I first began playing guitar around November of 1982; I remember vividly driving back from the Moorestown Mall having purchased (in the now defunct B. Dalton bookstore chain) The Guitar Handbook by Ralph Denyer. Covering everything from the author’s favorite guitar heroes, to what to look for when buying a guitar, to an extensive and well-written main core of the book devoted to music theory, Denyer’s book certainly lives up to its name. I remember instantly thinking as I thumbed through it, “This is it! It’s all here!” Of course, what wasn’t there was much of an insight into rock guitar licks, but still, it was a book I referred to endlessly when I first began playing, to the point where I basically wore my copy out, using black electrical tape to keep its binding together. While Denyer released an updated version of the book in 1992, a few years ago, I bought a used copy of the original 1982 edition, just to remind myself of where things started.
And they really did start from there. Shortly afterward, I bought my first electric guitar, a Hondo (Korean- or Japanese-made) clone of a 1959 Les Paul. In March of this year, after my mom had passed away and we cleaned out her house in preparation of putting it on the market, I found the old Hondo in the basement and picked it up — as was typical of Les Pauls of the early 1980s, both by Gibson and those selling knock-offs, it weighed a ton!
While I counted Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix as my early guitar heroes, at the time, my biggest musical inspiration was Pete Townshend. And as journalist J.R Taylor wrote a few years ago, with both The Who’s popularity and his own as a solo artist at their apogee, the early 1980s “was a good time to be a Pete Townshend fan.” Certainly in my case that was true.
In 1983, Townshend released the first of his Scoop series of albums. These were the demo recordings of songs that would be recorded by The Who or professionally re-recorded by Townshend for his solo albums. In the liner notes, Townshend explained that he didn’t write his songs on staff paper; he recorded them on tape recorders, overdubbing a drum track — either real drums or a drum machine — then guitar, then bass, then vocals.
Concurrent with the release of Scoop, the first cassette four-track recorders began to appear in music stores, building on punk rock’s DIY ethos, and I was quickly off and running. A cassette four-track isn’t one of those old eight-track machines that Homer Simpson had in his car as a teenager. They use ordinary cassettes, but instead of having flipping the tape over to play the other side, the four-track recorder only plays in one direction, to allow for overdubbing up to four tracks of music; perfect for cutting a demo, as mentioned above, with a drum machine (which was also a new development in the early 1980s), bass, guitar and vocals; one instrument per track.
While I was not very artistic as a teenager prior to picking up an instrument, once I realized I could write and produce my own music, I thought, what else can I do? Which lead to studying radio production, video production, and eventually, a certificate in filmmaking from NYU.
But it all began with guitar playing. And one of the elements that ties together so many early bloggers is DIY music. As Glenn Reynolds (who was producing his own MP3s before launching Instapundit) told C-Span’s Brian Lamb in 2006, paraphrasing the 2003 Dave Clarke song “Disgraceland” along the way, to him blogging was “like the old punk rock ethos. You know, ‘they were terrible; I wanted to be terrible too!’ But it wasn’t terrible. And that was actually what was really striking about [Mickey Kaus’s Kausfiles in 2001.] There were lots of sort of amateurish, not very good Web sites out there in 1996, or whenever this was, but this looked good and it read well and it was really interesting, and I just thought it was really cool.”
More or less concurrent with my own nascent blogging efforts beginning in early 2002, I returned to my eighties-era hobby of recording my own music. Only this time around, using a personal computer, Cakewalk’s Sonar multitrack recording program, and eventually, a couple of incarnations of the Roland Corporation’s guitar modeling rigs, which allow a guitarist to dial through an enormous variety of preset sounds in much the same way a keyboard synthesizer player is able to. (You can scroll through my articles at Blogcritics over the years; I’ve written all sorts of posts there on the topic of home recording.)
When I started producing PJM’s Sirius-XM radio show, which lasted from September of 2007 through the end of 2010, and my ongoing Silicon Graffiti video series, which began in earnest in January of 2008, my guitar playing went by the wayside a bit. I still picked it up almost every day to noodle, but rarely plugged it into an amplifier. And cranking out a weekly 55-minute MP3 filled with interviews and music — occasionally my own — and uploading it to the Sirius-XM server filled my home recording jones in spades.
But this past weekend, I dusted off my “Roland-Ready Strat,” a Fender Stratocaster electric equipped with a special pickup designed to plug into Roland’s guitar synthesizers and plugged it in my Roland VG-99 guitar modeling box. Just dialing through the presets, and playing electric guitar, acoustic guitar, electric sitar, and guitar synthesizer was a reminder of all of the possibilities inherent in the seemingly simple instrument that is the guitar.
And also a reminder of how comparatively easy it now is to both learn how to play guitar, and to get a decent sound out of it. Once you’ve learned a few basic chord shapes and the bare bones rudiments of musical theory and you’d like to learn to play a hit song, there’s likely tablature available for free on the Internet to learn its riffs and chord changes. With the fundamentals now so easy to learn, we should be hearing hours of fantastic new music on the radio every week, right?
No, of course not. Which brings us to the second part of this essay, starting on the next page.
OK, They Are Terrible. But Why?
The song that Glenn Reynolds referenced during his interview with Brian Lamb had the line, “they were terrible; I wanted to be terrible too?” But — and you knew this question was coming eventually, right? – if it’s so easy to get started on an instrument and advance your knowledge of music, then why is so much contemporary music so terrible? Where are the Beatles of today, using all of this technology to produce great popular music?
Well, here’s my theory; see if this makes any sense. A counterculture can’t exist in a vacuum — it needs an overculture both to push against and to draw techniques from. This isn’t a development that occurred in the wake of the 1960s; the pioneering modernist artists of the first decades of the 20th century were also very much a counterculture; the best of them also had plenty of training and knowledge acquired from the overculture of the period. As the late Hilton Kramer once wrote about those early modernists:
As for the avant-garde itself, its own history is anything but a single-minded tale of revolt against bourgeois values. Cocteau may have been exaggerating when he claimed that “The ‘bourgeoisie’ is the bed-rock of France from which all our artists emerge. They may possibly get clear of it, but it allows them to build dangerously on substantial foundations.” (“With us,” he wrote in Cock and Harlequin, “there is a house, a lamp, a plate of soup, a fire, wine and pipes at the back of every important work of art.”) But he was only exaggerating an essential part of the truth. The history of the avant-garde actually harbors a complex agenda of internal conflict and debate, not only about aesthetic matters but about the social values that govern them. If the bourgeois ethos may be said to have both a “progressive” and a “reactionary” side, the avant-garde is similarly divided. At one extreme, there is indeed an intransigent radicalism that categorically refuses to acknowledge the contingent and rather fragile character of the cultural enterprise, a radicalism that cancels all debts to the past in the pursuit of a new vision, however limited and fragmentary and circumscribed, and thus feels at liberty—in fact compelled—to sweep anything and everything in the path of its own immediate goals, whatever the consequences. It is from this radical extreme, of which Dada, I suppose, is the quintessential expression, that our romance of the avant-garde is largely derived. But the history of the avant-garde is by no means confined to these partisans of wholesale revolt. It also boasts its champions of harmony and tradition. It is actually among the latter that we are likely to find the most solid and enduring achievements of the modern era—among those tradition-haunted artists (Matisse and Picasso, Eliot and Yeats, Schoenberg and Stravinsky) who are mindful, above all, of the continuity of culture, and thus committed to the creative renewal of its deepest impulses.
This division between art conceived as a form of guerrilla warfare and art conceived as the reaffirmation of a vital tradition is by no means absolute. Many important artists—even such self-avowed Dadaists as Arp and Schwitters—identified their interests with the one camp while quietly enjoying the advantages of the other. And such a division is certainly no guide to the aesthetic quality of individual works of art. But it does describe the essential dialectic that governed the sensibilities of the avant-garde in the era of its greatest endeavors. That the custodians of bourgeois taste failed so miserably and for so long to distinguish between their genuine adversaries and their rightful allies is part of the historical tragedy of bourgeois culture. It is also part of its comedy. But neither the tragedy nor the comedy should mislead us about the actual course of the avant-garde enterprise, which in the 20th century—and even earlier—has been characterized by extreme dissensions in its own ranks.
Similarly, we tend to think of the early Beatles as wildmen rocking out in Hamburg, before being discovered by manager Brian Epstein, who ordered them to discard the leather jackets for tasteful matching Pierre Cardin suits. But as Reason’s Charles Paul Freund noted in June of 2001, the early Beatles had soaked up much more than Little Richard and Chuck Berry:
Sgt. Pepper’s (1967) may well have transformed the rock world, but it owes nothing to rock’s Romantic myth. It is built largely from the music and imagery of the Victorian and Edwardian pleasure palaces of the industrial working class. (Herman’s Hermits had already revived the Music Hall standard, “I’m Henry VIII, I Am,” but as a 1965 novelty song.) Though the Beatles approached the material with a literary sensibility, especially irony, songs like “When I’m 64″ and “Lovely Rita” are effective evocations of antique Music Hall style, while “Getting Better” and the melodramatic “She’s Leaving Home” make sympathetic use of antique emotion. Indeed, the corny, melodic sentimentalism of the Music Hall repertoire was a rich vein for the group, and they were never to abandon it.
A long list of later Beatles songs is drawn, directly or indirectly, from this tradition: “Martha, My Dear,” “Your Mother Should Know,” “Penny Lane,” “All You Need Is Love,” “All Together Now,” “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” “Honey Pie,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Magical Mystery Tour,” “Good Night,” and almost everything on the B side of Abbey Road, down to and including the inner-groove run-out, “Her Majesty.” While the Beatles continued to write and record rock songs such as “Revolution” and “Come Together,” and while they engaged in some entirely different musical experiments on the White Album, the influences that shaped their major, later output — most of the music for which they are best known — emerges from an antique pop style.
These two elements of the Beatles’ career — their development as narrators, and their exploitation of Music Hall content and style — lift the group’s music into a context of its own. It is these elements that are able to claim the attention of an audience that was born long after the group broke up. But what do either of these elements have to do with the mythology that the rock establishment embraces? Precious little. In the end, the rock world’s head was turned by music that was sweet, corny, artificial, and intensely sentimental. Rock has yet to come to grips with this.
The respectable middle class British citizens who inhabited those music halls would have understood the dismissive tone of Newsweek’s coverage of the Beatles when they arrived in the US in February of 1964 to play the Ed Sullivan Show, which in the post-Boomer world sounds like a news dispatch from another planet:
Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of “yeah, yeah, yeah!”) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.”
After the above quote from Newsweek, Bryce Zadel of the Instant History website wrote, “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?” No, not at all. I know from conversations with my father that this is absolutely what he thought when the Beatles first appeared on American radar screens, and proceeded to utterly destroy the midcentury culture of Crosby, Sinatra, Armstrong and Basie that he adored. Fortunately, even after their breakup in 1970s, The Beatles left such a powerful creative wake that artists as disparate as Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, The Who, and Led Zeppelin carried on the Beatles’ experimentation and willingness to destroy musical boundaries.
In sharp contradistinction today, it’s possible for a “musician” to make a very good living as a rap star grunting into a microphone accompanied by a drum machine; any additional accompaniment can be “sampled” from a recording from a previous era. The producers assembling the new recording probably think that the old music adds a layer of irony to their new effort, but in reality, the joke’s on them; it serves as a reminder of an era when musicians could still sit in the same room together, make music and learn from each other, all of which is increasingly a lost art. As Mark Steyn once wrote, “I think we can guess how Nat ‘King’ Cole would have felt about gangsta rap. Duke Ellington has more in common with Ravel than with Snoop Dogg.”
And if there’s no music made that advances popular culture, eventually that culture collapses — at least until something new comes along to revive it. It’s sort of like putting a reel of audio tape into a continuous loop — in theory it will play endlessly; in reality the contents will eventually degrade, wear out, and ultimately break.
At least that’s my theory as to why craftsmanship and taste seems to have vanished from today’s pop music. If you agree, leave your thoughts as to what happened in the comments.
Update: Welcome Instapundit readers and those tuning in from the PJ Media homepage; photo of first guitar added above.
Alas, Rock Music is dead. Died sometime in the ’90s, as near as I can figure.
Nah, just driven underground again. Unless you’re in your late-teens – early-twenties, it’s unlikely you’d have enough free time to go searching for it. Especially now with the intertubes, bands can care even less about broad appeal and preach directly to their choirs, so there’s even less chance any of it bubbles up to ‘mass-consumption’ levels.
Remarkably, there’s even *more* great guitar-rock bands now than ever, but like I said; it’s like another full time job to seek them out.
I think the decline in music (and movies) is more a problem with the “industry” than the “artistry”. Once upon a time, the current “artists” would never have been published. There are still great musicians composing and playing, but those real artists are shunned by the industry, which is more accurately described as anti-cultural than counter-cultural.
HELP!
Mooresetown Mall? For me Echelon was the one within Bicycle distance (actually a pretty long haul). But your link made me think of it, and the Wikipedia article is a tragedy. But then, the last time I visited the east side of Cherry Hill, I didn’t recognize the place where I grew up.
Most the guys producing hip hop aren’t big on irony (Mark Ronson and the white “hipster” end of the hip hop universe notwithstanding).
They sample old records because using bits and pieces of old recordings sounds good when quantized over a hip hop beat. And frankly, when done well, sampling can itself be an art form (like this underground gem from way back in 1999).
It’s really that simple.
But hip hop moved away from sampling 5-6 years ago as Southern “crunk” style hip hop (produced entirely with software synthesizers — a.k.a. “soft synths” — in programs like the aforementioned Sonar, Cakewalk, Ableton Live, Fruity Loops, Pro Tools, etc.) began to dominate the genre.
And hip hop hasn’t evolved much since the Southern style took over.
