Does Music Still Exist?

Or: How The Beatles Killed Mankind's Oldest Cultural Heritage

Dear Republic,

I’ve known for some time that Sam Jennings, of Vita Contemplativa, is one of the class acts of Substack — an unusually sensitive and graceful writer — but I really wasn’t prepared for this piece. I’d asked for an essay on the state of contemporary music, expecting something snarky about Spotify or Pitchfork, and Sam turned into a gen-you-ine tour de force that starts with the Pygmies and reaches Charli XCX. This piece is long for The Republic and I’d recommend taking your time with it.

We’re going into Positivity week, as reflected in the change in logo, and, in the spirit of good cheer and high vibrations, I’d strongly encourage you to pony up and flip over to a paid subscription to support high-class writing like this essay.

-ROL

DOES MUSIC STILL EXIST?

An old musicology professor of mine used to start off his grad seminar with a thought experiment: “If I asked you all — right this moment — to bring me some music, what would you do?” Being good music students, he suggested, most of us would probably start flipping through our folders, or run out to our lockers, hurrying back with sheets of paper, thrusting them into his hands. “Now, when I ask my freshman class the question, they say just this. And yet, how strange it is that none of them ever suggest simply standing there and singing.”

I bring up this anecdote simply because I find it a useful prompt. Useful in helping me to do something which most people generally do not do: to ask exactly what music is, to them. Everyone would agree that a piece of paper with small black symbols on it isn’t the same thing as sound, and that music is surely some kind of organized sound. Still I can’t help but see this particular (characteristically Western) confusion, of the written shorthand for the actual thing, as that far off from an even more consistent contemporary assumption: when most of us today talk about music, we’re usually not talking only about the sound itself as it emanates from a human body, or a human-made instrument — we’re talking about a recording of sound.

Of all the bromides in the world, there are few sillier than, “Music is a universal language.” I understand what people mean by it. It’s a perfectly nice sentiment. But —let’s face it — most people listen, in their everyday lives, to an extraordinarily narrow amount of music. How many of them, after benevolently declaring music to be a universal language, sit down afterwards and listen to a Hindustani Raga, or a choir of African Pygmies? How many people, if you sat them down, and made them stay through several hours of Peking Opera, would tell you they’d never known what they were missing? In my own experience, the majority of people who’ve ever called me a snob probably listened to a tenth as much music as I do. Despite the universalist cri de coeur, it remains the human norm to like your own culture, and your own era’s music, and consider people who appreciate different kinds of music to be pretenders at best, and at worst, prole-hating snobs. And though I may hold myself to a high standard, I’m not really an exception. I could spend a lifetime listening to Peking Opera, even learn to appreciate its finer qualities, and still find more than an hour of exposure to it exhausting.

Yet it’s not just a cultural distinction: how many people do you know, born and raised in Western cultures, who can enjoy a current popular song which uses the same exact chords as a Renaissance madrigal, but would only giggle and ridicule it if forced to sit through a concert of Early Music? Think of the metalhead who can only be convinced to like Bach because some of it depends on fast harmonic-minor scales. Or the hip-hop kid whose only pipeline to Beethoven is that occasionally a snippet might sound like the kind of syncopated rhythm that would work neatly when sampled as a looping beat. I’m prolonging the conclusion, but it’s only this: people like what they’re familiar with, philistinism is the rule, and as with most things in life it takes immense effort and curiosity — whether natural, or taught — to seek out anything else.

Now that same musicology professor of mine used to subdivide his first-year American Music History course into three basic categories, organized not according to their immediate genre, but to their use and origin: folk, popular, and fine art. Folk meant any music whose purpose was to fill up communal human time, which was collectively produced, and generally unassignable to any one “composer.” He used to joke that “Happy Birthday” was the only real folk song left in America. Fine art music had ceased to have any ritual function, having elevated itself in our time to the concert hall, where the purpose was elite-level performance, and the audience was there to appreciate it as art. The rest — by far the largest category in the modern world — was popular. That meant anything produced with the entertainment of large numbers of people in mind.

Any classification scheme is bound to be too simple. But I still like that one. I like it because it helps us see how recent our given assumptions are, especially the ones we most take for granted. I’ll never stop being absolutely floored by people who very seriously toss out sentences like: “Such and such band or artist absolutely changed the direction of music forever.” Really? One band, one artist — they changed the direction of all music? Forever? The statement only makes sense for people whose concept of “music” means a specific world of, say, guitar-based rock bands, and not one which includes Javenese gamelan ensembles, the Arabic oud, or centuries of Gregorian chant.

