Isn't music in such a strange strange place, these days. I was just talking to the guy at the next desk, & he mentioned that, growing up, he loved music & it was all he was good at: but he declined to seek it out as a profession, or study it at Uni - after all, the only thing you can do with it nowadays is go into teaching music at high school: and the first thing that gets cut when the budget gets squeezed is the music teacher (before even the art teacher).
Of course, I guess this has always been somewhat true, but the gap between popular (or at least high-selling) music, and what is taught as music seems to get wider with every year. Perhaps this is just my perception though, and part of the Old Mans' Grump - kids nowadays dress funny, dance funny, talk funny, listen to awful music, and aren't respectful enough, blah blah blah. Goes right along with the dont-the-policemen-look-so-young-now spiel, I guess.
Still, popular music does seem odd .. but then, perhaps it always did. I'm listening to Bob Dylan at the moment, which is - as always - a decidedly mixed pleasure. His voice resembles nothing so much as a castrated cat being slowly strangled, in all honesty, the melody is often indifferent and the beat all but nonexistent, but then - ah - the lyrics just lift and soar, carry you along to unexpected destinations, or familiar lockers of the heart, or just into the imagination. It's hard to hear some of these and not be moved, at many levels. Like:
Time is a jet plane,
it moves too fast
ah but what a shame,
that all we've shared can't last
I can change I swear
oh, see what you can do
I can make it through
you can make it too
A change in the weather
is known to be extreme
but whats the sense
in changing horses midstream
I'm going out of my mind
oh with a pain that stops and starts
like a corkscrew to my heart
ever since we've been apart
Or
Disillusioned words like bullets bark
as human gods aim for their mark
made everything from toy guns that spark
to flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark
it's easy to see without looking too far
that not much is really sacred
while preachers preach of evil fate
teachers teach that knowledge waits
can lead to hundred-dollar plates
and goodness hides behind its gates
but even the President of the United States
sometimes must have to stand naked
Or
Praise be to Nero's Neptune
the Titanic sails at dawn
everybody's shouting
which side are yo on
and Ezra Pound and TS Eliot
fighting in the captain's tower
while calypso singers laugh at them
and fishermen hold flowers
between the windows of the sea
where lovely mermaids flow
and nobody has to think too much
about Desolation Row
Which last just about brings me back to where I started, the divorce between high culture and popular culture. I still don't really see its' roots, in truth, whether it has always existed, or it is something that has grown up out of capitalism, a combination of elitism and market differentiation. A hundred years ago, opera and music hall seemed to co-exist, and both were popular and on the lips of anyone and everyone. Now, well...
But, speaking of Bob Dylan as I was, I found a jazz singer, Madeleine Peyroux, who has done a number of covers of his songs (along with some from Leonard Cohen, that other mordant bleak wordsmith of genius), and they sounded just amazing: add a warm rich voice, and a swinging jazz background, and they lift the songs to another level again. Now all I need to do is find a couple of albums of people doing Dylan covers to make me happy !
4 comments:
Surely there has always been a division been popular culture and "high" culture, and between the music the young like and that of their parents.
The upper classes (and even more so the aspiring middle classes) need to differentiate themselves from the lesser types, just as the young are driven to assert their own identity in separation from their parents - there is nothing so disparaging as children addressing parent who claim to like the same music as them.
So groups are driven to differentiate, but over time the differences shift (because middle class emulate upper and lower emulate middle as part of their upwards mobility, and because children grow up into parents).
I don't think music hall was ever seen as high culture, for instance. A more interesting case might be comic opera (eg Gilbert and Sullivan) which is, I suspect, the Victorian middle class version of more classical opera (which has always been a relatively expensive and limited niche).
Have to agree about Dylan's voice though - amazing what you can get away with sometimes - a singer who can't sing.
I'm not sure. I mean, yes, music hall was lowbrow and opera was highbrow but - absent England/America - both were in the 19th century popular with all classes, more or less. It's something of an Anglo-saxonism I think to think of opera (then) as being just for the upper classes.
And I see your point on the dreadful Gilbert & Sullivan - but I wonder if again they aren't an English reaction, i.e. that is actually the anglophone form of opera.
Again, with generational differentiation, has it always been like this? There have certainly been other times when it does seem so (late republican/ early imperial rome for instance), but i'm not sure it's an eternal verity: hard to see much sign of it in, say, the middle ages, or in almost any era of Chinese history outside the T'ang perhaps.
Maybe it's just a luxury, a function of urbanisation and economic surplus.
I would agree that children having enough money (or looked at alternatively, music being cheap enough) to differentiate themselves via musical purchases is quite recent. But I suspect that when the only music was live, children may have made their own to different standards - it just didn't get preserved.
hmm, good point.
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