Software makes it infinitely easier to make music. But music created by software
instruments lacks the warmth and intimacy of real instruments (or even of old samplers and drum machines). What’s more, creating music in software takes much of the musical element out of making music. It more or less comes down to creating loops of sound and mapping them out on a computer screen … not quite the same thing as jamming with your band (or even recording in the studio on a multi-track board).
There are, to be sure, a lot of good indie rock bands making good new indie rock. But rock doesn’t have the pop culture juice that hip hop and dance pop have these days. So most rock bands don’t get the kind of exposure that they got even five years ago. And the few who do seem to be newly obsessed with making music that maxes out all the bells and whistles in their recording software of choice (i.e., Pro Tools) — which makes for over-produced sounding schlock.
I never thought I’d say this, but not all hip-hop is rubbish.
Example here.
And yes, irony and satire can play a part. It just depends on who’s writing it.
I don’t consider rap to be music, but rather, poetry. There’s good and bad poetry (mostly bad, if you go by Sturgeon’s Law) and the same is true of rap.
I was a slightly puzzled but enthusiastic backer of rap back in the Sugar Hill Gang days. But, for me, the evolution of that art form ended back around 1992, when the gangsta culture took over. Long gone is the enthusiastic party atmosphere of the early RUN-D.M.C. records. Nowdays it’s all about bitches and hos and beat downs. I’ve heard it all, many times over.
The problem with rap is that the form has painted itself into a corner. Much like the cheap accordions of Cajun music limited the harmonic and melodic expression of that music. To eschew both harmony and melody of hip-hop and further limit the rhythm to a procrustean 4/4 beat it certainly takes some talent to make it at all musical. On top of that you have a doggerel poetic form which is doesn’t allow for any kind of lyric flow. You end up with an emotional expression as narrow as Freddie Kruger’s fingernails. It’s like somebody who tried to write a novel and never use the letter ‘e’. That’s even before considering the dominant gansta mode which celebrates the most degenerate and evil tendencies of black culture. Almost all rap I hear is dominated by the emotional climate of rage and hate. No doubt somebody can point me to something that has a positive message or some tender sentiment, but that’s not what I’ve heard lately.
I’ve listened to a lot of African tribal and popular music which has often the must exquisite rhythmic variations, and I can’t understand whereas these examples are easily available to contemporary pop musicians they continue, as in the case of rap, to limit themselves to the most prosaic and monotonous 4/4 beat imaginable. A bit of basic syncopation is about the only rhythmic subtlety you’ll find in rap.
Much like the cheap accordions of Cajun music limited the harmonic and melodic expression of that music. To
Take off the blinders, and admit the superb use those cajuns made of simple tools in their expression of universal human feelings. You might have a whole garage full of software and hardware, much as Ed Driscoll describes, giving you the ability to make noises like anything ever heard on earth. But with all your purchased complexities, you will still have to harness those universal feelings in terms comprehensible to an audience. I am betting that if you’d learn a few tools well, instead of a grab bag of effects slapdash, you’ll come closer to making music that folks will listen to more than once.
If you want to try real humility, learn to sing an Irish air without any accompaniment at all, in a way that moves someone who is familiar with that genre.
Not a big fan of rap, etc. myself (I grew up on Chicago blues) but I had a chance to work in Atlanta for several months a couple of years ago, and much to my surprise I heard some pretty good hiphop.
I heard Chet Atkins once say that you can write great music in any genre if you have it inside of you and you work hard enough at it, and I guess this just proves what Chet has to say.
Shameless plug/full disclosure: I play in Of Mice and Musicians. We’re not what most people think of when they think “hip-hop”. The seven of us came from seven different musical backgrounds, but we go VERY lightly on anything that might sound dated in 10-20 years. We have real guitar, real drums, real bass, and none of the constantly auto-tuned vocals that should’ve been dead and buried as a fad years ago. As for craftsmanship of our album, it still took 15 months to record Bottles & Bones. Sometimes we’d come up with a great idea and literally go into the studio the next day to record. There were a lot of ideas that never made it out of the basement.
Often, the best notes are the ones that get left out. It’s very, very easy now to slam out song ideas and have them available to the world instantly. A musician friend told me years ago that if he wanted to know if a song idea was good or not, he’d put it away for two weeks, then listen to it again. The immediacy of SoundCloud, to some people, discourages that sort of discipline. If the music sucks, you can’t hide behind plugins and overproduction for long.
It’s the same with photography: I’d rather look at an interesting photo with some kind of punchline taken with a crappy camera phone than a boring, badly-composed but technically perfect picture shot on a phenomenal camera.
Standing out among hip-hop groups in the Detroit area is REALLY hard. Despite that, I dare anyone to listen to “Livin’ Right” and not get it stuck in their head. The whole album is a free download at http://store.five30music.com , too.
I like how Kimbra, a young woman born in New Zealand in 1990, combines live looping with the jazz song Plain Gold Ring originally recorded 50 years ago my Nina Simone, to make an impressive cover. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i1mr9amqeg More Kimbra at SXSW performing her song Settle Down solo with looping and an iPad app for accompaniment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd7GLvMYSHI Embraces digital tools while rebelling against the me generation with jazz influences and songs about fidelity.
Good new music is out there. The playlist filters it out; it is hard to find. As far as what is popular, I really do not care.
Black Bart has it right. If you keep your ears and eyes open, you can still find good new rock music.
I was recently at a certain surf-themed clothing store in Portland, OR, when I heard something I liked on their sound system. The girl behind the counter didn’t know what it was and had to ask her colleagues. Turned out to be Gary Clark Jr.’s “Bright Lights” (recommended).
One of my favorite guitar-driven rock bands of recent years, the Drive-By Truckers, came to my attention on National Review Online!!
And if all else fails: never has there been cheaper hardware for making your own high-quality recordings at home. So let’s give those prune-faced antique rockers the Stones some competition already!
Pop music sucks. Always has and always will. You lament the lack of “good” modern pop music, I fail to see any pop music from ANY time period that I would describe as “tolerable”,let alone good.
You know why pop music sucks today? Because there’s only so many times and so many ways you can reaffirm what the lowest common denominator believes.Songs about dating, chewing bubblegum,springtime days and picnics are all very nice and non-controversial and everything, but where’s the good stuff,man?
Here it is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHPnpWc2SE4
Talent,art,traditional rock styles from the golden era of rock music, it’s all right HERE.
Your Justin Biebers can’t even touch it, they’d burn up in the flash of brilliance because of the weak,tired,limp-wristed subject matter they regularly handle. They’re too soft and a baptism in the stream of real human experience would KILL them,which is why they only dip their toes in the shallow end over and over and over.
I heard Cindy Bullens album Desire Wire in 1978. its a little known work of 70′s rock, went out the next day and bought a Strat. I took care of that guitar like my child, good thing as its worth20X what i paid for it. Should have bought a dozen and just stored them.
Went to any and all concerts i could..back then in California we had “Days on the green” concerts and could see 4-5 headline bands for 7 dollars. It was a great life and took full advantage of what California offered. It was tragic to see the golden state spiral down, but such is life.
