This essay is a response to the question: "Does modern music suck?"
I suppose that everyone reading this essay has at least heard of this
question. This essay will answer the question in the affirmative.
My assigning the year 1990 as the year "pop" music crashed is neither
a theory, nor a hypothesis. To me, it's just an observation, which I
do support with my own statistics.
I watched pop music crash in slow-motion in real time. This is
something that people born after 1985 cannot claim, for by the time
they became old enough to begin to appreciate pop music (or any
music), they were already inside the post-Heyday of pop music. So, I
suppose I can understand the resentment of younger people to be told
that "they don't write music the way they used to." Were I in the same
place, I might resent it too. But what if I'm right? What if we really
are still in the post-crash music era? What if, relative to the 60s, 70s,
and 80s, modern music really does suck?
It might be natural enough for young people to judge the validity
of their post-crash music by other post-crash music, but we of the
older generation can't unhear what we've lived with, and that's especially
true for us Boomers. The young people of today are stuck inside their
"pop music fishbowl," with little interest for what goes on outside of it
(meaning in the past). This is particularly true, I suppose, if one is
trying to earn a living inside that fishbowl. Going "commercial" these
days means conforming your music and your attitudes toward the way
things are done in the music industry today, for better or for worse.
It took me a few years into the 1990s to fully appreciate that the music
world had radically changed. I suppose that I was one of the first
listeners of pop music to come out and claim that pop music was seriously
broken. Years later, I would spend a lot of time researching how this
state of affairs came to be. What really killed off the novelty and variety
and depth that Heyday pop music was known for? Some say that it was
the production companies and the big labels that became risk averse and
settled down into the "they got to prove themselves right away or we'll
dump them" mentality. Or, "Find out what's hot right now, and
duplicate it." The sin of expedience. No "entrepreneurial spirit," as
Frank Zappa would say. The following is a YouTube video of Frank
Zappa (a musician I knew of during my teenage years) who gives his
own view on this matter:
Frank Zappa - Decline of the Music Industry
So, that's one piece of a multi-piece puzzle of what destroyed pop music.
But that doesn't seem to explain why the big artists of the 70s and 80s
produced very little completely original music past 1989, though some
good covers were made.
So, what's the answer? Is it risk aversion amongst the music industry
leaders? Is it greed? Is it a conspiracy based on ideology? Is it just the
confluence of random factors that came together to produce an unintended
destructive interference? Or is it even more basic than all of that? Is it
that good pop music is like a vein of ore in a mountain, and it's now well-
tapped out of existence? So, the reason pop music is dying is because there
is nothing left to invent. Well, I don't believe that.
It could be that modern pop music is driven by the money and fame that
can be derived from a big stage show. If this is the case, then the music
is subsidiary to the show and its glitz. Attenders aren't there to actually
hear music, but to see a spectacle. This isn't a new thing, though. I have
always hated it when groups made a spectacle of their performance to the
detriment of the music. To me, that's an insult to music, and no more than
a vaudeville act.
John Denver could never make it these days, because he didn't put on stage
shows that were spectacles. If you attend such things, you are voting with
your wallet. But it comes with a long-term price to the quality of music.
I'm a Boomer, but I cannot speak for my generation generally, though
I believe that on a few points I can. My essay here is specifically a
response to a video essay made by Mary Spender, who:
1) Has recently been in the controversy over the state of modern music,
having been in disagreements with the Boomer view of it, in particular,
challenging Rick Beato's take on the issue. Beato has explained in the
past the particular reasons that modern music is objectively lagging
behind the music of 30-60 years ago. But compared to me, his view on
modern music is practically accepting. (If you want, you can search for
those YouTube videos, using the search strings "Beato, music sucks" and
"Beato-Spender".)
2) A few days ago, Spender wrote a defense of "modern music," which she
equated as belonging to Gen-Z, under the title "Why New Music Sucks."
If you do not notice a strong disagreement between them in those videos
that they reference each other or are in the same video together, you will
see how far apart they are in their views of modern music when you see
her following video
Really, Spender? You really believe that the Boomers had only a single
record album as the soundtrack of their lives? This is just plain wrong.
