this is a nice sweeping synopsis, and all the more salient because music is the art form which is most inescapable today - you can't avoid hearing music, well, everywhere. And you don't get to just shut off your ears.
The idea that music is selected specifically to curate a vibe is one I'd go even further with, though. The demands of high art and folk music (attentive listening and coproduction) were always going to lose to the frictionless offerings of popular music. And popular music can contribute to whatever we're trying to achieve, beyond just a vibe. So we get intense music that tends towards more intensity to help us exercise, for example, or bland background noise that tends towards more blandness to play in cafes. So pop music helps us do what we already want to do, even if thats just inhabiting a specific wavelength of vibes. Folk and high art demand to be met on their terms.
Very good essay. Always good to be reminded that recorded music is unfathomably new. Have you read How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll by Elijah Wald? (the subtitle leads me to think yes). Reading that and The Rest is Noise back to back totally changed the way I think of music in the 20th century.
A very troubling recent moment for me was opening some youtube link called like "Funky Grooves from Planet Zorlon-B" or something like that, with a cool image of an alien on a midcentury modern spaceship, and within a few minutes realizing that it was all AI-generated. And worse, that it was perfectly pleasant enough music to work to. Soulless muzak has been a thing for a while ofc but many coffee shops that used to default to playing Kind of Blue or something are now playing this stuff...
Thanks Henry! I haven't heard of the Wald book. Would it puncture the soul of a Beatles idolizer like myself? "The Rest is Noise" I've read, though, and that's the best book on of music history I know of. Alex Ross is far and away our best American music critic. Though I'm not sure what he'd have to say about Funky Grooves from Planet Zorlon-B...
No the title is basically clickbait, only the last chapter deals with the Beatles and in the same terms you describe. It's mostly an amazing history of pre-LP American music that talks a lot about what was actually popular rather than the stuff that is retroactively enshrined in the music writer canon. Lots of incredible details and fun facts and I gained a much much better understanding of the place of music, dancing, the Great American Songbook etc in the mind of the average person as it actually was in a way that also reverberated into my understanding of pre-1960 film, literature etc. Provocative/contrarian at times but overall one of my very favorite books on music. You would love it I'm sure!!
And yes before I read The Rest is Noise basically all of my classical music knowledge came from Looney Tunes, after I read it I felt as if I had been living next to a beautiful cathedral my entire life and never bothered to go inside.
I've read the Wald book as well, and of all the books I've ever read, I can't think of any other one where the title was so utterly misleading, and I came to it not having any idea what it was really about, yet on finishing it felt I'd gained so much.
I related to your vice of music reaction videos. I too am addicted and have been for about 5 years. Why? I believe that we are indeed missing a crucial part to maximize dedicated listening enjoyment.
In the 70s new albums came out every week on Tuesdays. Often, a small group of friends would anxiously travel to the music store after school to buy an LP. Music in hand we would then go listen to the entire album on someone’s stereo. Most times it was the first encounter with the work unless we had heard one of the singles on the radio prior. The music was the main course but In hindsight the ability to look at your fellow listeners to see their reaction was integral to the experience.
Until I watched my first reaction video I didn’t think of, or appreciate, how important this seemingly insignificant ingredient was to music listening. Reaction videos serve as a facsimile of that ingredient.
I've got to check out Henry's suggestions (per usual), but I've also got to suggest Andrew Hickey's magisterial blog/essay series/podcast "A History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs" at 500songs.com as a slight revision to what you're saying here. I'm only at Episode 30 ("Bo Diddley,") but already, not only Bo Diddley but Les Paul (Episode 9, "How High The Moon") and Elvis Presley/Sam Phillips (Episode 19, "That’s All Right, Mama") are very clearly editing the folk tradition by using the recording studio to add so much tremelo it becomes its own rhythm (Diddley) adding overdubs to create a whole band from scratch (Les Paul) or adding tape echo to create an auditorium out of a cheap crappy room (Phillips/Presley). Obviously the Beatles idolize elements of Paul, Presley, and Phillips in their music, and synthesize those elements into something that's no longer prioritizing performance, but Andrew Hickey's always into this idea that "there's no first song" in terms of any genre, and I think the proto-Beatles show that there's very much something to your (interesting) idea in this essay that a certain kind of album-oriented rock killed "music" as a communal act versus an individual buying decision inside of a lonely online-oriented world.
This is all to say, in a way: Hickey's podcast and blog is one of the only really interesting pieces of sustained music criticism I've read or listened to in the past few years!
