For the Record.

My first post to this blog was a transplanted message-board post. I tend to get deeply into discussions at that message board, and write insanely long screeds. So this post is going to be grabbing some of those long screeds and putting them here, for posterity. (And because I’m lazy and don’t want to write anything new.) The intros link back to the original threads, for the morbidly curious.

On recommendations for early female blues singers:

Bessie Smith, absolutely. The thing baby boomers say about Bessie to make her sound interesting is that Janis Joplin claimed to learn how to breathe from Bessie Smith records, but of course Bessie can hand that skinny white chick's ass to her any day.

Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" was a triple-first: the first million-selling record in history; the first pop record by a black artist, thereby inventing the "race" market; and the first blues on record, though not the first recorded song with blues in the title. It was released in 1920, and the world was never the same again.

There were thousands of these women, some of whom recorded only a couple of songs, and they kickstarted the record industry as we know it, a generation before what most of us think of as the record industry began. The 50s have no monopoly on rebellion, or the 60s on sexual liberation. There are, in fact, some completely obscene songs among that first generation of vaudeville-trained female blues shouters. Though most of it is metaphorical, it takes no imagination whatever to figure out what "he puts his key in my keyhole" means, and that's without hearing how she sings it. Many of these women were the next thing to prostitutes (some of them were prostitutes), and their sudden popularity in the 20s and 30s is one of the amazing untold stories of American popular music.

Not all of them were black, either: Sophie Tucker, Norah Bayes, and Marion Harris were white (read: Jewish) vaudeville acts who sang bluesy songs with panache. They have been ignored, though, because they were white, because their songs were written by professionals, because they didn't just sing blues, and because they were very famous for their time. (Although except for being white, Mamie Smith was the same. There's a curious inverted racism to blues history which isn't entirely a bad thing.)

I really recommend Mississippi John Hurt, too. The quietest, gentlest blues singer ever, and a beautiful guitarist. The twelve tracks he recorded in 1927-28 are, I think, my favorite body of work by a bluesman.

There is an alternate history of the blues, too, which tracks its development through the publishing world via W. C. Handy, emerging into white culture in the music of George Gershwin and every jazz band ever. Duke Ellington wrote blues songs that swept the nation, which the bleary-eyed collectors who treasure Charley Patton outtakes will never call legitimate blues, apparently because the Duke could read music and had a publishing deal. The story of the blues was the story of jazz until the communist folk-scholars of the 50s rewrote history so that guys with guitars who sang in Deep-South dives were more authentic than Louis Armstrong's "Wild Cat Blues." But the cult of authenticity is rooted so deeply in our understanding of American music that to tear it out now would be unacceptable to almost every music fan ever. Too bad.

By the way: the story of early country is the story of white Southerners singing blues songs. Jimmie Rodgers, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, and Elvis Presley all released blues songs as their first record. Yazoo Records, previously mentioned, has done a fantastic job of documenting the overlap between blues and country in the 20s and 30s.

On what the best era for pop singles was:

I have four separate but equal favorite periods for the pop single.

The first is the era of the 78rpm record: 1915 to 1945, or thereabouts. The wealth of incredibly great and absolutely essential music released in this format staggers the imagination. Louis Armstrong's "Wild Cat Blues," Bix Beiderbecke's "Riverboat Shuffle," Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," Bert Williams' "Nobody," Duke Ellington's "Creole Love Call," "Black Beauty," and "The Mooche," Robert Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail," Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust," Noel Coward's "Love in Bloom," Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards' "Fascinatin' Rhythm," the Carter Family's "Wildwood Flower," and on and on and on. Jazz, blues, country, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, crooners, classical (Enrico Caruso's "Vesti la Giubba" contains one of the century's great pop moments), and other, weirder, more uncategorizable stuff -- it's all here, the forgotten foundation of 20th-century popular music.

Then there's the 50s and early 60s. [Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Vic Damone, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Carmen McCrae, Mel Torme] covers about half of the picture (and there, I'd add Julie London, Blossom Dearie, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mose Allison); the other half is, of course, rock & roll and its collaborators in r&b and country. Chuck Berry, Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Holly, Phil Spector, Wanda Jackson, Bo Diddley, DOO frigging WOP, Patsy Cline, Ray Charles, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Big Joe Turner, Professor Longhair, and, if we must, Elvis. I tend to overlook this decade because I like the Teens-Twenties-Thirties and the Sixties-Seventies-Eighties so much. But taking both "generations" of music together, as it were, it may be the most broadly brilliant period of all.

