polygon
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An Old Boomer Looks At The New Pop Music (LONG)
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Feb 18 05:21 UTC 1999 |
I'm fundamentally an old folk music guy, but there isn't a lot of folk
music on the radio any more, and for some reason I'm reluctant to get
involved with carrying cassette tapes around in the car, particularly
the irreplaceable ones.
I was born in 1955 and grew up in the era of rock and roll. Even for the
folkies among us, rock was so pervasive that it was the background music
and emblem of many life events in that period.
Another thing is that I am, essentially, allergic to radio commercials.
I have noticed that the same stations that promise 20 songs in a row
also deliver 20 commercials in a row. I know that's how they pay
their bills, but I don't care. I don't have to sit through them.
In recent years, my intolerance for commercials has also affected my
attitude toward talk of any kind on the car radio, including news,
NPR, station breaks, contests, etc. Unless it is incredibly
interesting, I don't want to hear it.
What I do want on the car radio is *music*. And given those constraints,
I change stations a lot. I use the scan button to seek the next clear
station when the one that's on has degenerated into deejay happy talk.
The effect of all this is that I wander all over the dial, far beyond
the constraints of the comfortable classic rock stations that are
targeted to people in my age group. And to my surprise, I have discovered
other music -- interesting, well put together, listenable popular music.
Music at least as good as what the classic rock stations play.
What we now call classic rock had a long period of dominance. In some
ways it seemed a strange thing that music recorded in 1968 was still being
listened and danced to by teenagers in 1988, when the teens of 1968 had
not the slightest interest or knowledge of the popular music of 1948.
My theory at the time was (1) the Boomers were a big generation, with
therefore a larger segment of talented people, (2) the 1960s and 1970s
were an optimistic time that encouraged the creation of music, when every
other college age guy was carrying around a guitar, and bands practiced in
about every third garage, (3) the generations that followed were smaller,
with correspondingly fewer of the talented, and (4) the 1980s were a dour
and pessimistic time for young people, expression of creativity was less
approved of. In other words, the music of 1965-1975, I reasoned,
continued to be popular for years after that, even among young people,
because no comparable body of work was being created.
If all that was ever true, it isn't now.
Popular music, as presented on the radio waves, has split. A lot of
classic rock stations seem to be defining themselves by what they DON'T
play. In Cincinnati, I found a station that was committed to playing ONLY
"music of the 1970s". That's not a musical style, it's an age cohort.
The intent is to give people in their 40s the music they grew up with, and
it works. The slogans may SAY "It doesn't have to be old to be a
classic," but the only new music they play is from old artists.
In the meantime, on other stations pitched to a younger audience, very
different things are happening. A whole new crop of groups and singers
are generating a lot of very interesting music -- songs which are
original, melodic, emotionally complex, and very listenable, even for a
grizzled old Boomer like me.
I'm talking about, just for example, Semisonic, Alanis Morissette, Natalie
Merchant, Lucinda Williams, Barenaked Ladies, Counting Crows, Cowboy
Junkies, Verve Pipe, R.E.M., U2, and others. Not all of these are
technically "new", but they are pretty much new to me in the past couple
of years.
The defining figure among all those is Alanis Morissette. The classic
rock stations never play her. The other rock stations play her
*constantly*.
If you've never heard of her, it means you're probably over 40. (Asking
my age peers, I am amazed at how few have even heard her name.)
Alanis might be described as a cross between Madonna and the young Joni
Mitchell -- all that defiant sexiness and self-pity, redeemed by brilliant
expression. She resembles Grace Slick in the sense that detesting her
personally only deepens your appreciation for her music.
A recent song of hers, "Unsent", is a series of eloquent lines from
letters-that-might-have-been to past boyfriends. "Dear Jonathan, I liked
you too much ... you were plenty self-destructive for my tastes at the
time."
There are quite a few others who are also producing music which makes a
lot of the overplayed stuff from the 1960s sound embarrassingly naive and
simplistic, not to mention drenched in the drug culture.
So, why is this happening? All of the following is half-baked
speculation.
Some time in the late 1980s, the term "alternative" emerged as the
commercial category of rock-music-that-was-not-classic-rock. Indeed, the
makers and listeners of the "alternative" music of that time defined
themselves to a large extent as not being inside the big-tent of classic
rock, but defiantly outside it.
I think of Kurt Cobain as being prominently identified with this movement,
which was deeply pessimistic and very resentful of the Baby Boomers, who
were blamed for everything from environmental destruction to taking all
the good jobs. Those (probably apocryphal) healthy young people in the
hot tub, who so annoyed Mike Royko by saying their lives were so hopeless
and their future so bleak that they might as well give up now, were part
of this trend.
But Cobain is gone, dead by his own hand, and so too are the economic
grievances against the Baby Boomers, washed away in a rising tide of
prosperity. There was no longer such a need for defiance and exclusion in
the music of the current generation of young people, or heavily encoded
lyrics designed to repel uncomprehending elders. Moreover, the good
economy helped free up resources again for creativity and of course music.
In sum, if all you hear on the radio is the pop music of 25 years ago,
you're missing out.
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