Which is all to say that a question like, “What does music mean to people today?” requires a serious narrowing of terms to get any kind of meaningful answer out of asking it. First, let’s assume we’re speaking about the West, broadly. Let’s even assume we’re mostly talking about the Anglophone world, since it was through the British Empire, and then the United States, that the technologies associated with modern industry were propagated across the globe. Modern popular music, being an invention of the industrial age, is arguably an Anglophone creation. Lastly, let’s assume that we’re mostly talking about just that: modern popular music. Since this very culturally and temporally specific thing is what most Anglophone people mean when they talk about “music.”

Now it may be true that Classical or Fine Art Music has been impacted by many of the same changes as the more mass-popular forms. Still, I find Western Classical Music almost an alien entity, from a musicological perspective. It’s strange enough that its modern form is based around the keyboard, which has no real historic comparison. The kinds of harmony enabled by the discovery of equal temperament almost amount to a break with the vast stream of human musical history. Still, where Western Classical music is really unmatched is in its longevity — its ability to elide entire centuries, due to its development of exhaustive notation. This means that while recording may be useful for its dissemination, it will always be a marriage of convenience. We’re even arguably going through a golden age of Western Classical music — if not in composition, then at the least in performance. I can go to any major city in the world and see most of the finest Western composers’ works, performed by technically accomplished professionals, who would have astounded their predecessors. Though obviously complicated by colonial and imperial histories, it’s nonetheless at least partially true that Western Classical Music offers something like an actual language available to the entire world. It’s obvious from watching any South Asian or African orchestra, that whoever can learn to read the notation can become as fluent in the performance of it as the cultures that first invented it — something which is plainly not true for most other kinds of music, which require total immersion in a specific ethnic group or subculture.

Let’s historicize, briefly. Though popular music existed in many forms, in many places, its more modern meaning began with the nineteenth-century growth of a mass market for printed sheet music. “Popular” listening for much of the nineteenth-century was far from passive: it meant a song from an opera one particularly liked, or a tune by a well-known commercial songwriter, the written music for which one could buy for a dime, and take home. Once home, with the introduction of mass-produced instruments, there was more and more likely to be some kind of communal instrument, like a guitar or piano. And with more and more middle-class children receiving some basic musical instruction, “popular music” began to turn into a partially amateur-domestic, partially capitalistic-mass-productive way of consuming new songs. In very broad terms, this ballooned in two directions. On the one hand, the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century development of high opera and its famous composers into “lower forms” like comic opera, minstrel shows, variety, cabaret, vaudeville, music halls, jazz clubs, folk festivals, and eventually Broadway musicals (later even TV pageant shows like Ed Sullivan). On the other, the slow introduction of more passive consumption, in the form of recorded sound.

Ragtime was the first true recorded mass music — if not in the literal marketing of early records, then at least in the distribution of piano rolls and sheet music. The impact of ragtime on the world was enormous: we simply cannot understand the extent to which it became the first truly global musical phenomenon — one which would be replicated in spirit throughout the twentieth century, in the explosion of jazz in the Teens and Twenties, then with rock ’n’ roll in the Fifties and Sixties, and again with hip-hop in the Eighties and Nineties. All African-American inventions: nearly all truly global popular music has, for over a hundred years, been the creation of Black America.

These kinds of popular music are also important for dating the changes: from the late Teens to the mid-Fifties, the bulk of Anglophone pop music used the ensembles and vocabularies of jazz, until that was replaced by the simpler harmonies and electric-guitar-and-drums of rock n’ roll. Eventually, the more sophisticated harmonies of jazz became more synonymous with middle-class leisure (to this day, I’ve had young music students hear a saxophone and say it makes them feel like they’re in a hotel), while rock ’n’ roll joined with that peculiar post-war creation, the Teenager, to orient almost every popular music market towards a new emergent youth culture. The “rock ensemble” still plays a huge part in our pop music — at least, its signifiers do, and there are thousands of bands still roaming around, using the same basic structure and simple chord language. But since the emergence of hip-hop and its vocabularies (some of which it shares with other mostly electronic music) — DJs, record-sampling, drum-looping, synthesis — it has had to share the stage.

But what I’m most concerned with here is the really, truly profound shift that happened in recording technologies in the mid-twentieth-century. Since its appearance in the early part of the century, radio had created the first way for people to listen to recorded music en masse. Along with the later appearance of television, it provided record companies with new ways to get their recordings out to enormous numbers of people — and, with metrics like the Billboard Charts, the ranking of sales numbers by specific artists began to create a mass obsession with clearly-defined economic success. Post-war entertainers like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra became enormous brands to be sold, as well as entertainers with famous faces, celebrities in themselves, pushing across sales of records at numbers no one could ever have imagined. Even Elvis Presley, though he rode in on the new youth culture and the rebellion of rock ’n’ roll, was part of this linear growth of enormous superstar entertainers, and the simultaneous increase in mass popular reach accomplished with radio, television, and the long-playing vinyl record.

