Fear of Music

One of the greatest loves of my life is music.  I think that this love was first inculcated in me by my father, who was himself an ardent fan of music.  His particular brand of choice was American country western music.  He was a native of Arkansas, and among my earliest memories are of him spending a relaxing weekend evening at home, drinking his favorite beer, listening to his country records.  In fact, I think that I probably learned to read at a tender age because he would enlist me to pick out the particular albums that he wanted to listen to during his evenings of repose.  I still remember his favorite musical artists to this day: Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Buck Owens, Conway Twitty, Floyd Cramer, and Marty Robbins.  Whenever my father would take us on our annual pilgrimage from the suburbs of Chicago to his ancestral homeland in Arkansas, to visit his parents, he would always point out the birthplace of Johnny Cash, with a reverence that seemed fitting for a military war hero or a great statesman.

I learned to love this music, too, but as I grew older, my tastes expanded into other musical genres.  At the age of thirteen (a fittingly appropriate one, in retrospect), a childhood friend introduced me to rock and roll, with all of the conspiratorial air of offering to someone his first cigarette.  It was a rapturous introduction, and afterward I eagerly explored the popular songs then in vogue.  I remember when I bought my first rock and roll album, entitled “Made in Japan” by the group Deep Purple.  When my mother discovered that I had spent a large proportion of my meager salary as a stock boy at a local department store on this purchase, she anxiously exhorted me to hide it from my father.  I am not sure, in retrospect, if it was actually because of the extravagance of this purchase, or rather because I had ventured into this subversive realm of rock and roll music, that my mother felt it necessary for me to hide the fact of it from my father.

But my record collection continued to grow – mainly in the form of 45 RPM “singles”, but also an occasional album, when I could afford it.  This was the early 1970s, and it was not until many, many years later, with the benefit of hindsight, that I realized I had discovered rock music at the height of its Golden Age.  Listening to the popular rock AM radio stations at the time was a joy, an ecstasy, and I devoted many hours a week to the pastime.  I was hooked.  I became such an adept “connoisseur” of rock and roll that by my late teens I could impress my friends with the ability to identify any song playing on our favorite radio stations after hearing just the opening bars of the song, only a second or two after it had begun.

Of course, there is a downside to discovering a genre of art or music at the peak of its era, and that is that one has to experience its decline.  When I had first started listening to AM radio, nearly every song was good, and there was just the occasional disappointment.  But this ratio changed, very quickly, and AM radio soon turned into a commercial musical wasteland.  The weekly list of “Top 40” hits, which had originally truly ranked the best music of the current week, evolved into a ranking instead of commercially successful but bland and forgettable music.  This is when FM came to the rescue – a discovery that was for me just as exciting as the original discovery of rock music itself.  On FM one could hear something more interesting than mere “pop” music.  There were songs from albums that never made it into popular airplay on AM, some of these that far exceeded the requisite 3-4 minute length of “Top 40” hits.  In fact, there were songs that took up the entire side of an album – some 20 minutes or more in length – such as the long version of Rare Earth’s “Get Ready”, and Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”.  FM stations played these songs in their entirety, and often played whole albums as well.  Quality rock-and-roll music had gone “underground”, and FM was the voice of this underground.

But even FM could not stave off the decline of rock-and-roll: it merely slowed its demise.  By the latter half of the 1970s, it was clear that the caliber of both the bands and the music was on the wane.  FM stations, in fact, began to sound more like AM stations, as the focus shifted to commercially successful songs, rather than ones that were deemed to be of high quality.  And the music that was out of the mainstream also changed.  In the past, such marginalization was a badge of honor: a place for music that was too creative and interesting to be included among the vapid commercially successful “hits”.  But now, a growing proportion of the marginalized music just sounded eccentric, and even unpleasant.

