In current news: it is the Second Coming of Oasis. Adele is still counting (her previous album, if I have it right, was called $600,000; the next one is to be called $800,000). Ed Sheeran has some Beatles and Led Zeppelin records in his collection. Elvis Presley is triple-vaccinated, somewhere, but just won’t die. And it is rumoured that Christopher Guest or someone will update Spinal Tap to make it about a female singer-songwriter called Tinal Spap or Tinker Swallow or something similar, who has boyfriends, writes cold turkey songs about them, and becomes not only Bigger than Jesus but Bigger than the Beatles.
What is going on with music? Not the musicians, but the music? Yes, indeed, Julie Burchill, Simon Price, Stuart Lee, Marcus Berkmann and countless others think that the second coming of Oasis is good/bad/ugly. But, who cares? Apart from the cellos and brushed drums of ‘Wonderwall’ (“To die is gonna be the die”, is workin’ class Hamlet, innit?), their discography is not up to much, musically. “Mere zeitgeist stuff, my dear,” one imagines Noel Coward saying, “now be a darling and pass the gin.”
As everyone knows, dimly, music is finished. The best band I saw in Turkey (called Spitfire) played old Pink Floyd, Alan Parsons and Jethro Tull songs. The guitarist, Suleyman Bagcioglu, even played his replica solos with a cigarette moving between lip and headstock. They added a bass solo to the Hendrix classic ‘Third Stone from the Sun’. Why? Because the Axial Age of modern music was the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. We cannot forget this, but it is part of the problem. This is because the existence of recording and the survival of music on vinyl, tape, cloud has meant two things: 1) that we still have that classical 60s and 70s music, and 2) that from the 1970s onwards there was an evolutionary pressure at all times to ‘improve’ music, change it, sell more, convince the corporate men. In the 1970s the corporate men had stood apart, and invested in everyone, leaving Caravan and Soft Machine to record five albums and sell a hundred records. By the 1980s that was all over. The entire history of modern music is a double history: a history of the music and a history of the money. In the 1960s the music led to the money. By 2000 or so, nay, of course, the 1980s, the money was making the music: the music was playing to the soundtrack of the money. I defy anyone to dispute this hypothesis.
Music has always had some sort of relation to politics. Fanfares, fife and drums, are military. ‘The Last Post’, ‘Reveille’ etc. (used for the funerals of Churchill and Elizabeth II, as if they were to die, and then to wake). National Anthems: all oddly sub-classical, usually taking the form of a march. Back at the beginning of political philosophy, Plato thought certain modes were a threat to the polis. Classical music and choral music always depended on aristocratic and episcopal endowment. But modern music is the ultimate sign that our world is economic as well as political, and that economic imperatives have not so much levelled down musical tastes as levelled them across into superficially various repetitions on a theme. I expect we’ll be hearing ‘pop’ until our civilisation fades out.
Judging by our contemporary music, dominated as it is by certain four-chord rounds, one might say that our society is threatened not by the modes Plato hated but by the demonic insistence of I, V, VI minor, and IV – ubiquitous in contemporary pop, as demonstrated by the Axis of Awesome. This four-chord round is an inversion of the chord pattern from all those standards like ‘Poetry in Motion’ in the 1960s which cycled around I, VI minor, IV, V. Odd how we like our rounds. There are other four chord songs, the famous chopping four of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and Blur’s mocking ‘Song #2’. There are not many one chord songs, apart from Lennon’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’. A good example of a two chord song is ‘A Horse With No Name’ which da-dahs on forever. Most simple songs are three-chord songs, I, IV and V (country songs, ‘Mull of Kintyre’ etc.) These three are also found in the ubiquitous twelve-bar blues: a happy discovery for every young guitarist, when they discover that they too can write a song by repeating a melodic line, first over E and then over A. It’s all great music for monotony, for monopoly, and for Covid-n-Climate compliance.
Music should be much more complicated and much less compliant. Though Pythagoras liked simplicity in harmonics, it is advanced harmony that has usually, when on this side of disorder, been considered heavenly. Anyone who knows Bach or a hymn like ‘O Sacred Head Sore Wounded’ or any of Holst’s Planets knows that much music in the West has slipped around modally, so that the composer seems to be shifting from one scale to another as the music continues. Anyone who has, like me, tried to learn the Adagio from the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ will share my astonishment at how Beethoven modulated from C# minor to B minor to F# minor and round and back again. Anyone who has listened to the ‘Tristan chord’ (F B D# G#) – or, more likely, the ‘Hendrix chord’ (with its internal blues dissonance, clashing a minor and major third), or the ‘Bond chord’ (with its querying suspension of major seventh and minor third), or the ‘Chicky chord’ – that I play to my boys, as it is from a cartoon – (with its major ninth and minor third), or the ‘Hard Day’s Night Chord’ (which, I learn, after reading a scientific analysis, was a cluster of A C D E F G, with George Martin’s piano hidden behind George Harrison’s guitar, playing the rogue F) – has awoken to the magnificent scepticism and querying to be found in the greatest music.
Not only is there pitch and harmony, assonance and dissonance, there is also the other business of rhythm. Most contemporary music plods or traps around in a boring four-in-the-bar, 1, 2, 3, 4. (Repeat, repeat. Save? – Delete.) But, again, anyone who has admired ‘Money’ by Pink Floyd or ‘Cinema Show’ by Genesis has learnt to respond to sevens, and anyone who has enjoyed ‘Take Five’ or Holst’s ‘Mars’ or the ‘Mission Impossible Theme’ has discovered just how exciting fives can be. I was once in my office in Cambridge listening to ‘Flite’ by Cinematic Orchestra (which is in sevens), on repeat, when a friend summoned me to the night club below. I found the music there, though loud, almost overwhelmingly unexciting, stuck in a rut of fours. I cannot remember which one of the Mission Impossible films attempted to change the five-beat theme so it fitted by force into four beats, so it seemed to suggest that Tom Cruise was dramatically riding an electric milk float on behalf of Mission Laborious.
