It was summer 1979. The new Dylan album everyone had been talking (arguing) about was finally out. I tore off the plastic wrap, gone went the SuperSaver label and price tag, crumpled up on the floor. I pulled the album out of its sleeve. No printed lyrics, but that was standard for Dylan. I put it on the turntable, popped the needle on, and laid back. A few minutes later, I’m thinking, “Well his voice sounds good, music’s good. But damn, these lyrics are all about God and Jesus, man!” Even the social commentary and metaphors are Biblical.
Dylan had gone born-again Christian, and this was the way it was going to be. At least for several years, it seemed. Dylan had gone through many “phases” and this was just another one. Hey, Rolling Stone liked it: ”It takes only one listening to realize that Slow Train Coming (Columbia Records) is the best album Bob Dylan has made since The Basement Tapes...” wrote Jann Wenner. Me? Not so much, in August of 1979. The dense, mysterious Street Legal just a year before was a hell of a lot more meaningful to me than this preachy stuff.
So having grown up with Dylan’s voice in my teenage ears, a voice that painted strange, vivid pictures and told me what to expect, what to watch out for, and what to beware of (because something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones…?), I kind of turned him off for a while. By the time really I turned him back on again, after a decade or so, his voice had grown too gravelly to enjoy. But it was okay because I had the luxury of that earlier music already imprinted in my brain. And anyway, by that time some friend had turned me on to Neil Young and the Grateful Dead.
And so it went, more or less, throughout my teenage years and early twenties. You’d meet someone who’d introduce you to a song you’d never heard before (“Procol Harum”? What the hell is that?) and if you found it interesting enough, you’d go buy one of their albums. If you really liked them, you’d go back and check out their early history; you’d find that all-important first album, which more often than not wasn’t quite as good as what prompted you to look for them in the first place, but you’d know something about the band’s development. If they were still around, you would wait for their new work to come out, usually in a year and a half or so. (Pink Floyd made you wait two years, and it was worth it). The continuity and growth of these musicians was really the most interesting thing. The Beatles were probably the textbook case of how a band matured over time (in their case, dramatically).
As they’ve grown up, my kids have been fed a steady diet of Beatles, Bowie, Elton John, and many others I liked when I was their age, and they’ve been fairly eclectic,
Those looks are ageless.
taking some and leaving others alone. Along the way, they’ve developed their own tastes (in rap, which I had less than minimal exposure to growing up; and in other genres (“My Chemical Romance”) I’d hardly ever heard of). But aside from maybe Radiohead, a lot of the bands and artists they listen to don’t seem to have much of a catalog beyond two or three albums. And if they have an extensive catalogue of prior work, that fact remains known only to a relatively small group of die-hard fans, due to the nature of the medium itself as it now exists.
If my son asks me to recommend him an album he should familiarize himself with, I could, for example, recommend Neil Young’s Decade, which spans a large part of Young’s creative period and allows you to listen to his development in phases. Or the Beach Boys’ Endless Summer, which pretty much sums up their early, best years.
Dolly Parton and Bonnie Raitt
Bonnie Raitt, Kate Bush, and Joni Mitchell’s albums allow the same sort of immersion into their particular body of work. I’m white, and I generally grew up listening to a lot of white-dominated rock music (much of it stolen from Black musicians, but that’s another story), but I suspect that everyone of a similar age can make the same sort of selective effort and find musicians with equally lengthy careers and output that they listened to in their younger lives.
I don’t listen to country or salsa, but I suspect the same thing may be true with those genres. I’ll omit jazz (which is what I mostly listen to these days) because its history is so immense, eclectic, and encyclopedic that I’ve always regarded it as music most people intentionally seek out, rather than something that comes to you naturally through the popular culture (unless you’re already initiated into that culture). Same with classical.
But what I seem to be missing today are the artists with the long, storied careers, the Joni Mitchells, the Steely Dans, the Pink Floyds, the ones where you could actually trace literally decades of development of their art. Where are the John Prines and David Brombergs and Linda Ronstadts? Where today are the new Fleetwood Macs and Eagles? Talking Heads? Where are the Michael Jacksons for this generation? Yes, in my relatively insular life I’ve never listened to whole categories of music, such as pop, or most anything that shows up these days in the Grammys (though I do like Adele and Lady Gaga). But the modern market seems so diffuse, fragmented, and compartmentalized that it appears difficult for anyone to capture the entire public’s imagination anymore.The “supergroups” of the 70’s and 80’s (and even 90’s) seem to have dissolved into a framework we now simply refer to as “classic rock,” with a fairly definitive endpoint terminating for good in the early 2000’s, not coincidentally, I think, at the advent of the era of digitally shared music.
Ted Gioia, writing for the Atlantic made the point early this year that “old” songs now make up 70% of not only the total music market, but are the major driver of that market’s growth:
The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5% of total streams. That rate was twice as high just three years ago. The mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted toward older music. The current list of most-downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the previous century, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Police.
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Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing the hits of decades past instead. Success was always short-lived in the music business, but now even new songs that become bona fide hits can pass unnoticed by much of the population.