When “disco” music emerged as a popular alternative for teenagers and young adults in the 1970s, it was a wake-up call for rock-and-roll.  It is fascinating, in retrospect, to recall the rabid reaction to disco music that eventually developed among rock-and-roll fans.  The harsh criticism that disco music took – as mindless, crowd-pleasing, pap – was, I think, largely undeserved, and even had racist overtones.  Its sudden popularity merely highlighted the fact that rock-and-roll had let a large portion of its core audience down: that group of fans – mainly women, I think – who preferred music that one could dance to, or at least feel festive about.  If one visited a rock bar in the late 1970s, what one would often see is young men with glazed, alcohol- or drug-addled expressions, sitting listlessly at the bar or shooting pool, while the women in their company, if they were not in the same condition, looked palpably bored.  Disco music, and the establishments that played it, provided a venue where one could dress up, and dance, and flirt, and possibly do more than flirt.  It brought a certain type of romantic excitement back to music.  And much of it was genuinely good, and compared favorably with rock music even in its better days.  Artists and bands such as Evelyn “Champagne” King, Tanaa Gardner, Parliament Funkadelic, Chic, Slave, and Prince made songs that livened the mood, and quickened the spirit.  White male fans of rock and roll at first grudgingly accepted this new musical genre.  It provided, after all, a much more pleasant environment (discotheques) for looking at and meeting women (and one that was probably much less threatening for women than many of the rock-and-roll “dives” that abounded at the time).  I think the charm faded for these men, however, as they realized that the new venue put them more often in competition with non-whites for the favorable attention of the women, hence the racist element of the rabid backlash that ensued.  Admittedly, there were other causes that were grounded in genuine criticism.  Pop musicians (including former rock-and-rollers, such as Rod Stewart) quickly capitalized on the disco craze, and the result was some dismally bad hits that still produce a cringe when one encounters them on the radio today.

In the early 1980s, rock had something of a renaissance.  The challenge that disco had presented, before it was successfully repressed, probably was an initial driver for this, but the rise of MTV and the new medium of music videos played at least as great of a role in revivifying the genre.  Even rock bands whose better days were seemingly long behind them, such as ZZ Top, started producing interesting music again, and other bands, such as the Pretenders, INX, and Duran Duran, came into prominence, helped along by the exposure that their music videos received.  Sadly, the renaissance did not last long, but it was a welcome reminder of what rock had been in its better days.

By the end of the 1980s, this renaissance had played itself out.  I went on to graduate school at this time, and it was during this period of my life that I began to explore, with great pleasure, an entirely different musical genre.  This was classical music.  With an enthusiasm almost equal to that which accompanied my introduction to rock and roll, I explored the works of Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Strauss, Mozart, Sibelius, and Beethoven.  I found that their music could send me into rapturous moods almost as powerful as the ones that I had experienced while listening to my favorite rock songs.  But I discovered something else as well.  I realized that classical music, too, had gone through a rise and fall very similar to the one that had happened with rock music.

In both genres there had been an early phase, where the music had been simpler, more rudimentary, but powerful and deeply inspired, nonetheless.  With rock and roll, this had been characterized by the driving three-chord compositions associated with artists such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Bill Haley and the Comets, along with the “rockabilly” artists such as Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley, in the 1950s and early 1960s.  With classical music, the comparable period occurred in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and was exemplified in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, and George Frederic Handel.

This early phase was followed, in both cases, by an evolution in the musical genre brought about by a development of technique.  The musical compositions became more complex, with a more intricate interweaving of melody and harmony, and the usage of an expanded ensemble of instruments (as well as, in the case of rock music, electronic effects) to perform them.  This was exemplified, in classical music, by the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner.  With rock and roll, it came about during the so-called “British invasion” of the 1960s, when artists there who had taken up the mantle of this genre – which until then had been primarily an American enterprise – led the charge in taking it to a higher level of sophistication.  British musical groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Yes, and Led Zeppelin ushered in rock music’s Golden Age, along with North American artists and groups such as the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young.  What made this music so great, in the Golden Ages of both the classical and rock genres, was that its sophistication was matched by inspiration: both spirit and technique infused the compositions.  Beethoven’s “Violin Concerto” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”, for example, have this in common: that each exhibits a masterful virtuosity in the performance of the primary instrument, with a musical score that seems to skirt dangerously at times on the borders of chaotic dissonance, and yet each is ultimately a deeply satisfying musical experience.  These examples, admittedly, probably represent cases where the artistry and sophistication did not appeal to everybody.  But consider, as another example, Strauss’s “Blue Danube Waltz” and the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna”.  These crowd-pleasers are no less representative of the marriage of soul and compositional finesse.