Then, of course, the Sixties. It's possible to listen to three-minute Sixties pop singles nonstop for a week and never repeat a song and never hit a lousy tune. (The Ultimate Playlist, perhaps?) Motown, the British Invasion, Stax/Volt, San Francisco, garage rock, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who's ever tried to find just how deep the Sixties-pop rabbit hole goes is never the same again. (For initiates only: try the Millennium, the Cake, and Twiggy's two singles.) And there's everything: Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood's "Some Velvet Morning," and Nina Simone's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" is, to grab three songs out of the air, indicative of the range, yet they all work together. Throw in Sly & the Family Stone's "Dance to the Music" and Marianne Faithfull's "As Tears Go By," and don't forget Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," and you have an unbelievable smorgasbord at only six songs. (There are some acts that I can't decide about. Does Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman" belong in the 50s/early 60s, or in the Sixties proper? Actually, I never have to decide; I just listen to it all on random.)

The last period is, roughly, 1976-1983. (Not, I should mention, that there's not good, even great, even life-without-it-would-be-unlivable stuff in between and outside of these periods. But these are the peaks.) From, that is, "Blitzkrieg Bop" to "Radio Free Europe": from punk to indie. Again, the historical record -- the charts -- only tell 10% of the story; maybe 15% in Britain. I should mention, this is only the "punk/new wave/left-of-center pop-rock" part of the spectrum; I'm not even counting, say, "You Shook Me All Night Long," "He Stopped Loving Her Today," or "Super Freak." But any period that produces (to pick just one band) the Buzzcocks can hold its own with any pop period ever.

Well, that's my answer.

On whether, and if so, why, music from the 90s is overlooked:

It always happens. No sooner do we move out of a period than we leapfrog over it when we look at the past. The early 90s, for example, liked to pretend that the 80s hadn't happened; and the punk/new wave movement of the late 70s/early 80s was a direct revolt against the influence of the late sixties and early seventies.

Perhaps we're still too close to the 90s to really see them clearly. (Some of us are still living in them, if the music we consistently talk about is any indication.) Or maybe we feel overfamiliar with the music of the 90s, and need to pursue other interests while that decade sorts itself out in our collective memory.

The primary difference so far between the 90s and the 00s is the dominance of hip-hop in the pop landscape. The 90s was the last time rock could pretend it was still the primary musical expression of youth culture. Which is why grunge fizzled out (well, that and it wasn't really a coherent genre): the audience for it simply didn't exist in the numbers it needed.

Another difference is the return of sprightly, catchy guitar-pop. Belay the chorus of "derivative," folks; fact is, the Strokes and White Stripes and Franz Ferdinand and the rest do represent a shift in taste. It's a shift away from boring, whiney guitar-plod: say, Matchbox 20 and Nickelback.

The other difference has more to do with the consumption of music as with its sound. The parallel here isn't with the Sixties-Seventies shift or the Eighties-Nineties shift, but with the Forties-Fifties one, when the 78rpm record was replaced by the LP and the 45, which gave rise to the jukebox (the iPod of fifty years ago). Documentary evidence to the contrary, it felt like a period of creative exhaustion (especially to young people), with the music of the previous generation being given artificially extended shelf-life by a corrupt industry, and nauseating novelties like "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" being allowed to dominate the pop charts. (The modern instance might be "Who Let the Dogs Out?") The fresh, lively music that was happening came from underground, from "race radio" and urban streetlife. When this came topside a half-decade later, it was called rock & roll.

It's a change in technology, while the aesthetic remains in something of a holding pattern. Not that there isn't great music coming out all the time from everywhere; but the mass audience is a thing of the past. A music industry predicated not just on record-breaking hits, but on every hit breaking the previous hit's record, is feeling the repercussions. So the charts are dominated by acts who appeal to people who aren't really all that fond of music, and the rest of us get what we need elsewhere. (Shoutout: Johnny Boy's "You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve" is something like the Pop Song of the Decade.)

My two cents, only they're the size of that penny in the Batcave.

