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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“Fanfares, fife and drums, are military”
Here ya go!
“African-American Fife & Drum Music: Mississippi & Jamaica”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6mRdPP6wRo
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fife+and+drum+jamaica
Speak for yourself. I am a Metalhead but do like some of the older Rock & Dance tracks. I have mentioned before about the German band Rammstein, and how controversial they were seen to be. Yet they are on a cover photo around 2021 with a mask!! FFS. So mush for the ‘edgy’ image that they portray.
You can’t beat dikke titten!
Here’s some metal for you. There’s no particular reason for this track, save that I have CD since yesterday.
NB: This Evil Stuff You Are Not Supposed to Listen To!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXGlxKjHt5A&t=1570s
the music was playing to the soundtrack of the money. I defy anyone to dispute this hypothesis.”
I think that is what you call the Hairline bands like Europe & Whitesnake etc.
“It’s all great music for monotony, for monopoly, and for Covid-n-Climate compliance”
Then surely it can be used to do the reverse!
Interesting idea. Might there be a correlation between the type of music one listens to (or plays) on a regular basis, and their worldview with regard to authoritarianism and compliance?
These days it takes 8 people to write a 4 chord pop song.
I love classic pop and rock. Current music is so bad that I like even the music I didn’t particularly like in the 1960s and 1970s better than almost all of 21st century music. There was certainly a lot more creativity then.
David Bowie’s Low album, which he recorded in 1976, in collaboration with Brian Eno, is one of his now most critically acclaimed and successful albums. But the record company at the time refused to release it. According to:
https://www.bowiebible.com/1977/01/14/album-release-low/?utm_content=cmp-true
“RCA initially refused to release Low, telling Bowie that he could keep the masters as the label had no use for them. Bowie, whose belief in the album was unwavering, refused to make changes, and took legal advice. He was informed that, under the terms of his contract, RCA were obliged to release the album.”
Corporate people – who know nothing about creativity – other than creative accounting – think they know better than creative musicians, and the corporations control the music industry. Hence we end up with the blandness of today’s music.
Probably my favourite LP
“obligatory rap songs at the end of every film”
Maybe not ICE – T who is on ‘our’ side of this war.
Fortunately we have a whole cabinet full of CDs and LPs we have collected over the years so we never have to listen to what passes for ‘music’ nowadays and the strange thing is we never get bored!
I’ve been collecting Gig DVDs of “the greats” of my lifetime for over a decade now. I now have about 60 and can watch Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, Queen and many many others ….. in their prime ….. whenever I want.
Of course, exceptions abound, such as some Frank Sinatra songs particularly “Mack the Knife” (which has about as many chords as one could possibly squeeze into a song) and “Under My Skin”. And the Doobie Brothers “What a Fool Believes”… Good luck making 4-chord versions of those!
But agreed, since the proliferation of original music like this and the with commoditization of pop music over the decades, it’s slow but steady homogenization has been an expression of group-think. It’s robotic-sounding, studio-refined rhythms, common themes, and repetitive, chopsticks-like chord patterns possibly have a spell-binding effect on the human psyche… If not consciously listening to music of one’s own choosing, it’s always somewhere in the background (the radio being played at your workplace, or mindlessly listening to any crap that comes over BBC radio while driving). It’s an ever-present, hypnosis-inducing drone that get’s you humming along or getting stuck in your head however much you hate the song.
Modern commercial music is not particularly conducive to independent, creative thought.
Yep every time I am in the bloody Supermarket I hear some little girl singing along to a basic drumbeat and silly bass line. The lyrics are almost always full of stuff like “If you wanna” or “You just gotta”. —–I remember in secondary school in the 70’s we all used to be trying to outdo each other with our new albums by Yes or Genesis, Jethro Tull,. maybe Joni Mitchel, The Crusaders. Great albums like Honky Chateau, Don’t shoot me I am only the Piano Player etc by Elton John. ——Ok we cannot all like everything but the one thing all these people had in common was they were all playing live and were competent musicians. Today technology allows anyone with a computer to record songs using software instruments.
“This ‘love’ gibberish which has dominated ‘pop’ since the 1950s is a vast distraction”
I read somewhere that during the Battle of the Bulge the US army banned Christmas tunes during Christmas because if the “Nauseating Sentimentalism”. There is some truth in that, I would probably end up shooting myself with some of that dreary sh*t.