The young Boomer probably had access to his or her older siblings's
records as he or she was starting his or her own record collection. And
the older siblings had access to their parents's record collection of Johnny
Mathis, Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, Percy Faith, and many more, not
to mention a solid Christmas collection. Furthermore, Boomers had access
to portable radios and, if I'm not badly mistaken, they knew how to hum!
Spender's explanation of why modern music does not have any particular
style come to the fore among its competitors is because there are today
just too many competing styles and genres out there. She explains that
the ascendency of the Beatles in the 60s was because of the dominance of
rock and roll in that period. Although there is some logic to her hypothesis,
it diminishes the real reason that 60s version of rock rose to ascendency
and continued through the 70s. And that was because of the hugely talented
rock musicians that created great music, the likes of which haven't been
seen since the 80s. In other words, they actually made good music out of the
rock genre! That takes talent to accomplish that. From the standpoint of
the pop music circa 1960, there was no guarantee that it would ever climb
out of the pit of 50s-style rock-and-roll boredom.
Spender's condescending views just serve only to insult the musical
accomplishments of The Beatles, The Doors, The Beach Boys, Jefferson
Airplane, The Monkies, and so many more. These bands weren't merely
riding the current wave, they created the current wave that finally forever
put to rest boring 50s rock and roll.
Beatles cover band music at the mall
Reaction by Gen-Zer: "Oh sure, if all you want is to listen to catchy old
music that's bound to make you happy."
I put a challenge to you confident young people of the Gen-Z: Try a musical
experiment. Take two cover bands, one of Coldplay, the other of The Beatles,
and have them perform for free at a large mall. They will perform
simultaneously within earshot of each other, but not too close, of course. The
Coldplay songs can be anything you like. But The Beatles songs will be of the
upbeat, early years. Then, see where the crowds go. It's not a perfect
experiment because young people will naturally gravitate toward what they're
familiar with, but at least it's a chance for modern music to compete on an
equal basis with Boomers's 60s music. But, remember that I'm not claiming
that good pop music ended in the 60s, but in the 80s. You could also put
Coldplay up against Bananarama if you prefer.
The reason it's appropriate to refer to those bands I just named as "rock"
bands is because nobody knows a better term to apply to them, but these
bands did not produce only rock music. The Beatles gave us such non-rock
songs as "This Boy" and "Good Night" and "Blackbird." Jefferson Airplane
gave us "Today" and "Comin' Back to Me" from their Surrealistic Pillow
album. So, even when you were listening to these bands, you weren't only
listening to rock music.
Now, although Spender's video essay was the trigger that motivated
me to formally respond to this conundrum, this essay is not meant
as a personal reply to her. For I have been trying to figure out for
twenty years why modern music sucks. It crashed long ago, and I
don't know why. Since that time I have heard or read many explanations,
but those explanations are to me inadequate to explain the downfall
of modern music, starting in 1990. That's thirty-two years ago, as of
this writing.
So, if Spender had just said that "What is good in music is subjective:
What Boomers like is what they like; what young people like is what we
like", then there wouldn't be much for me to say as a specific reply
to her. But what Spender did was to offer an explanation for this
profound difference between the views of these two generations. So,
although I've been biding my time for twenty years before putting my
concerns in writing, I'm writing now to contest what I believe are
incorrect explanations.
So, who is Mary Spender? When I first started to write this response
essay, all I knew of her was that she is a YouTube creator who teaches
guitar techniques and comments on modern music. But yesterday I
saw a video of hers in which she describes her desire to become a
self-sufficient musical artist, to which I wish her the greatest of success.
But what I don't understand is why a person who's smackdab in the
middle of an effort to get established as an independent artist, has the
desire to form an 'academic' denouncement of a previous generation
over its musical tastes.
In her video, Spender makes the formal argument that Boomers's
problem with modern music is wholly explainable by the psychology of
their generation. She lists three particular psychological problems.
However, she has presented no more than allegations, because she never
even attempts to prove any of them. We're not supposed to win arguments
by innuendo. Beyond that, there's one more problem with her argument:
Its most important assumption she has left unstated. Such an argument
is referred to as an enthymeme. And this is the assumption:
In each decade from 1950s to today's decade, there has always beenNot only does she not clearly state this assumption, she does not
(and will always be) an abundance of "good" new music.
