Contemporary Pop Music and Classic Rock

05 Dec 2019 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Blog Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Music was at the center of our lives when my generation was young.  There were no computer games.  So instead of hanging out and gaming with our friends, we would gather in a living room or someone’s bedroom and listen to classic rock.  OK, we usually got high, too.  With this much intensity surrounding music, it is not surprising how much really good music came out of my generation.  And with the gravitas now shifted from music, it is not surprising how poor the music quality is that is being produced now.  I think that music is now largely background to video games, repeating short phrases over and over again while one’s real attention is on the virtual characters.  I try to listen to pop music today, but very quickly get bored and turn it off.

Then I get philosophical.  Is this just another example of the older generation disparaging the music and customs of the younger generation?  I think about Dean Martin and Jimi Hendrix.  The silken sounds of Dean Martin and the melodic strings backing him were a mellow mix, soothing, if not mediocre.  Dean Martin was the music my parents liked.  What a shock to their sensibilities it must have been to hear Hendrix blasting onto the music scene in the ’60’s.  Hendrix, Clapton, the Beatles, Santana, and the other great bands and players of the ’60’s and early ’70’s brought a new and powerful sound to the world.  And none of them had anything near the silken tones of Dean Martin.  Young musicians are still learning Hendrix and other classic rock tunes.  No one listens to Dean Martin.  So I return to my philosophical question.  Is my disaffection with contemporary music just another example of the old disparaging the customs of the young?  Or is contemporary music really that bland?  I suppose the real question is whether there is any music today that will last like Hendrix.  Or is today’s sound fated to follow Dean Martin into obscurity?

But Dean Martin isn’t the only voice of his time.  Miles Davis, the great jazz trumpet/composer, lived approximately the same time as Dean Martin.  Miles Davis already has a lasting place in music history.  He took the jazz he inherited and took it into a new universe, inventing along the way the style called “Cool Jazz.”  The word is that Miles Davis wanted to collaborate with Hendrix just before Hendrix’s untimely demise.  Sadly, Dean Martin made more money and achieved greater fame than Miles did in his lifetime–except for those who cared about music quality.  So when I think of generational divides, it isn’t just a matter of Dean Martin and Hendrix.  Miles lived then, too.  And while Miles isn’t of my generation, my generation admires his music and, for me, envies the generation that produced the genius of Miles Davis.

So the issues isn’t one of generations only.  It’s a matter of the gravitas music holds for the listener.  I don’t think that there is a gravitas for music today.  So I doubt that any really good and lasting music will be produced in this generation.  And, sadly, I doubt that this generation will miss it.  Rather, I look into the future, when lovers of music will generate another climate in which a Miles Davis or Jimi Hendrix will rise up in song.

Trends, Styles, and the Self

20 Oct 2017 1 Comment

by davidfekete123 in Blog Tags: , , , , , , , ,

It seems that every time period is plagued by trends and styles.  I am old enough to have seen many come and go.  In my teens, it was “Do your own thing; be an individual; peace, love.”  I watched some of the music, now rock classics, yield to the sensitive, bland, forgotten music of the late ’70’s.  I remember fading out of pop culture in the late ’70’s and listening to classical music (symphony, not rock).  Then came the ’80’s with money, power, cocaine, preps and Yuppies.  I rebelled against these values angrily, though I was, myself, a prep at Harvard.  I can’t find a trend that dominated the ’90’s.  But today, it seems that LGBT is the centre of gravity, along with eco-justice, women’s issues, and pop culture.

I’d like to think that in universities there is free intellectual inquiry.  But this is not the case.  There are styles and trends there too.  Back in the late ’50’s, symbolic logic was the rage.  Philosophers and even anthropologists wrote their ideas in those strange (laughable) symbols trying to look all mathematical and scientific.  That eventually got debunked.  Then I remember existentialism coming around.  When I was in grad school and when I graduated from grad school, it was all gender issues, power dynamics, wealth and poverty issues, and Nietzsche was the prevailing world-view, along with Richard Rorty.  I watched Derrida and deconstruction come and go in about a decade.

The thing about trends is that there is power behind them.  If a person wants to talk to others in society, he or she needs to buy into the current trends.  The alternative appears to be isolation.  And if a person wants to publish, one needs to write and think in the terms that are current.  But I believe that everyone has an intuitive sense of the true.  I believe that Emerson called it the Oversoul.  We know when a given trend is ridiculous, or doesn’t fit with human experience we know.  We sense the vacuity of certain ideologies.  I believe that’s why I turned to classical music in the late ’70’s, for instance.

Some people dedicate their lives to following trends.  It is their quest to recognize the prevailing trends immediately so that they can be in the vanguard.  In the ’90’s it was goatees, in the mid-2000’s it was mountain-man beards.  Maybe in Hollywood or fashion this is a necessity to survive or to make a fortune.  But I suppose there is enough of the old hippie in me not to worry too much about trends and to follow my Oversoul.