Tip: If the sheer number and length of Hickey’s podcasts looks overwhelming, he also posts the transcripts. These are not the automated transcripts of most podcasts, but something that’s been edited by one of his friends and thus free of most of the usual transcription errors. A good way to catch up if you’re a faster reader than listener, and also a good way to search for and review things again later (hard to do with an audio recording).
Brilliant essay, Sam. Make of this what you will--I read it while listening to "MALL: Blade Runner Ambience | Massive Cyberpunk Ambient Music | 2099 Focus & Sleep Ambience | 4K" (2 hour version) on YouTube.
I posted a link to your piece in a family thread, and it stimulated more extended comment from three generations than anything else ever has! Much of what you said resonated, but there were lots of objections and exceptions, and additional musings. Thanks a lot!
I owe all my love of music to the Beatles. They articulated new genres with every song, planting a seed of curiosity for new sounds that persists to this day—35 years after I first heard The White Album when I was 10 years old. But I completely agree that they destroyed something when they turned musicians into multi-millionaires who sold recordings instead of artisans who lived off their craft.
Thanks for expressing so well something I've had a gut feeling about for the last 20 years. Brilliant article!
This makes a lot of sense... And there are associated factors. About the time of the Beatles was when musicians started making the big money by selling recordings and not from performing. That was enabled by the dramatically better reproduction methods allowed by transistorized electronics, which really was new in the 1960s. And I've seen an analysis complaining that the "song" was replaced by the "track" -- a song being intrinsically something that any number of people can perform, whereas a track was a heavily engineered audio construct.
Which means our times are different yet again -- you can't get rich selling recordings now because they are too easy to pirate. So musicians are starting to make money through performances again. E.g. Taylor Swift played in Boston for three nights and the tickets were extremely expensive. Compare to my youth when the tour was a promotion for the record, concert tickets were cheap, and bands played only one night in each city on a tour.
Yet it behooves me as a musician with fifty years of bluegrass music, jamming, concerts, contests, to say, you could be missing a small but powerful piece of today's music.
Leaving for a moment the way it is recorded, which is a salient point- country, bluegrass and old time music and dance contain all the elements you have said are missing. It is a veritable wave, slow but a renaissance of re- thought, re- played music.
Self expression is key. So much of the music and the musicians depend upon improvisation, as in jazz, that it is constantly growing and changing. One simply cannot compare bluegrass from the nineties to today. And bluegrass from the seventies to the nineties, of the fifties....
I love classical guitar and have been to a short short Chinese opera which I was glad to watch and never need to do again!
I lived in Hong Kong and played banjo at Disney's Grizzly Gulch. Guess what the most requested song from mainland Chinese people was? Country Roads.
Very few songs
got into communist China. But that recording did, and it informed their idea of American music.
Denver was reaching out the only way he knew how, like Dylan he was a folk-cum pop star who wanted to reach a wide audience by recording.
I've seen Chinese children dancing to it with abandon and sometimes glee( Did I mention I'm not that good?).
>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.
I dunno, I feel this still applies to handmade Spotify playlists. If I put one on at a party, I may be curating the mood but I’m also definitely putting down a marker about my taste; I hope for compliments, and bristle when someone else wants to seize control of the Bluetooth speaker. (The handmade playlist is also The Way to wrangle the Spotify algorithm: far more than whatever it makes of my account’s listening habits as a whole — many of which are in any case dictated by my 5- and 7-year-old daughters — it will respond really quite well to a “prompt” consisting of five or six tracks representing my taste within a particular genre or mood.)
This was great. I'm curious about your suggestion that modern performers would astound their predecessors. Were e.g. court musicians simply less skilled than contemporary professional orchestra members because they had less time to practice or less sophisticated practice methods? Maybe intonation was worse because instruments weren't as well made? I'm curious about what, like, baroque would've sounded like in its day.
I think it's more specialization and skill set. Yuja Wang and Daniil Trifonov are such extraordinary concert pianists I think they would dazzle men from the 18th or 19th centuries. But those men were likely more well-rounded, able to extemporize on figured bass, to sight read with ease. Their practice was probably as much teaching it to others as it was rehearsal. My guess is there was far less pure practicing as we understand it. If you've never seen the Straub-Hillet film "Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach" I cannot recommend it enough.
Enjoyed this. The ending especially struck a chord (so to speak). Recorded music was one of the great pleasures of the 20th century, but it’s sort of perfected itself into a dead end and we’re all sick of it. It seems to me that banning it completely would create a musical renaissance and bring the joy back. That’s not going to happen, of course, but somehow the thought seems like a good place to start from.
this is a nice sweeping synopsis, and all the more salient because music is the art form which is most inescapable today - you can't avoid hearing music, well, everywhere. And you don't get to just shut off your ears.