I don’t envy those working in retail at Christmas time, where you’ve got the same bloody Christmas tape playing over and over in the background… I can’t imagine having to listen to Chris Rea “Driving Home for Christmas” or “I wish it Could Be Christmas” 50 times per shift!
That reminds me of when I was a teenager working in Co-Op. My God that was an ordeal!
Still haven’t got over arriving in London from Paris on Eurostar last year, First Class, to the strains of ‘Last Christmas’ from Wham! Talk about lowering the tone …
When I semi-retired I got a little job in a local gift shop. Christmas was mental torture. The owner agreed we wouldn’t play Christmas music before 1 December, but it was then non-stop all day, every day. (Fortunately I only did 3 days a week).
We had several CDs, so we could mix up the playlist a bit …. but it was basically the same 30 songs, over and over, but in a different order!
Those are a blessed relief vs Maria Carey…
I just been listening to the Heavy Metal band ‘The Organisation’ that was formed after the break up of Death Angel Thrash Metal band of the 1980s.
Surely the purpose of popular music (and film, magazines…all ‘pop’ culture) is not to be good, but to be new?
Not to be “new” —-To make money. Music is a business like any other. But real music is to be found played by talented people who can find a gig somewhere, like in small jazz clubs. My wife and I were on holiday at Lake Maggiore in Italy. We came back to the hotel (Dino) one night and I spotted a grand piano with a drum kit and double bass. I said to my wife “Someone must be about to play, lets get a drink and wait”—-10 minutes later this trio came on and they were quite outstanding. My wife and I were the only audience. Till the Corporate people with their Tuxedo’s and evening dresses there for some business gathering started filling up the room. Pretty soon you could not hear the group and not a person was paying a blind bit of attention to them. ——The capture of music by big business has brainwashed people into accepting low quality easily manufactured tripe, while real music is driven underground.
Re the photo accompanying this article, doesn’t that singer Taylor Swift ever wear a full set of clothing on stage? Or is it just prancing about in different colours of bathing costume? A strange “role model” for little girls.
Tom Hiddleston had a lucky escape from her, in my view.
Or vice Versa !
Back in the 60s and early 70s music was ‘hand made’. It was artisanal music, and like all artisanal produce the the best was truly excellent and the worst was thrown in the bin.
And then music was produced by digital processes which encouraged the industrialisation of music. Most music became the equivalent of machine baked sliced bread.
Love the comment on the use of autotune – imagine what it would have done to John Lennon on “Twist and Shout” – doesn’t bear thinking about.
All pop music fundamentally is propaganda for hyper liberalism which pillars are collectivism, sexual promiscuity and abortion. I know it’s an unpopular view but my parents met at a dance in the 1950s, there there was an orchestra and virtually everyone knew how to dance. In 10 years pop reduced everyone to over sexed morons to amplified music and ppl generally couldn’t dance. We’ve gone from a Christian culture to one where we worship Paul McCartney/Tony Blair as God. It’s not really a great shock it’s not turning out well.
There’s something in what you say but it hardly applies to more than a fraction of “popular music”. Arguably it started with rock’n’roll or maybe earlier and that broke through because it spoke about sex, but it’s a very broad spectrum. I love all kinds of music.
Downvote didn’t come from me.
Our band The Refusers rock song DISOBEY
“They’re masters of manipulation, running a confidence game. All they care about is domination, deception is their middle name. Disobey! What’d I say? Disobey!”
Free streaming song link:
https://www.reverbnation.com/therefusers/song/29921834-disobey
I liked it! Thanks for the link.
Second that!
Very nice addition to an article which is little more than “Everything went downhill since we’re not young anymore!”
The only altenative to “get old” is “die young”. Strangely, nobody wants that, either.