Okay, according to Spender, the reason Why New Music Sucks is because
it doesn't! In the hands of Gen-Z, it's doing quite well, thank you very
much! If the Boomers don't like modern (i.e., "new") music, it has
nothing to do with the music itself, so it must lie in some psychological/
sociological factors of those old fogies who yell at the clouds. And then
she goes on to explain what they are:
I was born in the 50s and I always thought that 50s rock-and-roll
was BORING! (Three-cord drivel.) The 50s is when pop music crashed
for the first time in living memory! So, modern music is not the only
music in living memory that sucks. 50s rock-and-roll also sucked.
If you really wanted exciting and great music of that day, you had to
go back to the show tunes of the 40s and 50s and back to the big band
sounds of the 40s, like Tommy Dorsey's Opus One, which I remember
hearing for the first time in 1973, which is not exactly my youth and
which is very much unlike 60's pop music. The following are two
videos on Opus One:
How come, Spender, that one of my all-time favorite songs was written
in the 40s and I had only first heard it in 1973? It seems that your
nostalgia theory is not quite up to explaining this. So, at the same time
I was grooving on Opus One, I was also grooving on (just to name a
very few):
Seals and Crofts:
Judy Collins:
Godspell:
Roberta Flack:
Killing Me Softly with His Song (1973)
Barry White:
Jim Croce:
Manfred Mann's Earth Band:
Blinded by the Light*** (1973)
Vicki Lawrence
The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (1973)
Collectively, these songs are very different from the "music of my youth,"
from each other, and from Opus One. How is this possible under the
nostalgia theory? It isn't. According to the theory as presented, I should
have fixated on the Beatles and hated everything afterwards. But that
didn't happen.
So, instead of the confluence of that legacy giving us the best
music ever heard in pop culture to that time, we got boring 50s
rock-and-roll. I suppose the only good thing to say about 50s
rock-and roll is that it was a necessary phase to go through to get
to better things -- and much better things we got to by 1963. In
my opinion, that was the first year of a modern Heyday of popular
music that lasted 26 years until 1989, when pop music once again
crashed even bigger, and has remained in its dismal state to this
day. I explain it as that 1990 was the wall that music ran up against
and crashed, and we have yet to recover since then.
Comment: Can one make a great song on just three cords? Yes,
but it won't be easy. It better have something else going for it,
like a great melody and harmony. (However, I don't know if
Gen-Z knows what melody or harmony is or even cares if they
do. I find it hard to believe from the music they listen to.)
Before I give my brief analysis of what I just called those "Heyday
years of Pop Music," I want to list the various genres of music that
I'm not including in my analysis, which are Metal music, Grunge
music, HipHop, or similar genres. I'm going to give a favorable
mention to one song by The Cure from 1987, and I don't know how
they should be categorized in that period, but that song made it
to the Billboard top 40.
Spender's basic argument seems to rest on the unstated assumption
that the music throughout the decades has always been good and
therefore any criticism of "new" music by the older generation
must be their own fault. It must be something in them, not in the
music. They can go off yelling at the clouds all they want, but
modern music is just fine and dandy. But no, it isn't. And I'm not
yelling at the clouds or at the younger generation. If they are
content with the pablum music they claim as their own, more
power to them. But don't expect us Boomers to purchase your
music.
Okay, what about her 'Juvenoia' argument: The older generation
has a natural fear, loathing, paranoia of the younger generation.
And so the conclusion is that they would hate the music of young
people? Really? Is that even logical? If I were to hear now the
song, say, "Blinded by the Light" for the first time and discover
that it was written and performed by a modern band (say in 2020
-- of course, it wasn't!), I would still love it. A good song (or musical
piece) is good no matter when it's made! Just the same, I would
rather listen to the theme music to "St. Elsewhere" than to anything
written in the last twenty years that I am currently aware of. And,
if there is music out there that I would like that I have not yet heard,
then there is something terribly wrong with the way that modern
music is distributed, at least compared to the way it used to get
distributed to the masses.
Theme music to "St. Elsewhere" (1982)
Below is a link I made to many of my favorite songs/musical pieces
of the modern age. This music includes movie and show tunes, TV
themes, radio music.
Actually, my word of "pop" is misleading, as much of the music
is outside of the boundaries of "popular music" in the strict sense.