Music by this point was becoming less and less something seen or reproduced in person, and more and more passively consumed by listening to recordings of it. There were still circuits of performing musicians — many of whom might have perfectly long careers without ever making a dime from recordings. But the ethos was changing. There were still variety TV shows, and a definable sense of a popular repertoire, which expanded outward from Tin Pan Alley songwriters, Broadway musical hits, and jazz composers — what we today call the “Great American Songbook.” And it was that mainline tradition of jazz musicians which created the ethos of popular music in the post-war era. By their example, the idea of “pop music” (which is not necessarily the same as popular music more broadly) slowly became a matter of individual expression. But, specifically, expression via interpretation. For the time immediately following the War, even up into the early Sixties, it was understood that “pop music” meant individual musicians reaching into a universal stock of well-known songs, and producing new or unique interpretations of them. We like to think we still do this — what we call “covers.” But it’s not at all the same, and that old pop ethos is almost dead to everyone except jazz musicians. The world which could conceive of “My Funny Valentine” without thinking only of Ella Fitzgerald’s, or Billie Holiday’s, or even Pat Boone’s “My Funny Valentine” — that world is gone.

What killed that world was — you guessed it — The Beatles. Though this is not to say that they were alone in doing so. Early rock ’n’ roll icons had laid the groundwork: people like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and later Buddy Holly, started up the idea that an individual entertainer might not just be an interpreter, but could write for themselves. Bob Dylan had intercepted the New York folk revival, with its updates of older songs, and its worship of the tradition embodied by Woody Guthrie or Robert Johnson, by penning original songs which increasingly tilted away from anonymous blues and country tunes, and further towards his idiosyncratic personal expression. Brian Wilson used the Beach Boys to stage a personal response to Motown and Phil Spector’s legendary assembly-line productions. But it was the Beatles who changed pop music’s ethos the most. It’s almost as simple as that: between the time they had their first hits in 1963 and ‘64, performing a combination of cover tunes and originals, to their break-up in 1970, the pop landscape had shifted towards a different kind of personal expression. I suspect we still don’t understand how much changed, or how much we now take it for granted. But the expectation of popular performers ever since the Sixties has been that their highest achievement will be their own self-expression —and that the most authentic among them will be expected to write their own material.

The other massive change, also best exemplified by the Beatles, was from a world of performance to one of recording. Certain artists in the Fifties — particularly jazz artists, and a few classical musicians — had approached their recordings as artworks in themselves, seeing the studio as a place to experiment. Yet until the Sixties, there was still a feeling that the recording was very much a recording of a performance. The band, singer, or instrumentalist had a composition already, and the purpose of the recording was to get that composition out into the world, to be promoted, and sold: performance was still the locus for the making of music. As has been well-documented, the Beatles (and all the artists they immediately influenced) changed this around, through their work in the studio: the recording itself now became the locus of making the music. Getting into the studio became the point, and performance became mostly another way of promoting the recording. Or, in the case of the Beatles’ radical abandonment of live performance whatsoever in 1966: creating a profound recording became the ultimate end goal. Pop music was now entering a new kind of self-expression, which increasingly became about musical development — it was developing fine art pretensions. Fans and critics took to evaluating the qualities of popular musicians according to whether or not they were changing enough.

So the question, “What is music now?” has to take into account all of these assumptions, and the history which is often taken for granted. We can leave it there for the time being, since it seems to me that we may have reached the end of many of these assumptions. Spotify reports that the bulk of its streaming is music from the twentieth century, not our own. Small rock bands continue to flourish, and many sound not unlike bands from sixty years ago; many hit songs by huge pop stars seem similarly stuck in the Sixties or Seventies or Eighties (to put that in perspective, imagine a young group from the Sixties attempting to base a career off reviving ragtime, or Swing Jazz). Not to get all Mark Fisher about it, but we do seem to live in a time where the majority of popular music has become remarkably static.

Electronic software has made it easier and easier to create music outside the official record labels, while an industry that can no longer rely on sales of records is mostly reduced to squeezing individual influencers and pop stars for high-priced ticket sales and viral hits, or else leasing libraries of music to increasingly playlist-oriented consumers. The undercurrent of contemporary chart-topping music (even country) continues mostly to be the vocabularies of hip-hop. And yet, after seeing “50 Years of Hip-Hop” installations in museums in 2024, and watching the uninspired performance by Kendrick Lamar — the last great MC in an old tradition — at the recent Super Bowl, that once-vital genre also seems ready to dissipate into the same post-monocultural internet sprawl as everything else.