The third phase that is seemingly common to all music genres – whether classical, or rock-and-roll, or even jazz and country western – is one of decline.  The Golden Age in which the equal marriage of technique and artistry produces complex compositions that are immensely pleasing to the ear gives way to something of a markedly inferior caliber.  And the decline seems to happen in two distinct ways.  First, there is a growing dominance of technique over inspiration.  The music characterized by this flaw is no longer being composed to please even the discriminating listener, but rather the critics: who by this time have become an effete intelligentsia who are so enamored with the “how” of music – the technical prowess in composition and performance – that they have managed to make themselves incapable of appreciating the “why” – the production of something that is pleasing to the ear.  There is much truth in that famous saying of Louis Armstrong’s about music, that “if it sounds good and feels good, then it is good.”  This is a basic, fundamental truth about music that critics and their pseudo-sophisticated followers in a genre’s age of decline seem to forget.  But such an intellectually-driven divorce from the reality of what lies at the base of music’s greatness would not be enough to bring about this decline, unless the composers and performers themselves had fallen under the sway of these critics, and sadly, this is just what happens to a great many of them.  The result is a “new wave” of music that is technically sophisticated, but lifeless and even grating to the general listener.

I saw this happen with much of the so-called “New Wave” movement of rock-and-roll in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Granted, some of this music represented a sincere attempt, on the part of the bands that were part of it, to try to get back to basics – back to that earlier, more primal phase of the genre – and thereby re-inject raw emotion into their compositions.  But most of it sounded rather contrived: a sort of synthesized cacophony that was constructed to answer the call of the music critics of that time for a next generation of music.  And later, after I had become acquainted with classical music, I discovered the same evidences of a decline that had been brought about due to soul being smothered by technique.  The decline there happened in the 20^th century.  And the evidence of this decline can still regularly be seen at just about any contemporary classical music concert, as I was later to discover.  A tradition has evolved, at these concerts, to play three or four musical compositions by a variety of artists.  Most of these compositions will consist of well-loved symphonic pieces composed by the likes of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mendelssohn.  But invariably one of these compositions will be by a twentieth-century “modern” composer, characterized by discordant – even chaotic – melodies.  It is an unpleasant labor to listen to these, and seems to be forced upon the audience by the organizer of the concert as a sort of “duty” to do so in order to receive a well-rounded musical experience, like the parents who compel their children to remain at the dinner table until they have eaten everything on their plates: not just the things that they enjoy, but also the things that they despise, such as broccoli, or spinach, or kale.  The concert organizers really seem to be imposing these modern pieces on us for our own good, regardless of how hideous they sound.  (As I have often joked to friends, this “modern” classical music has always sounded to me like the musical score from a low-budget horror movie.)

But there is a second form of musical decline which generally occurs alongside of the first.  This is the development of sterile, bland musical pieces that, while superficially similar to the musical genre that they are aping, and harmlessly pleasing to the ear, are unmemorable.  Collectively, they comprise the “Muzac” that is often played in shopping malls, elevators, and dentists’ offices.  In a way, this avenue of decline, too, is a consequence of the suffocation of inspiration by technique, though in this case there is no pretence of technical wizardry compensating for a lack of artistry.  Instead, there is merely the crass commercialism of selecting melodic sequences that sound good, patching them together, and dressing them up in the garb of the genre that they are made to resemble (violin strings and woodwinds for classical music, guitar and drums for rock and roll).  Classical music was generally spared the indignity of actually having artistic pretenders prepare these pieces and pass them off as genuine musical compositions.  (Although it could be argued that many of the popular “crooner” love ballads of the early and mid-twentieth century constituted just such an attempt.)  But sadly, there were all too many rock and roll “artists” – some of whom composed genuine works of merit earlier in their careers – who trotted out inane, vapid ditties for a ready source of income.  (Phil Collins of Genesis and Pete Cetera of Chicago come to mind.)  Their music, too, can now often be heard serenading shoppers in grocery stores and patients in medical offices.  Mercifully, much of this empty music is merely quickly forgotten, fading from memory within years of its release, if not sooner.

If technique, through its eclipse of inspiration, is responsible for the ultimate decline of a musical genre, technology often serves to prolong or even revivify the genre.  The development of new instruments, or methods of augmenting existing instruments, or even new mediums, often results in a spurt of new creative development.  The opera, for example, though its origins nearly coincide with that of classical music itself, provided a visual medium to accompany the musical one, and as the stage settings and dramas became more elaborate, the operatic music did as well.  A rough parallel can be seen with rock-and-roll music, when, as described earlier, music videos became popular in the early 1980s, and the popularization of this new format seemed to coincide with a spurt of interesting new songs.