The idea that music is selected specifically to curate a vibe is one I'd go even further with, though. The demands of high art and folk music (attentive listening and coproduction) were always going to lose to the frictionless offerings of popular music. And popular music can contribute to whatever we're trying to achieve, beyond just a vibe. So we get intense music that tends towards more intensity to help us exercise, for example, or bland background noise that tends towards more blandness to play in cafes. So pop music helps us do what we already want to do, even if thats just inhabiting a specific wavelength of vibes. Folk and high art demand to be met on their terms.
Well put!
Very good essay. Always good to be reminded that recorded music is unfathomably new. Have you read How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll by Elijah Wald? (the subtitle leads me to think yes). Reading that and The Rest is Noise back to back totally changed the way I think of music in the 20th century.
A very troubling recent moment for me was opening some youtube link called like "Funky Grooves from Planet Zorlon-B" or something like that, with a cool image of an alien on a midcentury modern spaceship, and within a few minutes realizing that it was all AI-generated. And worse, that it was perfectly pleasant enough music to work to. Soulless muzak has been a thing for a while ofc but many coffee shops that used to default to playing Kind of Blue or something are now playing this stuff...
Thanks Henry! I haven't heard of the Wald book. Would it puncture the soul of a Beatles idolizer like myself? "The Rest is Noise" I've read, though, and that's the best book on of music history I know of. Alex Ross is far and away our best American music critic. Though I'm not sure what he'd have to say about Funky Grooves from Planet Zorlon-B...
No the title is basically clickbait, only the last chapter deals with the Beatles and in the same terms you describe. It's mostly an amazing history of pre-LP American music that talks a lot about what was actually popular rather than the stuff that is retroactively enshrined in the music writer canon. Lots of incredible details and fun facts and I gained a much much better understanding of the place of music, dancing, the Great American Songbook etc in the mind of the average person as it actually was in a way that also reverberated into my understanding of pre-1960 film, literature etc. Provocative/contrarian at times but overall one of my very favorite books on music. You would love it I'm sure!!
And yes before I read The Rest is Noise basically all of my classical music knowledge came from Looney Tunes, after I read it I felt as if I had been living next to a beautiful cathedral my entire life and never bothered to go inside.
That’s beautifully said. And now I’m totally sold on the Wald book thanks Henry.
I've read the Wald book as well, and of all the books I've ever read, I can't think of any other one where the title was so utterly misleading, and I came to it not having any idea what it was really about, yet on finishing it felt I'd gained so much.
Really excellent. Enjoyed the casually huge scope of your reflections here
I related to your vice of music reaction videos. I too am addicted and have been for about 5 years. Why? I believe that we are indeed missing a crucial part to maximize dedicated listening enjoyment.
In the 70s new albums came out every week on Tuesdays. Often, a small group of friends would anxiously travel to the music store after school to buy an LP. Music in hand we would then go listen to the entire album on someone’s stereo. Most times it was the first encounter with the work unless we had heard one of the singles on the radio prior. The music was the main course but In hindsight the ability to look at your fellow listeners to see their reaction was integral to the experience.
Until I watched my first reaction video I didn’t think of, or appreciate, how important this seemingly insignificant ingredient was to music listening. Reaction videos serve as a facsimile of that ingredient.
I've got to check out Henry's suggestions (per usual), but I've also got to suggest Andrew Hickey's magisterial blog/essay series/podcast "A History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs" at 500songs.com as a slight revision to what you're saying here. I'm only at Episode 30 ("Bo Diddley,") but already, not only Bo Diddley but Les Paul (Episode 9, "How High The Moon") and Elvis Presley/Sam Phillips (Episode 19, "That’s All Right, Mama") are very clearly editing the folk tradition by using the recording studio to add so much tremelo it becomes its own rhythm (Diddley) adding overdubs to create a whole band from scratch (Les Paul) or adding tape echo to create an auditorium out of a cheap crappy room (Phillips/Presley). Obviously the Beatles idolize elements of Paul, Presley, and Phillips in their music, and synthesize those elements into something that's no longer prioritizing performance, but Andrew Hickey's always into this idea that "there's no first song" in terms of any genre, and I think the proto-Beatles show that there's very much something to your (interesting) idea in this essay that a certain kind of album-oriented rock killed "music" as a communal act versus an individual buying decision inside of a lonely online-oriented world.
This is all to say, in a way: Hickey's podcast and blog is one of the only really interesting pieces of sustained music criticism I've read or listened to in the past few years!
Tip: If the sheer number and length of Hickey’s podcasts looks overwhelming, he also posts the transcripts. These are not the automated transcripts of most podcasts, but something that’s been edited by one of his friends and thus free of most of the usual transcription errors. A good way to catch up if you’re a faster reader than listener, and also a good way to search for and review things again later (hard to do with an audio recording).