What is music today? Clearly less than communal — certainly not monocultural. And yet perhaps it’s never been as obsessed with individual expression, in such hyperspecific ways. A multi-billion-dollar pop star like Taylor Swift is expected to sing about the minute details of her life. Rappers are still expected to tell painfully authentic stories of their struggles. Newly-minted pop stars are expected to be authentic and relatable, yet are very quickly torn apart if they do not assume a completely vulnerable, emotive pose — as Chappell Roan has recently discovered. Political posturing may be on its way out in some places, yet popular music seems to be more and more a battleground between toxic sincerity and toxic irony. And yet the Internet makes it impossible to know exactly what “popular” is. Last summer I couldn’t avoid seeing Brat everywhere. I myself wrote here on Substack about how much I loved the record. Yet I still regularly met people who didn’t know who Charli XCX even was — and the album certainly didn’t make much of a dent in the charts or on streaming services. Monoculture is showing itself to be the brief, transient phenomenon that it was. The Internet is now virtually the only way most people have of discovering new music: radio and music television still nominally exist, but have been almost completely replaced.

If there’s any general sense I can gather of what music seems to mean for young people right now, it’s something like “a selection of sounds for curating a mood.” People go to concerts to see a whiz-bang pageant and simulacra of recordings they enjoyed at home. They use streaming services to build playlists of songs, even of ambient noise, to help them feel certain ways. “Sad songs” is one of the highest-searched phrases on all platforms. One of my own vices, over the past year, has been trawling through “reaction videos” on YouTube — clips where some content-maker charges money to request different songs, which they’ll film themselves reacting to, while listening to them for the first time. It’s often very moving, often fascinating. Something in the experience moves these content creators to be sincere: they debate what the song means, and get invested in new genres they’d never have known otherwise.

And yet the whole thing feels — like all content-creation — pornographic and uncanny. There was a time when people used recordings to share pieces of themselves with other people — a time when “taste” was used as a marker of identity, and the ownership of physical recordings conferred and confirmed that taste. Now we film ourselves reacting to digitized recordings, while other people have vicarious experiences watching us do so — no physical items necessary. The recording is now a means to an experience, or a self-promotional end — the audience doesn’t pay the artist, but instead pays the listener, for the thrill of simply watching someone interact with the audience’s favorite songs. Clearly people crave communal musical experiences they simply are not having: and clearly people feel that unless something happens on the internet, it isn’t real. Once The Beatles were a musical act whom you could see perform live. Then they were recording artists, who made records you could hear and buy. Eventually, they were a once-extant act, whose recordings could at least still be collected and cherished. Now they’re dead (or near-dead) legends, whose recordings can be used as props in parasocial internet schemes.

Like all artistic questions today, we seem to be torn between two extremes, one impossible, the other a nightmare: either attempt to resurrect the dead life of irrelevant objects, or push further forward into a digital world, refracting those objects at a further and further remove from real life and human contact. AI will only make this stranger. Is it possible that advances in technology no longer change the development of music itself, but retard it instead? AI production of “art” as it currently exists is not really capable of “making new.” Instead it’s something like the mathematical, statistical perfection of pastiche. Real art is about choices — it’s just as much about what one chooses not to do, as what one does. And a great artist is a person who is aware of all the contingencies, all the other possibilities, latent in the things they have chosen not to do. The great artist practices and trains an instinct which selects, and gets better and better at choosing the right combinations, until they seem to know exactly what choices to avoid, in order to produce something beautiful. It’s entirely possible to imagine a machine doing something vaguely similar to this — and yet, could human personality ever really emerge in the doing? An artist emerges from intensive physical practice and imitation, something an AI can only approximate, when prompted. And yet an artist also emerges from something intangible and clearly beyond description or confinement. Even human imitation has dimensions which machine imitation does not.

Music today obviously continues to be something one can encounter in the presence of other people, being made by people — as I said, Western Classical Music especially has perfected the art of performing its repertoire for the world. But the greater crisis looms: what to do when the substance of music seems to exist mostly in its disembodied use for consumers to inculcate a particular mood, or some vicarious pleasure? The situation warrants a revolution — yet so far, all the great revolutions have been changes in musical vocabulary, mixed with leaps in technology. Our current revolutions seem to change neither — merely to delegate the change to more and more automation. What remains is for enough people to get tired of the situation that the itch becomes intolerable: something difficult to do in a society which has entire entertainment and scientific departments dedicated to alleviating itches. One thing is for sure: recorded music as a monocultural experience is dying — perhaps already dead. What replaces it remains to be seen.

Sam Jennings is an American writer and musician living in London. He is an associate editor at The Hinternet and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa.