Booman has a piece up here, Remember When Pop Was Great. In it and in the (so far) 33 responses, the ongoing demise of this culture is being discussed on the very focused level of “pop” music.
Read on for a musical expert’s take on the matter.
Expanded.
Bet on it.
I am a working professional freelance musician in NYC…40 years and counting…and I have lived through the change being discussed in Booman’s thread. My own take on it? As “pop” music…including all of the music that we hear on the media (Background music, advertising music, etc., easily more than 90% of the music that the average American “hears”)…as the music that we consume stepped away from acoustically-based to technologically-based performance and production, the excellence to which the people on this thread are referring simply disappeared. This was an economically driven change. It is quite simply cheaper to use electronics to produce music than it is to use the musical expertise of real people.
This is the culture’s loss, and it goes way beyond “pop” music. It is a sea change that affects the very basis of this society…its people and how they function on a day-to-day basis. So-called background music…film + TV scores, music that is left on as we go about our daily lives, advertising music…subliminally affects us in very serious ways. It times in our motions, so to speak. Our emotions as well. The complexity of the sounds that human beings make with instruments that have as their base a physical existence in the world is literally thousands of times greater than sounds that are produced electronically, yet from the advent of the synthesizer as a practical, easily usable musical instrument…say the late ’70s/early ’80…through to the present the acoustic content of almost all of the music that we consume has steadily declined. Even the voice…the first and most important instrument, really…is now basically synthesized in most of the music that we hear. That is, vocals are electronically controlled so that the final product most often sounds absolutely nothing like what the singer was singing.
Add to this movement the digital recording and propagation techniques that compress sounds so that they are more easily stored and reproduced on small media…first CDs, now mp3s and the like…and what you get is almost a flatlining of the music. It’s “there”, but it’s not beating. Barely beating, anyway.
Long story short?
No emotional content. Like fast food. It’s there, but there’s no there there.
This is not just a “pop” phenomenon, either. I rarely listen to recorded music except for research…who’s doing what and if it’s interesting to me, how they’re doing it. (Technical stuff…if it’s interesting enough, I transcribe it by ear in order to better understand it.) I’m involved in making great music on an almost daily basis in live situations, so not consuming recorded music is no great loss to me. But just a couple of days ago I was driving in midtown Manhattan traffic…don’t ask, we all make mistakes sometimes…and I got bored. So I put on the local jazz station, WBGO. Now I don’t listen much to WBGO either, because most of the “jazz” on it is really mediocre. It’s simply rewarmed, 2nd, 3rd and even 4th generation remakes of the music of the great bop and post-bop jazz masters. If I want to hear Miles Davis or John Coltrane, I listen to Miles Davis or John Coltrane. Duh. Hell, I heard them live. Anyway, WBGO was playing a track by a fantastically good trumpet player who shall remain nameless because I have to work with him once in a while. I didn’t know who it was while I was listening, but he was playing the horn as well as it can be played and the piece of music he was playing was amazingly complex. Harmonically, rhythmically…every way possible. A very fast tempo, and he and the rhythm section were doing absolutely incredible things. (I don’t say this lightly, either. I have played with the best of the best for a long, long while.)
So I pulled over at a fire hydrant and sat there, listening. But after a minute or two I began to get…antsy. Like…where’s the emotion? Where’s the blues? Where’s the feeling? I have a pretty good sound system in my car and I keep it well balanced in terms of EQ, so as I thought about it I realized that:
1-The recording mix…the way the instruments had been balanced after the music was recorded…was missing a lot of information. It was clear, it was easy to hear every note and every part of the drum set, but there was no fire left in it. It sounded…like a synthesizer! Like the world’s greatest sampler had sampled what the musicians were playing and then recreated it without any mistakes. Without any apparent “effort.” It sounded totally inhuman. I have played music on that level, and let me tell you…there is effort there. Listen to ‘Trane or the great Miles groups on the original vinyl or on the (increasingly rare) digital versions that have not been remixed to near death for evidence of what I am saying. The humanity coming out of the speakers is palpable. But here? Again…no there there. Musicians call it “presence.” The notes were there…you could hear them all…but they had no presence. No weight.
2-After having done nearly a thousand recording sessions, I could hear that the musicians themselves were separated from one another acoustically, that they were receiving each other’s information through earphones and that they were each in a fairly small space, physically separated from one another. I could sense this by the way that they were playing.
Now think about this idea for a minute. Think about the difference between:
A-Four people sitting at a table having an intense discussion, passionately improvising around a subject in which they were all masters.
and
B-The same four people having the same discussion, only in separate little rooms listening to the others’ voices on earphones. Good earphones, but still earphones. And someone else was deciding how much of each voice they were receiving in those earphones. Someone who was a master of recording but not of the particular subject that was under discussion. And not only were they listening to the others on earphones but since they had to wear earphones they were also listening to themselves on the earphones too. Reality takes a step away. So does passion. Bet on it.
Then add to that difficulty the following. A couple of them farted or burped or misspoke or simply didn’t get their point across clearly during some parts of the discussion. No problem, Fred…we’ll just redo your part for that sentence. We’ll punch it in. And…what’s that you say, Mikey? You don’t like the way your voice is sounding today? You have a little cold? You’re jet-lagged? Don’t worry, baby…we’ll fix it in the mix. What? You want to do the whole thing over? No way. Sorry. Too expensive. On to the next discussion. Trust me. It was fine. Next!!!
And so it goes.
I was listening to a digitally altered recreation of a make-believe version of how people play this music live, on stage.
It’s not like there was no “there” there. There most certainly was, but an important part of it was missing. It was partially a remembered there. A reanimated there. An undead, Draculaized there. A digitized there.
So now the recording goes out into the world. And people who know very little about the reality of the music listen to it, which is the way it’s supposed to be. No sense playing if there’s no one listening, right?. But…to what are people really listening if not the actual “music,” if not the notes, the rhythms, etc? They are listening to the effort, to the expertise of a lifetime of talented effort. And it is that effort…that heat, that passion…that has been edited out and dumbed down by this process. So people don’t listen, and in not listening they don’t get tuned up.
Now go back to the ‘Trane or Miles recordings…or Basie or Ellington or Louis Armstrong in his prime or Bill Evans or Stan Getz or any of the other live music masters of jazz. It’s all there. Heat, passion…the works.
Expand this syndrome throughout the music world. This is not a “jazz” problem, it is a societal problem. It’s the same up and down, from pop to country, from latin to jazz to Western European style orchestral music. The funk is missing. It’s been digitalled out. It’s been moneyed out.
Now expand it to the other arts.
Same same.
Now…expand it to the political and media info world.
Same same same.
We got a cool Prez, right? He works on digital. But the important info? You can’t hear it. He’s been digitized. Will we ever again hear a public servant say something like “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” and witness that expression make real, emotional waves in the culture? No, it would be digitized out into just another soundbite.
What y’all are complaining about?
It’s the sound, babies.
It’s the sound.
We have all been soundbitten. Digitized. Compressed. Aurally undeaded.
Turn the shit off and go walk in the sun. Go listen to live people saying and doing live things. Go have a party. (No, not the DemocRatpublican Party. Something not prerecorded, not synthesized.) Go do something, goddammit!!!
You be bettah off.
Bet on it.
Over and out…
AG