Brilliant essay, Sam. Make of this what you will--I read it while listening to "MALL: Blade Runner Ambience | Massive Cyberpunk Ambient Music | 2099 Focus & Sleep Ambience | 4K" (2 hour version) on YouTube.
Hahahaha. You and untold millions! But thanks, Derek, always enjoy hearing from you.
I posted a link to your piece in a family thread, and it stimulated more extended comment from three generations than anything else ever has! Much of what you said resonated, but there were lots of objections and exceptions, and additional musings. Thanks a lot!
This is so wonderful to hear! Thank you.
I owe all my love of music to the Beatles. They articulated new genres with every song, planting a seed of curiosity for new sounds that persists to this day—35 years after I first heard The White Album when I was 10 years old. But I completely agree that they destroyed something when they turned musicians into multi-millionaires who sold recordings instead of artisans who lived off their craft.
Thanks for expressing so well something I've had a gut feeling about for the last 20 years. Brilliant article!
This makes a lot of sense... And there are associated factors. About the time of the Beatles was when musicians started making the big money by selling recordings and not from performing. That was enabled by the dramatically better reproduction methods allowed by transistorized electronics, which really was new in the 1960s. And I've seen an analysis complaining that the "song" was replaced by the "track" -- a song being intrinsically something that any number of people can perform, whereas a track was a heavily engineered audio construct.
Which means our times are different yet again -- you can't get rich selling recordings now because they are too easy to pirate. So musicians are starting to make money through performances again. E.g. Taylor Swift played in Boston for three nights and the tickets were extremely expensive. Compare to my youth when the tour was a promotion for the record, concert tickets were cheap, and bands played only one night in each city on a tour.
Great post
masterclass essay. bravo
Thank you!
I agree with so much.
Yet it behooves me as a musician with fifty years of bluegrass music, jamming, concerts, contests, to say, you could be missing a small but powerful piece of today's music.
Leaving for a moment the way it is recorded, which is a salient point- country, bluegrass and old time music and dance contain all the elements you have said are missing. It is a veritable wave, slow but a renaissance of re- thought, re- played music.
Self expression is key. So much of the music and the musicians depend upon improvisation, as in jazz, that it is constantly growing and changing. One simply cannot compare bluegrass from the nineties to today. And bluegrass from the seventies to the nineties, of the fifties....
I love classical guitar and have been to a short short Chinese opera which I was glad to watch and never need to do again!
I lived in Hong Kong and played banjo at Disney's Grizzly Gulch. Guess what the most requested song from mainland Chinese people was? Country Roads.
Very few songs
got into communist China. But that recording did, and it informed their idea of American music.
Denver was reaching out the only way he knew how, like Dylan he was a folk-cum pop star who wanted to reach a wide audience by recording.
I've seen Chinese children dancing to it with abandon and sometimes glee( Did I mention I'm not that good?).
I really appreciate your perspective on all this.
Jack
>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.
I dunno, I feel this still applies to handmade Spotify playlists. If I put one on at a party, I may be curating the mood but I’m also definitely putting down a marker about my taste; I hope for compliments, and bristle when someone else wants to seize control of the Bluetooth speaker. (The handmade playlist is also The Way to wrangle the Spotify algorithm: far more than whatever it makes of my account’s listening habits as a whole — many of which are in any case dictated by my 5- and 7-year-old daughters — it will respond really quite well to a “prompt” consisting of five or six tracks representing my taste within a particular genre or mood.)
Christmas Carols.
This was great. I'm curious about your suggestion that modern performers would astound their predecessors. Were e.g. court musicians simply less skilled than contemporary professional orchestra members because they had less time to practice or less sophisticated practice methods? Maybe intonation was worse because instruments weren't as well made? I'm curious about what, like, baroque would've sounded like in its day.
I think it's more specialization and skill set. Yuja Wang and Daniil Trifonov are such extraordinary concert pianists I think they would dazzle men from the 18th or 19th centuries. But those men were likely more well-rounded, able to extemporize on figured bass, to sight read with ease. Their practice was probably as much teaching it to others as it was rehearsal. My guess is there was far less pure practicing as we understand it. If you've never seen the Straub-Hillet film "Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach" I cannot recommend it enough.
Enjoyed this. The ending especially struck a chord (so to speak). Recorded music was one of the great pleasures of the 20th century, but it’s sort of perfected itself into a dead end and we’re all sick of it. It seems to me that banning it completely would create a musical renaissance and bring the joy back. That’s not going to happen, of course, but somehow the thought seems like a good place to start from.