On why pop music sucks today as compared to the golden days of 1967:

The fragmentation of the market is due to a fragmentation in American culture (which, by extension, means most of what other countries hear, or copy, too). On the most obvious level, in the forty-year span under consideration, we've gone from having three networks control everything on television to the shocking plenitude of even basic cable today. The rigorous scheduling of television too much for you? Fine, there's the internet, where virtually unlimited content is available for no effort at all. Our grandparents had limited options for entertainment; there is literally no limit today.

Psychologically, the excessive availability of options works a curious trick on our minds. Most of us retreat, in some way, from all the options out there, just for the sake of coherence. (One famous study on children in playgrounds showed that children ran freely all around playgrounds that were fenced in, but huddled towards the center of playgrounds that had no barriers between them and the rest of the world.) Similarly, supermarkets know that the vast majority of their customers aren't comparing prices or reading nutritional-value labels; they just buy what they've bought before.

The hegemony of the major labels, top 40 radio, and what are still fondly referred to as "the music video channels" (ha ha) has been accepted by the majority of music consumers to be that fence between their playground and the rest of the world. It's a protection racket, in a way: the majors get their money, and in return the consumer is protected from having to make a decision.

This, of course, does not ring true to anyone's experience, and I'm not suggesting this is a conscious thing on anyone's part. Because stupid as "information wants to be free" sounds, it's a little bit true in the sense that nobody can have a monopoly on good music, and with the pseudo-democracy of the internet (not free, but cheaper), even distribution is getting harder to monopolize. Not that they won't find a way; I'm reminded of the way radio went from being the province of a million amateur hobbyists in the 20's to being two coast-to-coast networks subject to government regulation in the 40's. Already, most web surfers never leave their tightly-scheduled round of regular stops, almost invariably professional-grade sites.

I'm wandering. (Actually, does that last paragraph even make sense?) Basically, I meant that when there were fewer options, it made financial sense to "run quality programming" (like the BBC); you had every right to expect that at least a certain percentage of your audience will go for it, since there's nothing brighter or shinier available. Today, in the midst of so many options, the people still attempting to make a profit under the old model have no choice but to keep dumbing it down to appeal to the broadest possible market, even if the appeal itself is watered-down. I like a lot of modern radio music, but I don't own any of it; it's enough to hear it a couple of times at random, and then get on to the really cool stuff I'm interested in that doesn't get played on the radio. And that just seems normal now.

On music history what-ifs:

What if the Velvet Underground had been the huge pop band and the Beatles had been an underground, hard-to-find, word-of-mouth act revered by the cognoscenti alone?

What if Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens had taken a train? What if it had an accident? How would rock & roll have changed if they'd died in a train wreck instead of in a plane crash?

What if a massive plague had struck inner-city New York in the mid-to-late 70s, decimating the black population and destroying the community from which hip-hop sprang? What strange, ungodly music would we have had instead?

What if James Taylor had been in a death-metal band instead of a folk-pop band before going solo?

What if John Lee Hooker hadn't died a few years back, but was still alive and pumping out variations on the music he was recording in the 40s?

What if, in the 20s, jazz and blues had been white people's music and country & western had been black people's music?

What if John Lennon, instead of dying, had been nursed back to health, realized that all his love-and-peace crap hadn't saved him from a single deranged fan, and decided to strike back at the criminal underworld instead, and as he was trying to figure out how to do this, a bat had fluttered in through an open window, and he thought, "Aha! This is how I will strike fear into the hearts of that cowardly and superstitious lot!" Wouldn't Yoko have made a strange Robin? (Or would she be Alfred?)

What if disco-punk had caught on in 1980 instead of 2004? Would Gang of Four be thought of the way Foreigner and Journey are today?

What if Rod Stewart had died in 1974? What if Tom Waits had? Or John Lydon? Or George Jones? Or Stevie Wonder? Or the Captain and Tenielle?

What if the technology to record music hadn't come into being until 1987?

What if classical music had never faded in popularity, and composers were treated like rock stars?

What if musical theater had never faded in popularity, and Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards, Simon, Wilson, Bowie, Reed, and Gaye were all primarily famous as composers of show tunes sung by irritatingly chipper people?

What if Jimi Hendrix had been the guitarist for Led Zeppelin? What if Keith Moon had been their drummer? What if Bill Wyman had been their bassist? What if Tiny Tim had been their vocalist? How would undergraduate theses on "Stairway to Heaven" be different?