Now we have YouTube we can explore music, with the help of Rick Beato or Wings of Pegasus or any number of other adepts: these confirm the view that music was good, and now is bad. Years ago, when the internet was young, I read almost the entirety of George Starostin’s website of essays on the music of the 1960s, 1970s and after: and he, a Russian academic, made an argument I had never seen uttered before (certainly not in a mainstream book, where the pretence had to be maintained that we had never had it so good, “things could only get better”, etc.), but which I think absolutely correct, which was that music – and here I refer only to popular music, the music associated especially with the guitar and the vinyl album – came to its apex between around 1965 and 1975. Though there were interesting sonic innovations in the 1980s, there was almost nothing – except occasional songs – that got beyond the Beatles, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Genesis, King Crimson and some others. The two best singer-songwriters were women: Joni Mitchell and, in her first albums, before she was eaten by the 1980s, Kate Bush. The two best bands later on – in my opinion, of course – and much later, were, by contrast, almost entirely masculine and entirely reactionary: these were Transatlantic and Big Big Train (try ‘Suite Charlotte Pike’ or ‘Underfall Yard’), with perhaps Spock’s Beard and Neal Morse’s other various bands bringing up the rear, and with Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson getting an honourable mention (though he is overly dreary, lacking the human exuberance of Morse, Portnoy, Longdon and the rest). This masculine music really takes off from the 1970s, as if synth pop, dance, club, rap, hiphop and the rest never happened.
Anyhow, I diverge from the rest of the world about music: since the rest of the world appears to like things like ‘Adele’ and ‘Taylor’ and ‘Ed’, not to mention obligatory rap songs at the end of every film. (I shall ignore the nostalgists who simply replay old Iron Maiden, Queen, Bowie songs on their headphones.) Does anyone like music? Who knows what is going on? In an academic book on the changes to the nature of work, Axel Honneth says that work used to be about hands, and now is increasingly about the eye. Well, music has shifted, alas, from ear to eye. Consider Autotune, and pitch correction, which is more about eye than ear. The music may formerly have sounded great, but if Lennon, Mercury, Gibb, Bush etc. go even slightly above or below a G natural then there is now always some cloth-eared eagle-eyed cybernumpty who is willing and able and paid well to snap the singer’s vocal to visual exactitude on a screen. This is probably one more reason why music is not much good at the moment. It is being drowned by corporate mindsets of the sort we are familiar with in politics, but also by the fading out of the ear for music. Perhaps video did kill the radio star: by making everything about the eye.
Music has been of much unmusical significance recently. A month or more ago almost every article was about Taylor Swift. In the last week or so there has been much banter and bitterness about Noel and Liam. Taylor Swift is probably just the ‘vaccine’ in musical form: I don’t know. But what is interesting is that the argument against Oasis seems to be social or even political, as if ‘we’ are as tired of Oasis as we are of Iraq. Sounded good at the time, but in retrospect not so good.
Also political is the interesting contrast between Republican and Democrat in the United States. Trump can barely play a bar or two of a song without receiving twitter condemnation, public refusals to sanction the music and threats of legal action, whereas the Democrats can summon an incredible roster of names, such as Lady Gaga, Stevie Wonder, John Denver, Coldplay, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, to sanction the use of their songs at the DNC, or even, in the case of Wonder and some others, to appear in person. Why is this? Why are almost all pop stars on the boring Covid-and-Climate Left? Why did Rage Against the Machine supinely comply with the machine? (“Fuck me, I just done what you told me.”)
Well, I think it is because pop stars are the bards of “You have your troubles” and embodiments of – in the immortal phrase of Rod Liddle – “I have had my troubles too”. A songster sings, “I lost my love” or something similar, which resonates with all the others who lost their love, thus earning the songster vast amounts of money which enables him or her to shag with impunity, only later discovering that “they have had their troubles too”, as girlfriends talk to the papers, or boyfriends leave them, or the drugs work only too well: and there they are, on their island of gilt-covered plastic awards, lonely, talking to the piano or ukelele. In short, modern music is, and perhaps has always mostly been, about the hypocrisy of being rich and pretending to have troubles too, while also pretending to care about the poor, and singing for them, while not knowing them, and having only a dim memory of the three years of maturity which preceded fame. This ‘love’ gibberish which has dominated ‘pop’ since the 1950s is a vast distraction. Eventually, after 2000, it was so good it could distract us from the music itself. MTV played its part: and YouTube, by shifting us away from the ear to the eye.
I wonder if any children nowadays discover music by ear. I discovered music when I heard ‘Wonderful Land’ by the Shadows on the radio: I stood still, and couldn’t believe what I was hearing – I was 12 or so. For years afterwards I would hear things and have to ask what it was. What’s that? Prokofiev’s ‘Dance of the Brave Knights’. What’s that? Caravan’s ‘In the Land of Grey and Pink’. What’s that? The third movement of Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto. Etc. I wonder if it ever happens now. Probably not.
Instead, everyone exists in a solipsism of four-chord-rounds and trap-beats, musing on how they have had their troubles too. It is the Matrix, the Machine. We can imagine we are raging against it, and then, probably while the headphones are still humming irrelevantly in our ears, and as we stare down at the phone in our hand, we can stretch the other arm out to be jabbed, chipped, fingerprinted, whatever.
[A one bar rest.]The only unhypocritical, and therefore quite possibly the best, modern song: ‘Taxman’ by the Beatles. Discuss.
(Ha, ha, Keir Starmer! Ha, ha, Rachel Reeves!)
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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