But I need a simple word to cover it all and this is that word for
this essay.
When I refer to pop music as any piece of music that had any appeal
to a popular audience, I mean it. That includes even the music to TV
commercials. How about this as an example from the 70s?
Three Musketeers commercial- 1978
Or, how about from the 60s?
CLASSIC TV COMMERCIAL - 1960s - SLINKY #3
By the way, you may think that slinkies are boring, but physicists
love them because they're useful for teaching a lot about classical
wave motion.
Okay, neither of these examples of music qualify for greatness, but
that's not the point. The point is that both of them have better music
in them than any original music in TV commercials I've heard that
has come out over the last forty years (I'm not including in this
comparison modern commercials that use classical or old pop music,
which, of course, are many). My point about the destruction of music
goes way beyond the concerns of just radio, record, or concert music,
and includes all forms of music that go out to the general public.
As for Spender's last category of 'smorgasbord', I didn't grasp her
point, so I'll not comment on it. If any generation is not availing
themselves of the wide choice of musical styles out there, it is the
younger generation of hip-hop/Coldplay-imitation addicts. So, let's
look at Coldplay. Here's a list of their top 16 songs, as compiled by
bor zong on YouTube:
Out of the sixteen, I'll only comment on three of them.
By the way, though Elton John gave us the moody "Sorry Seems
the Hardest Word", he also gave us "Crocodile Rock" (1972).
My point: Musical Variety!
Now, for a couple "folk rock" examples:
The Byrds - Turn! Turn! Turn! (1965)
By "folk rock" I mean a song with simple lyrics, a simple beat, and
the main instrument accompanying it being the electric guitar, mostly
used for chords.
Now, I'm going to use my own list of favorite pop music to do some
light statistics to compare each decade from the 1950s to the 2010s.
It's important to understand how I drew up this list by decade. For
the decades of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, I tried to get a mere representative
of the music I like from each of those decades. However, in the decades
following, there was so little good music that I listed every single
song/musical piece I could. So, if I had used that same standard for
the previous decades, they would probably be 30-50% larger,
especially in the 60s. Well, I don't intend to take the time to update
those lists, so understand that they are at a handicap compared to
the later decades.
So, here are my approximate counts:
The sad truth for me is that the last good pop song that I know of is
"Man on a Mission," by Hall & Oats (2003). That's about twenty
years ago! With the exception of the controversial song by Adele, the
rest of the songs were covers of music written before 1970.
"Man on a Mission" by Hall & Oats (2003)
Anyway, if my counts are slightly inaccurate it won't matter because
I will need only ballpark numbers to make my points. You have to
understand, folks, that by the time 1986 rolled around, the people
making the "new" music were to me the "younger generation,"
but that never entered my mind because they were making good
music! That's all I've ever cared about. Just make it good. I don't
care if it sounds 50 years into the future or 500 years in the past
(like Greensleeves) -- just, please, make it good! In my big list of
music I like (over nine decades), which segment of that is supposed
to represent this so called "music of my generation"? Making music
to be different just to be different is stupid, but history has proven
that that doesn't mean it won't find an audience. If you don't demand
good music, then you'll have to settle for bad (or just okay) music.
I want the reader to understand that the music list I made is
firstly a list for myself so that I could remember all the music
I like. Therefore, I did not intentionally leave music out to bias
my thesis. I know that musical taste is subjective, but how is it
that music has remained in the pits for so long? Obviously, a lot
of Boomers and Gen-Xers feel the same way I do, and I doubt that
this can be explained away by all of us being prudes when it comes
to new styles. So, I don't have any answers. All I can do is to thank
God for older music. One thing is clear: the music of today is
objectively different than the music of the period 1963 to 1989, as
judged by rhythm, melodies, complexity of chords, changes in tempo,
changes in key, number of instruments used, ranges of volume in the
same piece, etc. And, to be honest, these are objective aspects of
music that Spender curiously didn't address at all.
She goes on to claim that new music has always represented modernity.
Isn't that a truism in some sense? Is she implying that new music is
necessarily radical or offensive to the older generations? That's not
what the word means. All the word "new" means in this context is a
song or musical theme that was produced for public consumption
*recently*. There is no other connotation to it. When the Beatles
published their hit song 'Yesterday' it was new at the time, but it was
neither radical nor offensive nor breaking with convention of the time.