What if hip-hop had been birthed first, then morphed into funk, then soul, then rhythm & blues, then swing, then New Orleans jazz, then ragtime, then black minstrelsy, then traditional African music? Wouldn't that just be nutty?



So, yeah, I find the whole project of imagining alternate histories faintly ludicrous. There are always too many variables.

On the lack of beauty, humor, love, and fun in modern rock:

I've said it before, and I'm gonna keep saying it until everyone realizes it's the truth:

Rock music is not the pop music vernacular anymore. Rap is.

Rap is where the fun, the creativity, the white-hot heat of pop-cultural imagination and enjoyment are happening today.

Rock music is either too aware of its fifty-year past, too ground down to a blah generality, or too much the product of a singular (often very odd) vision to recapture the Shock of the New like it did in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. Rock fans who hate rap today are where jazz fans who hated rock were in the 60s. The word for rock's state is decadence. The root word for that is decay. This is not an insult, just an observation. (I tend to prefer rock-based stuff myself.) It's a natural cycle, and it reinforces the idea that I always bring up in these conversations, that there are no absolute standards in pop music.

This isn't quite what you asked, I understand. (Please, please, please don't let this turn into another stupid anti/pro rap thread, for the love of God.) Of course any hip-hop fan is gonna laugh at the idea that ironic detachment isn't present in hip-hop; Eminem built his whole career on it. But the cancer has spread throughout the system. It's not music's fault: it's culture's fault.

One thing about living in the Information Age (I wanna say something in these parentheses that will ironically detatch me from that capitalized phrase, but I can't think of anything) is the numbing effect of mediated experience (paging Dr. Lacan). Jane's Addiction made the point on a record cover: nothing's shocking, not even naked Siamese twins on fire. The Age of Aquarius was a bad trip; everyone's scarred and scared of getting hurt again. Plus, there's the generational thing: whatever mom and dad like isn't cool. Well, but what if when mom and dad have good taste? So now the shaggy teenage rebels who want to be the Rolling Stones are the previous generation's marching-band dorks. How can you be special and brilliant when you sport the same ten influences as every other guitar band in the country? (Uh, we sound like the Beatles meets the Velvet Underground. Which is every indie act since REM.)

Musical revolutions (as opposed to simple evolution, which is American music from 1930 to 1963) happen due to cross-pollination: when people raised in one musical tradition are exposed to a completely different one, and try to recreate the experience. That's the Birth of Jazz simplified, and remember the quote from Brian Eno, that hearing rhythm & blues music on a shortwave radio was like hearing music from outer space? His generation (which includes everyone from the Beatles to the Pistols) transformed popular music. (It's hard to remember today, but the punks weren't the children of the hippies; they were their younger siblings.) The problem is that no one is so insular anymore; everyone's heard everything, and those people who haven't heard everything are the ones content to churn out the same old sludge because simple chord changes are always beautiful when they're new.

So we'll mashup the past and create a new world out of the fragments of the old. This isn't anything new; Dada did it a century ago. (And it's a very old game in religion.) But it'll never quite have the flavor of that dear, sweet vanished past, because too much water is under the bridge, and we have our own ways of having fun and falling in love and finding things funny today.

I could go (and have gone) on rants about how much we've lost by not playing and loving the music of the early 1900s, but that's how culture and history work. Much as we as a society love to pretend that we're at the end of history and because of this Internet thing nothing good ever has to die (it can instead be cherished forever by a small group of slightly demented enthusiasts), we're in the time we're in, and the beat the world dances to is programmed instead of live.

It's a mistake, I think, to try to talk about music in the abstract instead of tied to a specific time and place (though I'm not going to stop trying). Beauty, humor, love and fun may be eternal qualities (it's all in Plato, all in Plato), but the way a mass society responds to them and idealizes them will inevitably change, as anyone who's paged through a magazine from 1913 can see. The beauty I hear in operetta, the humor in vaudeville, the love in a Jerome Kern show tune, and the fun in New Orleans jazz are entirely unavailable to the majority of listeners, for whom beauty might be melismatic singers, humor a shock-jock skit, love an explicit ballad, and fun the whole clattering, zooming mile-a-minute production.

I mean, have you heard "Hey Ya"?

Dear God, I’m an egomaniac.