Classical music, it seems, met its demise (though some of its followers might vehemently deny that a decline ever occurred) sometime in the early 20^th century.  It is hard to determine exactly when rock when into its final decline.  Like most contemporary listeners of music, I have become a collector of MP3s, amassing a collection of all of the favorite songs of mine that I can remember, going back to my youth.  And, as a typical economist, I have taken advantage of this collection to do an analysis of the underlying data.  Noting the year that each song in my collection was released, and then plotting a histogram (a bar chart, with a vertical bar for each year, and the relative height of the bar corresponding to how many songs in my collection were released in that year), I can get a good visual record of the rise and fall of rock and roll.  Of course, my personal tastes are not necessarily representative of all lovers of rock and roll, but I suspect that the pattern I found is fairly representative.  The highest bar in my chart is in the year 1970 – a year I remember well, because even the songs being played on AM radio in that year sounded terrific.  The bars gradually decline after this year, reaching a low in the very late 1970s.  But then the bars begin to rise again, corresponding to the rock and roll “renaissance” of the early 1980s, and a second, smaller peak is reached in 1983.  This is followed by another decline, and another smaller “renaissance” which peaks around 1990, and then a final, even smaller one, peaking in 1999.

The year 2001is the last one for which I have an MP3.  Apparently it is after this year that music “died” to me, since I no longer encountered even the occasional interesting song that I might like to purchase, or at least hear again.  I remember feeling uncomfortable, even in the 1990s, about the changes that popular music seemed to be undergoing.  “Rap” music was growing in popularity, and while I did like a song or two from this genre, by and large it just sounded to me like angry people yapping at real or imagined slights perpetrated upon them.  There were also slow songs, apparently intended as love ballads, but the singers of these all had a nasal, plaintive quality about them which really didn’t inspire much sentimentality.  I remember thinking to myself, back then, that if the music of my era was called “rock and roll”, then an appropriate moniker for this new music would be “bark and whine”.

I have often wondered if my reaction to the music of today is simply typical of somebody of my age, and is no different than the reactions of those in my parents’ generation to the music that I had come to love when I was a teenager.  But there are some critical differences.  As the title of this particular blog entry, “Fear of Music” (which was taken from the name of an album by a group that became popular during the first rock renaissance in the late 1970s and 1980s, the Talking Heads), suggests, much of the antipathy to rock and roll was, I believe, based in fear.  There was the racial element, as there had been with the reaction to jazz and blues when those genres first crossed over into a general audience: the unease that many white elders had over the fact that the youth of their generation were becoming enthusiastic fans of non-white performers.  And as rock and roll became increasingly associated with the turbulent protest movements of the 1960s, this became an additional cause of unease among the older generation, or at least that part of the older generation who were generally unsympathetic to these movements. 

There is no fear underlying my revulsion toward today’s music – it is simple loathing.  Whenever I happen to turn on the radio, and come across a contemporary “hit”, it produces an immediate, visceral reaction of disgust in me.  The best analogy that comes to mind is if one were to walk into a strange room, and the very first thing that one notices is a very foul odor in that room.  The immediate reaction is to want to get out of that room as quickly as possible.  When I signed up for an MP3 service a few years ago, I was “treated” to a large number of free tunes that were all produced by artists within the past few years.  After just a cursory listening of these, I was compelled to remove nearly all of them from my hard drive.  And this leads to another other critical difference between my resentment of contemporary popular music and those of my elders when I was a teenager.  I have had the opportunity, on several occasions, to engage people in their teens or twenties in a conversation about music, and have asked them right out if they are familiar with the music of my generation, and, if so, how they feel it compares to their own.  Without exception, they have actually said that they liked the music of my generation better.  There have been times, I must admit, when a friend or colleague has said to me that if I liked such-and-such a song from the 1970s or 1980s, then I would probably like such-and-such a song by Beyonce, or some other contemporary artist.  I will have to take their word for it.  It couldn’t have been a song that I heard on the radio, because if it was, then I definitely didn’t like it.