Today i live in Asia, and teach guitar to college and high school kids. The look on a kids face when i play Ezy rider, Gator country, Making magic, other anthems we grew up with is priceless and spend their nights learning to play. They are the next Townsend, Hendrix, Travers, Blackmore and Clapton.
Rock didn’t die, it moved down the street to where counterculture is booming across the landscape. There are great rock shows here at universities and nightclubs, kids that rage against the machine just like we did.
Rap has existed in Asia for thousands of years. It is played with a percussion instrument in each hand, one lays base, the other lead. And this is done while rapping about politics, love, or what a crappy day it was working. Rap is new to the western world, here it is played in parks and variety shows by 80 year olds telling stories of their youth.
The tragedy of America is lack of fight in kids today..they prefer perception to reality, to watch instead of participate. American culture surrendered to a marketing campaign and its truly sad to watch.
Thanks, this is what is great about this time in history, right now. I read a PJMedia article for free, I hear about an artist I had NEVER heard of before, I google the name and album read a couple more interesting longer articles. I google name+album+”rar” and I get a link to a 320L download.
And I don’t have to spend a cent.
I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of rap, but the whole “rap is not music” argument is getting tired. While the content of the actual lyrics can often be beyond abhorrent, you cannot deny that there is some talent behind rappers’ ability to spit out words the way they do. For anyone that says rappers have no talent, I recommend Outkast for an intro to Rap 101.
The worst, most no-talent “musicians” out there are the garden-variety, studio-engineered pop stars like that annoying Bieber kid. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but give me enough autotune in the studio and an army of songwriters and I could sound pretty good too.
Look, the music on top 40 radio sucks, it has for years now. But just because the mainstream stuff blows does not mean people are no longer making good music. Check out Soma FM or Slacker Radio on the web, they’re both excellent (and free!) channels for exploring what’s out there.
Here’s a few of my favorite artists and albums from the past 5-10 years (in no particular order) to get you started:
1. Mastodon, Crack the Skye (Metal)
2. Janelle Monae, The ArchAndroid (R&B/Soul – even my Mom loves this one)
3. Rilo Kiley, Under the Blacklight (Rock)
4. The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (hard to define, kinda prog rock-ish)
5. Amy Winehouse, Back to Black (Soul – she might have been a train wreck, but the girl had talent and her band is awesome)
6. The Black Keys, Brothers (Garage Rock)
7. Crooked Still, Hop High (Bluegrass/country)
What’s old is insisting that rappers have talent.
It’s not easy to spit out a tongue-twister, either – but that doesn’t mean people who can do it have any kind of musical ability.
If you like rap, that’s fine with me – but don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.
I stopped reading at “…my biggest musical inspiration was Pete Townshend.”
Too bad for you!
Whom would you have preferred I plugged in there? Say what you will about him, but in the late 1970s, Townshend was an industry, with The Who producing films, albums and touring. Plus his solo albums. And being an early adopter of synthesizers. And his use of multitrack recording to write demos was pretty amazing as well. Not to mention being a monster rhythm guitar player. I can’t vouch for his later run-in with the law, but I learned an enormous amount from studying how the man approached his craft.
There is real music being made out there with craftmanship and sophistication, but it’s hard to find on the radio, and it’s entirely missing from the singles charts. Prog rock artists like the Flower Kings, Spock’s Beard, and Neal Morse carry on the Beatles tradition of experimentation in a vein similar to that mined by Gabriel with Genesis, along with other classic prog rock bands such as Yes, Jethro Tull, and King Crimson. There is even great prog metal acts (for those who like hard rock) like Haken, Redemption, Leprous, and Symphony X that owe their existence to bands like Rush and Dream Theater – to say nothing of “indie” artists creating quality music (albeit without quirky time signatures and 20 minute long opus tracks), Arcade Fire, the Mynabirds, Grace Potter, and Stars among them – just to name a few.
Believe me, I could go on and on about the great artists who are out there in both genres, but I don’t want to bore anyone with a long list.
Unfortunatley, your point about a culture collapsing without quality music to advance it still stands because the amount of good music makes little difference if no one listens to it. There are glimmers of talent on the charts (despite people’s hatred of her, Lady GaGa really is extremely talented), but it’s mostly a depressing parade of autotune, electronic bleeps and bloops, samples copped from older artists, and rap. Truly awful.
I was just listening to The Who’s “Tommy”. I think Obama fancy’s himself as a sort of political Tommy.
Your essay has me thinking along a peculiar line. It draws from a motif in an old, classic SF story: Christopher Anvil’s “Mission of Ignorance.” In that story, a society fiercely determined to avert technological contamination and conquest by a gaggle of Galactic con men had instituted a program of incentives and rewards for “backsearch:” research into how devices of earlier eras would have advanced along the lines inherent in them, had they not been made obsolete by greatly divergent new technologies and devices. (For example, the gas lamp is intellectually and technologically a straightforward development from the kerosene lantern; the electric light is a wide divergence made possible by a new technology.)
Just now, most pop music is formulaic and uninteresting, which is why those who perform it routinely adopt all sorts of non-musical fetishes — strange costumes are only the most obvious sort — to get and hold attention. (Rap is not music; it’s a cry for help from a subliterate savage. The aggregate number of such sufferers is truly heartbreaking. Perhaps a federal program…but I digress.)
However, there is a community of contemporary musicians who’ve chosen to exploit both the roots of the Western musical tradition and the huge range of compositional possibilities still largely unexplored. Unfortunately, that community goes by the moniker “progressive rock,” but I assure you that there’s no connection to any political alignment. As with any such community, some of the members will be true artists and innovators, head and shoulders above the rest, while the rest are essentially dismissible. All the same, their output is a reassurance that there’s still thought, taste, and respect for the achievements of the past at work in the contemporary music world.
A few names:
IQ
Neal Morse
The Tangent
Parallel or 90 Degrees
The Flower Kings
Transatlantic
Spock’s Beard
Marillion
Dream Theater
Glass Hammer
Try them on.
Francis, you just recited my CD collection!
IQ! Dang it! That’s wonderful stuff! Neal Morse: best musician on the scene right now.
Problem is: All my friends have reached “saturation point.” Their brains are shut. They’ve decided what “the classics” are; they’ve decided “No one will ever top them,” and that’s that. Personally, I don’t give a damn if something’s “classic” or came first, the thing that comes later can very well be better – just like the teacher getting outclassed by the student. People can go on and on about Pink Floyd, but there are many bands that have picked up where Floyd left off and HAVE DONE A BETTER JOB! The hitch is: that form of music is “out” now. (All entries for “classic art rock” had to be postmarked no later than 1979.) The endless fawning and toadying for Pink Floyd is a waste of time! Get over it, people! Put on some Flower Kings and friggin’ marvel at the brilliance!
Once in a while, I can FORCE one of my friends to listen to something huge and powerful like The Flower Kings’ “Garden Of Dreams” (I have to hold them hostage to do this) and they raise an eyebrow and mumble, “Yeah… well… that’s pretty good.”