Even my parents' prudish generation couldn't find anything evil to say
about it.
Spender tells us that the main driving thrust of "new" music has always
been to break with the conventions of the past and to drive to something
new and different. She is trying to get us to accept that "new music"
means "new style" or "new genre," which it does not. When the Beatles
put out their song, "The Long and Winding Road," it was of course new
for that year, but it was not a new genre, in fact, it could well have been
written 20-60 years earlier. The Beatles were not stuck in the reprobate
mindset that every new song they put out needed to be "groundbreaking"
or convention-smashing. And certainly Coldplay has never followed
that advice, have they? On the other hand, the Beatles probably should be
credited with promoting more novel musical styles and instruments to the
general public than any other pop band before them. Yet, I don't believe
that they introduced novelty for its own sake. When they introduced the
sitar into their assortment of instruments, they insisted that it should
sound good.
Spender went on to further clarify these new genres that "Each was
pretty much universally hated by the parents of the kids who loved it."
This is simply not true, at least for my generation of the 60s. It is not
true that all music that was produced in the 60s was cutting-edge,
revolutionary, or convention-breaking. Yes, a lot of the music that
came out in the 60s was disliked by my parents's generation, but I
disliked some of it too! But, I'm sure they had no problems with other
contemporary music of that decade, such as was made by Petula Clark,
Oliver, Glen Campbell, The Sandpipers, the Tijuana Brass, or many
others. It is not true that all "new" music is convention-shattering
or shockingly-offensive to the older generation.
And what point is Spender trying to make, anyway? Is she claiming
that the Boomers can't handle convention-breaking music? Really?
I doubt that there is a generation alive right now that has been as much
assaulted by new musical genres than the Boomers.
So, Spender gives an example of that old-fogie mindset of an aged music
professor who can't stand modern jazz. So? I can't stand it either, and
there other genres I don't even call music at all. I've made this argument
elsewhere. Jazz will never be more than a niche genre because it's
too 'technical'. But that's okay. Vince Guaraldi showed us how to make
jazz popular: 1) cut down on extemporaneous individual instrument
playing ("improvisation"), 2) find a good melody, and never depart
from it for too long. Then, ordinary people, like me, will appreciate it.
At the same time that jazz was pigeonholing itself as a niche genre,
classical music was running itself right into the ground, to perpetual
self-destruction. It wanted to explore the new and different, and forget
all about what had made it great in the past. So, is it dead altogether?
No. The Classical/Romantic style of music (what I'll just refer to broadly
as 'classical music' or 'orchestral music') is alive and well in mostly
film music. Think of the many pieces written by John Williams, such
as for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park.
And John Barry, who did "Born Free":
and the theme to "Ipcrest File":
Theme from The Ipcress File (1965)
Then there was Jerome Moross who gave us the theme to the sci-fi
movie "The Valley of Gwangi":
And let's not leave out Ennio Morricone, who gave us the music
to many great movies, not the least of which is Once Upon a
Time in the West (1968):
Once Upon a Time in the West -- Intro Theme
and
Once upon a time in the West - Final duel
While I'm at it, I should include at least one of the orchestral
pieces from the Beatles movie The Yellow Submarine.
Pepperland (George Martin, 1969)
And then from TV we got the theme to Kung Fu:
And the theme to Battlestar Galactica:
Theme from Battlestar Galactica:
TV has also given us some good pop songs that never attempted
to cut new ground or go-counter-culture, like
"Welcome Back, Kotter":
and
And, so far as I know, the last good TV theme song:
"Charles in Charge" (very 80s)
Or, how about something from England?
Theme to Doctor Who (1980-1985)
And, so long as we're in England, how about a couple more
TV show themes?
Spender then tells us that there has always been bad music on
the charts. Sure, I can't disagree with that, but more to the point is
the ratio of good music to bad music. When I used to listen to the
radio in the 70's and 80s, I could expect a 1 : 3 ratio of songs I
liked to songs I didn't care for. But today, like I already said, I can't
find any songs released in the last twenty years that I like, and that
includes on TV, the radio, theater movies. They may be out there
somewhere hiding from me, but that still adds up to zero.