Gioia pinpoints a lot of causes for this seeming shortage of enduring modern music: massive investment in older music publishing catalogs by the record companies; radio stations generally ignoring modern music; the entire “niche” format philosophy of satellite radio, which tends to focus on established hits for its audience. There’s also the increased risk of copyright infringement, and the fact that, thanks to technology, many musicians now record on their own rather than opting for bands and having to deal with and coordinate all those talents and personalities. With online piracy so omnipresent and the market so fragmented, a lot of musicians who do form bands have to play live pretty much constantly to make a living.
It should come as little surprise to anyone familiar with me that I put a large share of the blame on technology itself. Going to the record store used to be an impromptu exercise in research. Being able to hold an album or even a CD in your hand and look at it, along with the other work available from any particular artists—in an alphabetic setting—was one of the easiest ways to discover new music: Abba, Allman Brothers, America, and so on, there they were in order, all for your perusal. And the sheer physical nature of holding the music in your hands, the lyrics, the booklets, the art that went into the albums was an integral part of what you experienced. When I think of the Who’s masterpiece, Quadrophenia, what sticks in my head is the staggering book of photos that originally came with it, each one depicting the emotions of one particular song, and the printed lyrics, which were like opening a door into another world.
But there are very few “record stores” anymore. There’s no Tower Records or Sam Goody’s to actually look at, read about, and physically come into contact with the product. And you can’t really do that kind of casual, untargeted examination, browsing or research online, or on Amazon. The digital world has rendered that type of interaction more or less obsolete, except in a few specialty stores whose catalog is mostly made up of used, older issues (and yes, it’s interesting to me that vinyl seems to be making a huge comeback).
Call it commodification, technological advancement or what you will -- this change, I think, has had a negative effect not only on young peoples’ overall sense of musical possibilities, but on our culture itself. When Marvin Gaye asked “What’s Going On” and Sly and the Family Stone replied with “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” those songs provided an contemporaneous, shared representation of the issues and events that people were experiencing the streets right at that time. When Crosby Stills, Nash and Young played “Ohio” in Chicago, that was a reflection of the mood of the moment as well. Everything from “Sgt Pepper” “Woodstock” to “Anarchy in the UK” to “Born In the USA” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” brought all of us face to face with the zeitgeist this country (or the rest of the world) was actually experiencing. Some of the best music was being heard but rarely played by white radio stations (a trend that continued well into the ‘80s, as noted here by David Bowie in an interview for MTV) But all of these songs put our lives into context with the culture. Now, my son may be familiar with Eminem’s “Untouchable” or even Childish Gambino’s (Donald Glover’s)
Eminem takes a knee during the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show.
“This is America,” but apart from a few discrete songs that occasionally galvanize the culture (“the video for “This is America” now boasts 835 million views) most of the country beyond a select audience is not hearing it. Maybe that’s just my own failing, but if there’s another Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones out there, I have yet to hear them.
Gioia notes that for many struggling new musicians the pressure to commercialize their work in some way is enormous. Gone are the days when a label would take on some band like the Beatles, sit back and let them develop. Gone are the days when every “Dark Side of the Moon” was preceded by a bunch of interesting, creative, but not particularly commercial efforts.
As record labels lose interest in new music, emerging performers desperately search for other ways to get exposure. They hope to place their self-produced tracks on a curated streaming playlist, or license their songs for use in advertising or the closing credits of a TV show. Those options might generate some royalty income, but they do little to build name recognition. You might hear a cool song on a TV commercial, but do you even know the name of the artist? You love your workout playlist at the health club, but how many song titles and band names do you remember? You stream a Spotify new-music playlist in the background while you work, but did you bother to learn who’s singing the songs?
And I know I’m showing my age here. The kids are finding the music they like, and they’re sharing it on YouTube and other forums. I see it in my own kids. And every parent loves it when his kid asks for a recommendation about music. But wasn’t it nice to be able to say, “Hey I like this artist, and this album,” and have someone respond, “Oh, that’s good, but you have to hear theirs from five years ago,” and then have them hand it to you? Music has always been about how we relate to each other, or whether we decide to relate to each other at all. Historically it’s been a driver for protest and social change, and it’s always reflected the cultural environment we’re living through. It could bring us together or set us apart. And that really was the beauty of the thing.
But it almost always came to you, somehow, some way, and not as a commodity the way it is now. You didn’t necessarily have to go seeking it out, or curated into a feedback loop that would constantly please you, but no one else. There was a spontaneity to it, an urgency that gave us an instant backdrop to the times we lived through. And it provided a vibrant, engaging way to measure those times, to take stock of where we were from, and where we might be going. But above all, it was a way to unify us, filling in gaps to our collective knowledge, and giving us all what at least seemed to be a shared stake in the culture, an investment that no longer exists. At least to me, from a cultural standpoint, that’s sad, and a real loss. Popular music — and the shared experience of that music — helped all of us to think about things in a collective way that nothing else could.
Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” was one the first songs to even hint about climate change that I’d ever heard.
Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships lying
In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home in the sun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home
So simple, eloquent, and universal. But I fear this generation may never hear the likes of it again.