(chuckle) I’m right there with you, RKae. From about 1985 to 2000, I bought no new music and listened to approximately no music radio. Then, in 2002 if memory serves, I heard the Flower Kings’ “Stardust We Are” for the first time. I was mesmerized throughout. I remember picking myself up off the floor and saying, “How long has this been going on and why wasn’t I told?”
Just as there are indie writers with sound values who can tell a story better than anyone between Pub World covers (hint, hint), there are innovators in contemporary music who can take you on a journey that broadens your horizons and exalts your spirit without offending your tastes, bruising your senses, or breaking the laws of physics. They don’t get much attention (if any) from commercial music radio. You have to look for them. Happily, we have the Internet for that.
Rock and Roll basically doesn’t exist any more on the top 40 stations. The stuff they play is such a mush I can’t listen to it. It’s all kiddie pop geared to 12 and 13 year old girls. Rap is reprehensible noise as is most modern country music.
The problem with Rock is that there is now no connection to the wellspring of the genre, which is the Blues. What we call classic Rock all came out of the Blues in one fashion or the other. There wouldn’t have been the Beatles or Led Zepplin or ZZ Top or the Rolling Stones etc. without the likes of Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent and they built on the foundation laid by the many wonderful black blues players of the 40′s and 50′s.
When the well dries up there ain’t no water.
Thanks for mentioning country. It’s not immune to the malaise infecting the rest of popular music. There were great artists in the past, and there are several talented ones playing today – but not on the radio.
Country radio is 90% cookie-cutter garbage about the same 3 or 4 topics over and over again (really, how many songs do we NEED about the charms of small towns?) delivered in a nasal whine and a fake southern accent. Fingernails on a chalkboard.
Yeah, that’s Nashville production for you. If you want to explore country, you have to get away from that. The Drive-By Truckers were mentioned up-thread, and are well worth a listen, as is Ray Wylie Hubbard — roots! Some other bands to hunt up are the much-lamented Kentucky Headhunters, and The Mavricks. Or check out some of the Bakersfield stuff; to me Buck Owens’ old stuff speaks to the country ethos a lot better than most stuff from Nashville does. That’s sacrilege for me to say since I live near Nashville, but the truth must be told.
I call most modern country music dumbsh*t music. It’s like the modern country artists are saying “I’m stupider than you and I can prove it!” It speaks volumes about the listeners because evidently the artists are making bunches of money. On the other hand a lot of the honky tonk stuff was great and danceable and Bob Wills did some really classy stuff.
As an owner of Denyer’s book and a fellow traveller in the world of guitar and DIY recordings using a Roland/Boss 16 track home recording station, as well as someone in agreement with page 2, I have to say, very interesting. I enjoyed that.
Same here. I was a four-tracker back in the day (still have an old Fostex X28). Then in the ’90, I learned virtual mixing — recording everything as MIDI tracks, then playing it all back at one whack and mixing down directly to two-track. Of course nowdays we have near-infinite audio recording capability, but I stil virtual mix a lot. I don’t miss tape, though; I always found its limitations aggrevating and frustrating.
I’ve been listening to music of all different types and styles since the late 50′s. Seen lots of “styles” rise, then fade away and it seems to me that new genres come along, get popular, then fade in a kind of cycle. Bands will come along that the “eigth grade garage bands” can mimic and their music advances in style and complexity until they are beyond the capabilities of the garage bands to duplicate. At that point they either fade away, disband or go to the $.99 bin in the record store (remember those?). Then a new style (such as “Thrash”) comes along that the three-chord bands can emulate and away it goes again. Watched this happen for years and it isn’t such a bad thing (other than being kinda hard on the ears) but it allows the cream of the songwriters to rise to the top and evolve to a higher level in their craft. Sometimes I get discouraged listening to all the “audio pablum” that passes for popular music these days and then one day I will hear a song (or songs) from somebody who still puts their heart and soul into it and I know there is still hope. Every once in a while I hear a song that takes my breath away. At that point that artist will have a fan for life in me. The internet is a great place to find new artists but BOY does it take a lot of time to look for them. It’s worth the effort. Radio, on the other hand, is a great place to find all that “audio pablum” and is generally a waste of time. (Listen to a station for two hours and you will have the words memorized to all SIX songs they will play endlessly for the next two months.) That’s my three cents worth for this day.
I’m always amazed at how much people fuss over pop music. Is this stuff really so important?
I suppose we lost the Melody. In addition, making music takes discipline which is not as common in the young of today. Young people have always been the wellspring of artistic endeavor.
A friend of mine started an indie music label in the early 90′s. He found lots of talented musicians and bands floating around in LA, eager to do an album. But it takes more than talent.
When he found a group he liked, he’d book them a month’s worth of gigs around Southern California, Arizona and Nevada, then bundle them off together with all their gear in a van. If they came back still speaking to each other, and made all their gigs, he’d book studio time and do an album with them.
It was his way of weeding out the guys without enough self-discipline.
When I was a kid, I took no notice of rock & roll. It was simplistic, repetitive, repetitive and repetitive. The electric guitar was a huge part of the problem. Every musician was monkey-see-monkey-do; cranking out the same unimaginative junk as the guy before them with the same “I’m so cool” looks on their faces.
When I heard Steve Howe that all changed. His mix of classical acoustic (a bit of ragtime thrown in) and his ability to make the electric guitar soar was something new to me. In particular: “And You And I” (which uses steel guitar) and “Turn Of The Century” (which has beautiful classical structure) turned my head around.
That showed me there was more to music, and I got into it; found other interesting players like Fripp, Hackett and the woefully underrated Anthony Phillips. Then I finally loosened up and started listening to a bit of rock & roll. I still prefer Howe’s choices, though.
But blues? You can keep it. What a boring dead-end!
RKae, I was ok with you until your slam on the blues- when you can play like Buddy Guy, SRV, or Chris Duarte, then maybe you can comment on the blues.
I can’t play the accordion. I still don’t like the sound.
Just so.
as our band tries to get some chops i’m finding that many bands, regardless of genre, are now becoming ones to look up to and emulate
i’m sure anyone who makes a living performing in the music industry has something to offer a bunch of scrubs like us looking to put a sensible set together for gigging purposes
to each his own
Certainly we can all agree that the best music you will ever hear, you will never hear, on the radio. I’m also looking for like minded persons who don’t get excited anymore when I hear Stairway to Heaven or Freebird. Like putting that reel of audio tape into a continuous loop, they lustre in worn. I do agree that the creative spirit and skill of musicianship that is behind them could still be relevant. Its easy to find one or the other but seldom both, because in an entitlement society such as the one we live in, even creativity wants nothing required of it.
Most of the discussion here is about recorded music. Go hear some live music at your local bar. No I’m not talking the 300 – 2000 people sized venues. Local bar, smaller, more intimate. Buy a few beers or what ever and kick back.
Al those who lament that there are no groups of people playing as groups, and in a rawer intimate format, well there you are.
Certainly not every band/bar will suit you, but if you some time and effort to look around, you just may find something that would be interesting, and will probably surprise you in some cases.