Then she informs us that new and good music is coming from video
games. Well, I don't play video games, so if there is really good
music arriving from that platform, I hope I get to hear it someday.
But I don't know how that could happen. Surely this is not the
efficient way to get new, good music to the masses.
This essay has gone on long enough. I will end with relaying that
Spender finishes her video by seeing a rosy future for both consumers
and producers of music in the democracy of the Internet. That
just means that we can expect a lot more music being produced.
Okay, but how good will it be? I suppose you could say that
Spender sees a new renaissance of music in the near future that will
benefit us all.
In 1989, the year before the 1990 Music Crash, we had such great
songs as
Simply Red's
You've Got It (1989) Such pretty chords.
Richard Marx's
Elton John's
Mysteriously, we have had nothing like them since, even from
those artists!
There are a lot of songs I remember from my youth that are as cringy
to me now as they were to me back then. According to Spender, I should
be nostalgic to them all. It's true that some songs are nostalgic, but
that has nothing to do with why I like them. They weren't 'nostalgic'
when I first heard them.
I'm still trying to assign which decade of my life that I am supposed
to be fixatedly nostalgic about. One thing is certain, whatever decade
I choose to fulfill that, it will not contain all the Classical, Religious,
Christmas, and Traditional music I like, and that doesn't even begin
to mention my favorite Sea Shanties! Some of this music is 1) hundreds
of years old, 2) of many different styles, and 3) I didn't even hear for the
first time until after I reached adulthood. For example, the first time
I heard Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor, I was an adult.
Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor (1868)
When I was in high school, I was in a rock band, but at the same time
I was listening to Beethoven on record albums and playing Beethoven
on the piano. One particular sonata of his I came to enjoy was
Sonata 30, Opus 109, played by Stephen Bishop.
Beethoven's Sonata 30, Opus 109 (1820)
So, I don't think that it's the Boomers who are over-restrictive in the
styles of music that they like, and I don't think that Boomers have a
fear of novelty in their music. I think that Boomers just demand that
the music they listen to should be good.
At least 50% of the music I know and like right this moment, I heard
for the first time after I was an adult. I do not associate them with my
youth; I associate them merely with my past, recent or distant. You
people who are going to fulfill Spender's prophecy about a renaissance
of new music, I ask only one thing: Please, just make them good!
(Hint: Use variety.)
I challenge young people to resurrect the great musical styles of the
past 80 years and make them live again. While you're at it, you might
try some diminished, augmented, and suspended 4th chords -- if it's
not too much trouble.
If you could just rise to the level of bringing forth a song like "When
Smokey Sings" by ABC, it would be a start.
"When Smokey Sings" by ABC (1987)
A song or two like "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by
Tears for Fears would be interesting -- if it isn't too much trouble.
"Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears (1987)
If that's too hard, how about this: "You Belong To The City"
by Glenn Frey:
"You Belong To The City" Glenn Frey (1985)
I won't even bother to prod you to accomplish something like
"Horse with No Name," because you probably already think you've
got that challenge covered. Well, if so, I haven't heard it yet.
In which corral are you hiding it?
"Horse with No Name" by America (1971)
Oh, that's so unfair of me to request producers and creators of today's
young people to resurrect music they've never even heard of before.
Shame on me. Let's see. How can I fix this problem? I know!
How about this song, that you might just have heard?
What if it's just a simple truth that for the Boomers, the Heyday of
good pop music is over, and has been for many decades? What if the
real problem here isn't the bigotry of the older generation to the
music of the younger generation, but the bigotry of the younger
generation against embracing the hundreds of years of good musical
styles that existed and flourished before they arrived on the scene?
Maybe the problem lies in them and they need to get over their
Not-Invented-Here mindset. But even if there is a component of NIH
in the overall explanation, that is far from the whole answer.
In the end, it's still a mystery what happened to pop music since 1989.
Spender assures us that something seismic is coming musically out
of Gen-Z in a few years. I can only hope so. I ask just one thing of
you creators: Just make it good. (And use an oboe once in a while.)
Exit Music
Vallerie -- Steven Winwood (1987)
Once upon a time in the West - Farewell to Cheyenne
Ashokan Farewell, Jay Ungar (1982)
Moon River, Henry Mancini (1960)