlessness. Even now, Top 40 sounds all the same. This isn't high-minded, pretentious ranting. If we took an objective look at music today, it would scare the hell out of us. Grunge has sudden appeal for its novelty and recklessness, until everyone now realizes that its the same three chords, with some distortion thrown in. Virtually no popular drummer today could lick John Bonham's boots, because no one works at drumming. People try to reproduce great works of the past, but they just don't get it. Whether it's Van Halen exhuming The Who, or Michael Bolton mimicking Ray Charles, the integrity and intent of the original work is lost; on its own and in comparison, the piece sounds like such nonsense! Yes, note for note, it's about right, but they've souped up the production and arrangement of it so much, you can't even consider it the same song.
The reason why music is in decay today is the same as always: no incentive for change. However, conditions exist presently that allow a distinction to be made between the past and present. Examining the musical periods of the past, one finds that the public was generally much better educated in music than today. Music lessons for children were "de regeur," even for the impoverished. Of course, much of this has to do with the fact that there were fewer recreational diversions then. Additionally, the nobility, primary financiers and patrons of composers, were not the most adventurous sort in musical exploration. Handel wrote 104 symphonies, none, it is said, completely to his liking. But before the mid-1970's, artists would take great risks in their writing. Torn between alienating the public by self-indulgence and drowning themselves in mundaity, they would opt for the former. But almost universally, the public would respond favorably. There seemed to be a measure of common pride for the public to be able to probe the complex depths of an innovative work, to link minds with the composer, and the composer would repay them with more extraordinary gifts. Stravinsky's initial performance of "The Rite Of Spring" in Paris concluded in such a riot, that the house manager was frantically flicking the house lights on and off, screaming for order. But the frenzy was borne of both outrage and catharsis. No one had ever heard music of this nature. The audience had no idea how to handle it. But soon, the work became as mainstream as a Bach toccata. The artist's experimental contributions were accepted, promoting an incentive for continued development of musical form.
From the mid-70's on, the situation is quite the opposite. Whereas the great composers of the past were expected to, and did, improve with time, today's once great musicians lapse into complacency and decay. The extenuating condition that exists presently that differentiates it from music of the past is that incentive exists for repetition. The public does seem to perceive that popular music is not very original or challenging, but they also seem to prefer it that way. No one is willing to think, to invest time and energy in the appreciation of good music. Somehow, the value of good music to the public appears to have depreciated significantly. In Top 40 radio, one can easily hear a drum sampling or melody from one popular song sampled directly onto another, an horrific development. Here is music offered to the public, involving virtually no effort by the artist, with massive monetary reimbursement not just expected, but demanded, by today's arrogant performers. The public sucks up image over ability, style over substance.
This abominable trend will not right itself until a desire is expressed by the public for some real music, on a large scale. As with any business, the most effective method is purchasing power. Especially in today's market, music production is expensive, and a panhandling amateur will not survive long without financial backing. By identifying and understanding objective values in music and associating them with one's own subjective values, we may yet find an egress from our musical morass.