Recording as the standard for music delivery is no longer what it was. It came into being after WWII and peaked several years ago, as the dominant form of music entertainment. Most working musicians recognize this. There’s always tomorrow and possibly something will come along and perk it up. But right now live is where it’s at, much like the pre WWII times.
There is so much music on that level. Do yourself a favor, if you find recorded music less than satisfying, check it out live, on that very personal bar level.
On bands being too loud (the #1 complaint). Tell them to turn down, tell the bar people to ask them. If they don’t, go elsewhere. And don’t sit in front of the PA speakers. Try further back in the room. Use common sense. Take your $$$ elsewhere. Good old Capitalism on the personal level.
If you make the effort, and if really you want it, you will find it. “Control your own destiny, or someone else will”.
Sorry, but a local bar is going to have “tough guy” rock, or jazz if it’s a swanky joint. I have friends who are musicians, and I go hear them, but that’s all it is: rock and jazz. Ho hum. (I do go to the symphony once or twice a month, and I like that.)
But my gig is “art rock”: lots of keyboards, clean production, busy drums, long epic songs. I’m NEVER going to find that in a local bar!
Depends somewhat on where you live. Check out around the colleges, and maybe even drive 30-40 miles to someplace.
I’ve done sequenced music as well as live for many years in small bars. Tough guy rock? I work with lady vocalists too. Celtic, blues, rock, jazz, oldies country, you name it.
I think the issue might be, are you really adventurous, and how much time will you spend on it? And friends are friends, you will like them and they like you. No the best test of the market.
Get the local “alternative” paper (don’t read the ads or look at the pictures!) and take a chance.
Then again, you can’t please everyone everytime.
Not much of an original music scene where I live, unfortunately. The bars here are pretty much all filled with the generic cover bands. You’re right about recorded music, but one thing I fear is that those of us who don’t live near the art centers will lose access to worthwhile music. Radio here is the absolute bottom of the barrel, the pappiest of the pap. I pretty much rely on satellite radio and Youtube to keep up these days, but those media have their limits.
Mr Lucky, good comments about the local scene. That’s where the best boogie and blues music is played. Another place to go is to local bluegrass festivals. Lots of very good amateur musicians in every state in the nation out there playing for very little or free.
The hole-in-the-wall bar in my little town does something a few times a year that’s pretty interesting. They have their small little stage set up with a drum set, amps, keyboard, mics, and even a beater guitar or two you can borrow if you want. But your’re encouraged to bring your own instruments.
A bunch of paper bags line a table. They have labels, “Guitar”, “Keyboard”, “Vocals”, “Drums”, “Bass”, and “Other”. Write you name on a piece of paper and stick it in the bag (or bags) you do, then sit down and have a beer.
The host randoomly draws names and call them up to the stage. This impromptu band gets five minutes to tune up and figure out what they’re going to do, then fifteen minutes to play a set. No covers, original only.
Some of it ends up being bad, some of it absolutely great. But it’s always fun.
I’ve hosted jam nights in blues bars for two decades now and can attest to the magic that sometimes happens on those rare evenings when a bunch of folks who’ve never played together before try something new.
I’m the exception to my blues buds: I came from a prog-rock background and developed a deep appreciation for blues and the pioneers of the genre. Blues and it’s child jazz, are the musical history of America. Raw? Yes, but the emotion is real.
In my opinion, today’s pop is what it was when I was a kid: accessible, uncomplicated and meant for mass consumption and profit. Beginner’s music, if you will. We baby boomers were indeed fortunate to have been exposed to the Beatles. As the author points out, much of their later work introduced a young audience to other genres as they matured musically and expanded their range and repertoire to include horns and string arrangements.
Now, as then, you have to search to find music that entertains with satisfaction. Find the local bars that cater to local groups, and hit a jam night occasionally. Many times, you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the fresh-faced kid who’s been practicing in his room for the past few years and is taking his first steps musically. We old farts always encourage the young’uns to join us on stage, as was done for us.
And hit their tip jar, early and often.
Intersting that Peter Gabriel was mentioned, since of course Genesis was one of the biggest purveyors (along with ELP) of borrowing from the classical tradition and adapting it to rock in some rather startling ways. And they didn’t learn any of that tradition down on the docks — they all attended an elite private school, which is where they met.
Gabriel has always been kind of self-conscious about his upper-middle-class upbringing. But nowdays he hangs out with Hollywood types, and so he has to prostrate himself musically in order to hang with the cool kids. And this is where he loses me; unlike his band-mades who accepted their upbringing as part of the record and moved on from there, Gabriel wants to denounce the tradition he came from even as he employs that tradition to make himself famous. There’s both a personal and artistic cost to this; Gabriel, for instance, has long since dumped his first wife Jill, whose nightmares inspired “Supper’s Ready”. Does whichever Hollywood starlet Peter is dating these days hallucinate ghost priests walking across her front yard at midnight? Does she even know what a priest does? Peter doesn’t care; he’s too busy donating the money he made off of Genesis fans to the Green Party, and fighting against development that might mess up the view from his private recording studio, where he continues to live the lifestyle that he deplores in his music.
Not to mention that he hasn’t released much that’s worth listening to in, what? 10 or 20 years? He (along with Sting) defines “resting on your laurels.”
Do yourself a favor: try a Paul Reed Smith. Tonally, technologically and aesthetically superior to any guitars being made in America today.
Thanks to the PRS marketing and sales department for posting this.
I own several PPS guitars but I am in no way an employee of any facet of the company. I just love their product.
Don’t insult me if you don’t know me.
In the “do yourself a favor” category:
1. Buying a PRS isn’t too bad an idea.
2. Buying a Flaxwood is a far better idea, though.
3. Other names for the discriminating buyer to consider: Melancon, Suhr, Tom Anderson, Gary Jacobs, David Thomas McNaught, and…for those who want top-notch quality Abstract, Pearlcaster, LSR, or Quicksilver guitars, and are willing to put up with a website decorated with skeezy pictures of two-bit skanks in short skirts, Ed Roman has you covered. (I wish, though, that some of the chicks holding the guitars were covered. I mean really. They must have had good personalities. Or something.)
4. Someone with the Roland-ready Strat should also consider the James Tyler Variax and, if you have the means, one of the Parker Roland-ready models like the Adrian Belew. If you’re going to go for technical wizardry, don’t skimp.
5. The most innovative and exclusive electric guitar feature on the planet is found on JET guitars by Jeffrey Earle Terwilliger; namely, a guitar which seems to have 24 frets (for the full 2 octaves) but actually has 23 frets and a metal end-plate flush against the neck pickup which serves in the role of a 24th fret. The result: It is the only 2-octave-per-string guitar in the world which keeps the neck pickup in the “sweet spot” where it usually is for Strats and similar 21/22-fret guitars. Add this to the fact that the JET guitars are far superior in quality and tone to even the custom- and signature- models made by the more famous manufacturers, and…well, they’re pretty much unbeatable.
