I’ve been thinking off and on all day about the Jon Sobel post I mentioned in the previous post. I think he’s got a point, but something about it strikes me as slightly off. To get this out of my system, I’m going to babble about it a bit here, and see if anything coherent emerges.
Sobel’s jumping-off point is the fact that thrity-year-old music is still used at sporting events and in tv commercials, which he finds amazing given the origin of the form:
If you had told me, back in the 1970s when I was in high school, that the records my friends and I were playing at our parties would still be supplying the theme songs for sporting events – and college sports, at that – three decades in the future, I’d have said you were nuts. After all, 30 years before my musically formative period, big-band swing and Frank Sinatra were all the rage, and no one was listening to that any more (except “old” folks experiencing nostalgia). As a rule we didn’t appreciate, or even like, the music of one or two generations back.
And we didn’t have to. We had our own defining songs and bands that everyone our age listened to. Sure, tastes varied – some liked southern rock, some liked the Dead, some liked the heavier stuff, and some got into disco – but whether you liked or hated “Sweet Home Alabama,” whether “Hot Stuff” made you boogie or cringe, you knew those songs, and so did everyone else.
He argues that these songs get used because they’re known to just about everyone, which can’t be said for popular music these days, since the music scene has become so fragmented with lots of different sub-groups downloading their own little thing, and not even aware of what other people in other sub-groups are listening to.
I don’t think he’s completely wrong– I listen to a lot of music, but it’s been fifteen years since I’ve felt I had a good handle on what was really popular on a national level. I rely on a few sources where I can reliably get music I like, and stuff from other genres doesn’t really penetrate.
I think he’s overstating this, though, for several reasons:
One reason is just the usual temporal compression. He allows that there are a few genre-crossing monster hits these days– citing “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Green Day as examples, though I didn’t think the latter was that big– but saying that this is rarer than in the past. The tricky thing about comparisons to the past, though, is that it’s really easy to compress large spans of time together, and wind up thinking that there were more “classics” produced in a shorter period of time than actually happened. You can see that happening directly with the examples he’s chosen– “Crazy” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” are from 2006 and 2004, respectively, and are supposed to show that monster hits are thin on the ground. The two songs he cites in the example quoted above, “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Hot Stuff” are from 1974 and 1979, respectively. There’s twice as much time between those two as between the more recent examples.
For another example of this, take a look at Jason Hare’s Chart Attack! archives. This is a regular feature in which he goes through the top ten Billboard hits from various weeks in the past, and talks about each song in detail. The charts chosen are mostly from the late 70’s to early 90’s, which is right in my wheelhouse, as it were. Those are the years when I listened to Top 40 radio with some regularity, and I’ve never had a better feel for what was popular in music than in that span.
And every single one of those charts has at least one song that makes me say “What the hell?” There’s always one track that I can’t even begin to place, and some of them I don’t recognize even after looking at the video clips, or listening to the samples provided. And lots of the songs I do recognize are songs that I recognize only because I was an avid pop music fan during that period– I know Dan Hartman’s “I Can Dream About You” from 8/25/84, but that’s because I’m a gigantic dork. That wouldn’t mean anything to most people.
The real, true classic songs that absolutely everybody knows seem to me to come along at about the same rate now that they ever did– one, maybe two a year. (You can identify them using the “Tonight Show” test– they’re the songs that are big enough to make it into painfully un-hip monologue jokes.) Most of the rest of the hit songs out there are popular for a while, and then basically forgotten by 90% of the population.
It looks like there were more great songs in the past than recently, because there are more years in the past than there are recent years. You end up blurring together 1975-1979, like a New Yorker getting Midwestern states mixed up, because they’re distant, not terribly important, and only have a few interesting features.
The other big difference in what Sobel is talking about has to do with class and generational factors. I hate generational explanations in general, but I think there is something to it in this case. I think the big difference between the late 70’s scene Sobel describes and the current situation is really a function of what hasn’t changed, namely the fact that the people running the business now are the same people who were running it then.
In the 60’s and 70’s, rock was a relatively new form of popular music, and it came in with a bunch of new or new-ish media and distribution channels. The record industry as we now know it was more or less created in the 60’s, and television was relatively new. The music press that we now know didn’t really come into existence until the late 60’s, and only really became established in the mid-to-late 70’s. All those media outlets were new, and provided opportunities for young people who were familiar with the new forms to step in and make a niche for themselves.
The problem now is that all the production, distribution, and taste-making apparatus is still being run by the same people, or people of a similar background. The pop music of the Baby Boom generation is still a dominent force in mass culture because the Baby Boom generation is still running things, and they play a big part in setting the agenda.
There isn’t as much of a split between the tastes of college kids these days and their parents because there hasn’t been a musical revolution since then that’s had a chance to take over the taste-making machinery. Rap and hip-hop are arguably as big a departure from rock as rock was from Frank Sinatra, but their rise didn’t coincide with any significant new media opportunities– there are some record labels and networks and magazines that grew out of hip-hop culture, but they weren’t stepping into a void the way that new media companies were in the 60’s and 70’s. And, as a result, they’ve failed to displace the older order, and have had to settle for co-opting mass culture in a slightly watered-down form palatable to the people who were raised on rock, and are still in charge of producing, distributing, and marketing music to the masses.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the rise of filesharing and Internet distribution gives rise to a new dominant musical form in some way. Somebody’s going to need to figure out a way to make serious money off it first, but if they do find a way to use the new media in ways that bypass the current infrastructure, it’s entirely possible that my as-yet-hypothetical children will one day scorn the music of my generation, the way my parents scorned the music of my grandparents’ generation.
Until and unless that happens, well, as the song says, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”