Has anyone seen the 1984 Horror Black Carrion, well it was on last night. Here is the end with a classic tune:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm2cE8D3F18
This article reminded me of Hi Rez & Jimmy Levy ‘We will not comply’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHxk1Mg5n7I
Madeline Hamilton & Marcus Pearce (2024), Scientific Reports
Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023
Abstract:
In the past century, the history of popular music has been analyzed from many different perspectives, with sociologists, musicologists and philosophers all offering distinct narratives characterizing the evolution of popular music. However, quantitative studies on this subject began only in the last decade and focused on features extracted from raw audio, which limits the scope to low-level components of music. The present study investigates the evolution of a more abstract dimension of popular music, specifically melody, using a new dataset of popular melodies spanning from 1950 to 2023. To identify “melodic revolutions”, changepoint detection was applied to a multivariate time series comprising features related to the pitch and rhythmic structure of the melodies. Two major revolutions in 1975 and 2000 and one smaller revolution in 1996, characterized by significant decreases in complexity, were located. The revolutions divided the time series into three eras, which were modeled separately with autoregression, linear regression and vector autoregression. Linear regression of autoregression residuals underscored inter-feature relationships, which become stronger in post-2000 melodies. The overriding pattern emerging from these analyses shows decreasing complexity and increasing note density in popular melodies over time, especially since 2000.
Hawkwind and Gabriel era Genesis.
Yup.
Those were the days.
I should just like to commend this song by Jem to all those of a Scepical nature. I first heard this track played by the late, great Terry Wogan. It perfectly sums up the covid era and what has ensued, long before anyone had heard of covid.
https://youtu.be/k53NGe64RBU
Try this new Track , “Nothing Ever Grows”by Bristol Band “Krooked Tongue” !
https://youtu.be/dvXEk6stEWc
Rick Beato on Youtube explains what has happened to music. The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse (youtube.com). ——In the 60’s and 70’s all music was live. There were 3 4 5 and 6 piece bands. Musicians had to learn songs by copying records, which is the only way to learn anything. Then hopefully after learning something they might be able to write some songs of their own, if that is what they wanted to do. But they would be recorded using real instruments and often live.
—–One day around the late 80’s after I had been very busy working in London and when I returned to my home town I was one night outside a bar and I heard this music coming from inside. The music sounded ok but the singing was truly dreadful. Someone came out of the bar and I asked them “What is that band in there”? They replied “It’s Karaoke mate”. I said “What is that”? I had never heard of it.
——This was my first realisation that technology had now taken over the music business. Today anyone with a computer and a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) which is a recording program, can put digital recordings together and edit the data in multiple ways that are quite mind boggling. Vocals can be tuned to be in pitch. Notes can be quantised to be in time etc etc.
——Talented people can use this technology and still produce quality music, but the general public often are not musically astute enough to see what real talent is and will often just accept a jumble of processed crap.
—-Rick Beato has his take on these developments and is worth a watch. He also makes lots of other great videos analysing artists, albums, recordings and solo’s by musicians and explains what is happening and why the music is special.
Second Rick Beato – I only understand a fraction of what he talks about, however his videos are a great watch. Amazing to hear the different approaches and layers etc in songs you love – really helps you appreciate them. He also makes proper length vids and interviews – actually lets people talk vs wanting to talk over them
Yep —-Cheers. Try watching the ones on Larry Carlton
Interesting article, I guess we are from a similar generation, though I would have mentioned punk’s initial desire to break the rules (Wire, Siouxsie…) also, which showed you don’t have to be prog to innovate
And ‘Taxman’ was written by George Harrison perhaps the most insightful, spiritual and least hypocritical member of the band.
There’s a reason why Greatest Hits Radio focuses on the ’70s, 80’s and 90s ….. with an occasional foray into the ’60s.
And it’s not just to do with the age of the listeners, since it attracts listeners from far younger age groups.
There are virtually no contemporary singer/songwriters who have anything interesting to say …. about anything. And bands are virtually non-existent.
I feel sorry for the younger generation (age 25 and younger). They will have no musicians with the stature of, say Elton John, Rod Stewart, the Stones and many, many others to remember.
Is the difference in merit between one pop song and another really comparable to the difference between, say, Bach or Mozart and any and every pop song? It sounds as if the Professor and his readers think it is.
Isn’t — once you’ve got the point — Axis of Awesome’s ridicule of boring 4-chord pop songs just as boring as the pop songs it ridicules. It’s an example of something that in literary criticisn sometimes gets called ‘the fallacy of imitative form’.
I think it was Homer Simpson who said “Everyone knows rock music attained perfection in 1974”. Wise and true words.
There is a band, formed that year, that has made sublime and magnificent music ever since. Next month The Enid embark on a 50th anniversary – and final – tour.