So, yeah, PRS is okay. But there’s a wide range of excellence out there that you just don’t see at Guitar Center or in a Sweetwater or Musician’s Friend catalog.
(No offense, though, to said catalogs. My 3-year-old son loves to “read” them with me.)
Liked the part about the guitars.
And the pop music
One sure sign that you are old…you lament the decline of popular culture.
Would it be too much to ask that you get off my lawn?
Their still exist good rock music and rock musicians in contemporary music. What doesn’t exist is the frothing at the mouth zeitgeist, that existed from about 1959 to 1989. The gatekeepers of pop culture see the writing on the wall a lot faster than the audience who are way too over laden with nostalgia. (Did you see Mick Jagger,s most recent SNL performance.) Rock is now so categorized, and properly so, it has as many aisles as a supermarket. And the gourmet cheese (appropriately analogous) section of rock and roll, is as infinite as our galaxy,s stars and planets. There is one (1) classic rock radio station in the New York City terrestrial radio broadcast range. Q104, it,s playlist is dominated by white male British guys in their 60.s and 70s and probably a few in their 80th year of life. The music is most often compelling because the wine that goes with the cheese is the pouilly fuisse of 60,70, early 80,s rock. Women, black anyone, Asians, South Americans, Caribbeans, don,t or barely exist though boomers in these ethnic groups are fans of rock. Rock I ,m happy to say did disassemble and though that occurred more so due to advancements in technology than the audience fragmenting of it,s own volition. From this unfolding. we managed to get
product choices that are easier to discern because the vintages are more distinct even when blended well or haphazardly. Desert island discs: Sinatra over Snoop Dog, No brainer. Sinatra over rock. Yes to that also.
A nearby rock FM outfit, KYYI, has, I believe, 6 cd’s on their playlist. 5 of them are Stevie Ray Vaughn. I get that he’s a (deceased) local-ish boy made good but give me a break.
Just because it’s not on dead media like radio or the MTV networks, the old stuff never really went away. There is huge scene in retro-rock; rockabilly, R&B, jump blues, Western Swing, garage/freakbeat, exotica, etc. Not oldies acts, mind you, but a new generation of young people who adhere to the framework and visual style of pre-’67 pop styles. I have a number of friends who make a decent living playing international rockabilly fests like Hembsby in the UK, Madrid, Berlin, Japan, etc. In the US there are dozens of annual fests.
Case in point, my friends JD McPherson and Jimmy Sutton:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZGn4LncY0g
These guys don’t get a ton of radio play, but they pack every joint they show up at around the globe. The songs are all original but would be at home on Wolfman Jack’s Stack of Wax in 1958.
Another great example is the Irish lass Imelda May, who was featured in Jeff Beck’s tribute to Les Paul in 2010. Set of pipes on her to rival Mary Ford.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAUAAn46ji0
Rock ain’t dead. It’s boogying at a hip little joint downtown.
On both the musical and counterculture fronts, a great deal of the post-World War II ethos of the youths of the moment — with more free time to play with than in previous generations — has been “How Do You Best Annoy Your Parents and/or Authority Figures in General?” Back in the 1950s a duckbill haircut and a leather jacket were often enough to turn the trick, but as the years wore on, not-so-much.
Those who came of age especially in the post-1964 period have been driven by a desire to remain ‘permanently hip’ and basically try to be a wise friend to their kids, instead of being a parent. Which, if you’re an average teen or young adult, is not what you want from mom and dad. The vast majority of non-lethal things that would freak out parents 45 years ago do nothing today, so you’ve got to push the envelope further and further out there to get a rise out of people.
Whether that’s fully engulfing your body in tattoos and studs or going for music of limited melodic content but brimming over with paeans to misogyny and anti-social or criminal behavior, or just a ‘scandalous’ Gagaian stage act, it’s people trying to find a place to go where their aging hipster parents or other supposed authority figures in their lives who are trying to pretend they’re not of another generation aren’t going to follow.
In music, the result is not songs that are taken up because of their lyrics; they’re taken up because of their attitude, while at the same time, they’re also immediately disposable, thanks to the 99-cent to $1.29 per song options from places like iTunes, let alone the illegal file sharing that goes on. Even if it’s not the type of song you can picture someone still listening to 30 years in the future, it doesn’t matter, because another mediocre song with attitude will come along next week (and it’s also why since the electronic music rating equipment has come into vogue, the Arbitrons for the classic rock and mix stations have shot up, while the ratings for other music stations have declined — take away the ability for people to lie to the ratings books about what they’re listening to, in order to make themselves feel like they’re still cutting edge in music, the new numbers are showing today’s popular music has a very short shelf life once something new, but not necessarily any better, comes along).
Try this: Led Zeppelin II was what, 1969? Go 40 years back from 1969 and you have 1929. Jazz was just starting and it had banjos and tubas in it. Radio was just starting. There were still horses in the streets. Music was Al Jolson and Paul Whiteman.
Now go 40 years forward from 1969. 2009. You could play 1969 records in 2009 and they’d fit right in. Not that very much has changed.
Of course we have electronic sounds and rap, and rap is just the current manifestation of the African-Americans’ great talents at elocution, evidenced in the great black preachers and civil rights activists. It’s a natural thing and many of us don’t take to it but it completely makes sense.
My 12 year old son knows more about the Beatles and Sinatra than he does about the Black Eyed Peas. He likes the BEPs and all. but lets face it, who gives a crap about them once they lose the harmonizer machine get into their street clothes? It’s obvious even to a kid their music comes out of a machine.
I never thought about the music sinking into decrepitude with the culture but it makes sense to me because I cannot see beauty in the fare available in rap and pop.
Perhaps just as modern jazz can trace some roots back to the ring chants of the American Southern slaves in the field, rap may yet plant another seed of musical creativity that may germinate in a hundred years or so. It’s for sure the government dependent urban dwellers have more in common with antebellum slaves than with the hyped pop culture superstars they worship.
I don’t play the guitar, and I don’t play a guitar player on television. That being said, I love music. I love old music, new music, however, don’t talk to me about hip-hop and rap. That being said, I’m sad about the demise of the “F” hole guitar. The tone that came out of that instrument was amazing. I loved the people that played them in the 20′s and the 30′s, the Eddie Langs, the Lonnie Johnsons, Carl Kress, even Les Paul, before electrics. The tone was amazing. They were based on the classic string instruments which gave them a tone that few can match.
I still love the electric guitar solos, Les Paul on “How High the Moon” George Harrison on Abbey Road, Eric Clapton on just about anything. The point is, the “F” hold guitar has disappeared from instrumentation and it’s a shame because the tone is so unique that it doesn’t deserve what happened. I’m sure much of it was money, the Spanish guitar was cheaper, but it’s never been
Get off my yard! But seriously, there is usually good music in the margins every decade if you make the effort to look for it. I just do not have much time these days to chase after it. That is why friends are so important to share with. Heck, my teenage daughter points out stuff that hits or misses my fancy.