I think that truly great music brings people – even people of different generations – together, rather than divides them.  As evidence of this, I note the many parents who have taken their teen children to rock concerts, to enjoy bands that they had probably enjoyed when they were teens.  And I can remember a particularly poignant personal example of this. 

As I had mentioned earlier, when I had my own personal encounter with rock and roll as a young teenager, my mother had urged me to keep this a secret from my father, and in particular to hide from him the fact that I was spending my meager earnings as a department store stock boy on the purchase of rock and roll records.  At first I abided by her wishes, but as my collection grew, and I encountered a variety of interesting styles, I found it increasingly difficult to believe that my father, who loved music as much as I did, would disapprove of all of them.  I finally mustered up the courage to put my theory to the test.  It happened on a weekend evening, when he was enjoying his own record collection.  The rest of our family was away attending a funeral, and so it was just the two of us at home.  He was in one of those mellow moods – helped along by indulgence in his favorite beer – in which he was at peace with the world.  I was fulfilling the role that I had played since I was a little boy, picking out the particular albums that he wanted to listen to, and putting them on the turntable.  He requested a certain Buck Owens album.  I knew it well, but decided that the time was ripe for me to take my gamble.  Earlier that week, I had purchased an album by Creedence Clearwater Revival entitled Bayou Country, and, after listening to it, I suspected that this was just the type of music that my father might enjoy as well.  I put this album on instead, and waited for his reaction.

As the opening guitar notes of the first song, “Born on the Bayou”, began to sound, my father slowly looked over to me with a quizzical expression and said, “That’s not Buck Owens.”  I noticed that he was smiling.  I quickly explained to him that this was an album that I had recently purchased, by a band that I thought he might like.  He continued to listen, still smiling.  Before the rest of my family returned home that evening, we listened to this album together, in its entirety, twice.  Creedence Clearwater Revival had won a new fan.

From that moment on, whenever I happened to buy another album by Creedence Clearwater Revival, rather than hide this fact from my father, I would eagerly share it with him at the first opportunity, and he would listen to it with at least as much enthusiasm as I had.  There was one particular song by this band that he came to love, called “Bad Moon Rising”.  Whenever I would put it on, he would let out a shout of glee, and his face would erupt into a broad smile.  I am convinced that this was not only his favorite song by Creedence Clearwater Revival, but his favorite song of all time.

Sadly, in the years that followed, as I entered my late teens and young adulthood, the relationship between my father and me became increasingly contentious.  I suppose that such things are not uncommon between fathers and sons, particularly at that time, when there was a pronounced ideological divide between the younger and older generations.  But it seemed that the conflicts between my father and me were particularly bitter ones, and even after they had subsided, as I moved into my mid-twenties and embarked upon a career that he approved of, I think that there was still a lot of residual bitterness on both sides – memories of hurtful remarks that each had said to the other.

I was shocked, while still in my twenties, when I learned that my father – who was only in his fifties – had contracted an illness that would ultimately prove to be terminal.  I lived a couple of hundred miles away at the time, and when I returned home to visit him in his hospital room, it was an awkward meeting.  One would like to believe that such a situation would provide an ideal setting for a deep, meaningful conversation in which two persons who had had a contentious relationship could finally talk through any unresolved issues between them.  But usually what happens instead, as happened between my father and me during that visit, is that the conversation settles upon comfortable, uncontroversial topics.  For us, one of these was music, and we spent much of that visit talking about the songs that we both loved.

When I attended my father’s wake and funeral, not much later after this visit, I noted the maudlin music (or Muzac) that was playing in the background: the kind that is played with the specific intent to try to produce a melancholy mood and tug at the heartstrings.  But it did not have the intended effect upon me, as I found myself standing there, dry-eyed and unmoved all the time that I was in attendance.  I wondered what was wrong with me.  Had the earlier period of enmity with my father really left me so hard-hearted and remorseless at his passing?  Was I so unforgiving?

  

But weeks later, when I happened to be out one evening sitting at a bar, the familiar strains of the song “Bad Moon Rising” began playing in the background.  Suddenly, tears started to stream down my face, and I found myself sobbing, as happy memories of my father flooded my mind.  In the midst of my tears, I actually smiled, and lifted up my bottle of beer in a silent toast, as I said, silently, “I miss you, Dad.”  Here was a moving example of the enduring power of music.