Lucky enough to reside in the NYC environs, it.s fascinating how the on and off Broadway theater industry has found more gold to mine from the veins of black pop culture. And to rightfully fill their box office coffers with these productions. More often than not, it,s the golden years of black American rock and roll of the 1950s, they mine. Shows such as *Memphis* and even *The Color Purple* treaded over the black idioms of rock, soul and gospel. Kind of sheepishly sad that *race music* once played in the house of blue light entertains nowadays the blue haired ladies of Broadway matinees. More than occasionally a Grand Mom brings along a mildly curious young black child to be chastened by how so innocent an entertainment evolved into the loathsome pathetic grimaces of the Jay-Zs and Lil Waynes. Alas Babylon. This 50s rock and roll evolved into the most naval gazing gallows meditating, mournful mouthfuls of words that that child will be convinced is the epitome of sophistication and wonderment. Cant Imagine why everyone longs for the 1950.s? These Grand Moms would pay to put their grand-children in time machines and throw the switch in reverse. Even with a President Obama. Life is awesomely weird.
Funny, I started playing guitar in 1982 as well, as a high school kid. I convinced my mom to help me buy a beautiful maple Gibson L6-S, which cost a fortune for a single mother. But it’s still the guitar I play every day. I should call her up and thank her again…
Allow me to recommend this week’s episode of ‘History Detectives’ on PBS, wherein they attempt to authenticate what is alleged to be Bob Dylan’s first electric guitar, having been in the possession of a New Jersey family for forty years. Also, Beatles autographs from Miami in ’64, and artwork by Zappa.
I am a huge Pete fan, Scoop was just the best. A friend turning me onto the Who said the immortal line, “hearing Pete singing ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ was like hearing Jesus saying the our father” To this day, not sure he was wrong.
Hi Ed
I enjoy your articles and, like you, I am a guitarist and home recordist.
What you describe does seem paradoxical. More access to the tools of music is not leading to an increase in quality of popular music. But there is always an underground in music. You can hear my latest contribution “Occupy This (Occupy That)” at http://www.ggorrie.com It’s also on itunes etc. It is a Dylanesque mocking of the Occupy movement. I hope you enjoy it.
Ed & All,
I have a band that writes and records original pop songs that skew into country owing to the inclusion of pedal steel guitar. It’s grounded in the late 60s – early 70s “cosmic American” style, which itself was a fusion of earlier country and then-contemporary rock elements.
We didn’t spend a lot of time trying to categorize this music, we just focused on what we thought the songs required to make them complete.
It’s our first time out with this music and I’d love some “smash or trash” feedback on it from this group.
You can listen to some of our songs here:
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/pagesofpaul
or here:
http://www.reverbnation.com/#!/pagesofpaul
Reply here and/or marktomeo@hotmail.com
Thanks,
Mark
Pages of Paul
>>>
“if it’s so easy to get started on an instrument and advance your knowledge of music, then why is so much contemporary music so terrible?” Playing an instrument does not a musician make. There are no short-cuts to becoming an expert musician, even a proficient one. One must not only master the mechanics of playing one’s chosen instrument, but internalize and master the tools (chord-scale theory, etc.), traditions and stylistic devices of one’s genre. Then there is the learning and performance of songs; the best working music pros can know hundreds, if not thousands of tunes, and play them in all 12 keys. Finally, one must know how to reach an audience in live performance or the studio, which is an art unto itself. If ones wishes to compose original music, that is also a demanding craft. Ditto learning to sing.
The culture of instant gratification is one reason why so much contemporary music is mediocre at best; another is that opportunities to perform live and refine your craft on the road and in front of audiences are dramatically less than they used to be c. 30-40 years ago. If you wanted to be a pro musician in those days, you could go out on the road and refine your craft in a territory band, on the chitlin circuit, or in honky-tonks and the like. You wouldn’t make much, but you’d get by and grown and develop at the same time, and move on up in the performing world. Those opportunities are still there, but there are far-fewer of them than there used to be. And as any pro musician will tell you (I was once one) – there is nothing like playing live to make you raise the level of your playing. You either make the grade, or get sent home with your tail between your legs.
“Where are the Beatles of today, using all of this technology to produce great popular music?” Technology isn’t an end, it is a means to an end. Those who believe that technology offers a cheap, fast, no sweat method to being an accomplished musician are kidding themselves. There are no short cuts (see above).
Ed,
Am not sure why I bother to point this out but you have become your parents. I’ve tried to ignore the fatuous chronocentric comments on this thread for a couple of days but won’t any longer. This is the golden age of popular music, including “guitar” music.
If you don’t know Queen’s of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures, Foo Fighters, Slayer, Dandy Warhols, The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Elbow, Kings of Leon, The Black Keys, etc., etc., you’ve stopped listening. Amusing, the younger people who are coming of age to this remarkable music will probably someday, like you, look back and bemoan the lack of contemporary great music. They too will be wrong.
Taking up a thread of Ed’s piece neglected in the comments so far:
George Orwell “got” the overculture/underculture dynamic Ed talks about in his insightful analysis of the deep dependence upon tradition discoverable in the “shocking originality”of Salvador Dali.
An excerpt:
“The important thing is not to denounce [Dali] as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations. The answer is probably discoverable in his pictures, and those I myself am not competent to examine. But I can point to one clue which perhaps takes one part of the distance. This is the old-fashioned, over-ornate Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to revert when he is not being Surrealist.
Some of Dali’s drawings are reminiscent of Dürer, one (p. 113) seems to show the influence of Beardsley, another (p. 269) seems to borrow something from Blake. But the most persistent strain is the Edwardian one. When I opened the book for the first time and looked at its innumerable marginal illustrations, I was haunted by a resemblance which I could not immediately pin down. I fetched up at the ornamental candlestick at the beginning of Part I (p. 7). What did this remind me of? Finally I tracked it down. It reminded me of a large vulgar, expensively got-up edition of Anatole France (in translation) which must have been published about 1914, that had ornamental chapter headings and tailpieces after this style.
Dali’s candlestick displays at one end a curly fish-like creature that looks curiously familiar (it seems to be based on the conventional dolphin), and at the other is the burning candle. This candle, which recurs in one picture after another, is a very old friend. You will find it, with the same picturesque gouts of wax arranged on its sides, in those phoney electric lights done up as candlesticks which are popular in sham-Tudor country hotels. This candle, and the design beneath it, convey at once an intense feeling of sentimentality. As though to counteract this, Dali has spattered a quill-ful of ink all over the page, but without avail.
The same impression keeps popping up on page after page. The sign at the bottom of page 62, for instance, would nearly go into Peter Pan. The figure on page 224, in spite of having her cranium elongated in to an immense sausage-like shape, is the witch of the fairy-tale books. The horse on page 234 and the unicorn on page 218 might be illustrations to James Branch Cabell. The rather pansified drawings of youths on pages 97, 100 and elsewhere convey the same impression. Picturesqueness keeps breaking in. Take away the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones and other paraphernalia, and every now and again you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany and Where the Rainbow Ends.”
As usual with Orwell’s essays, the whole thing is worth a read:
http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/dali/english/e_dali