I’m issuing disclaimers first; I’m an old-school acoustically trained musician and educator with advanced music degrees. I’ve studied the classics, undergone vigorous music theory, harmony and composition courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, which included study with leading contemporary classical composers. I’ve studied under Darlene Cowles and George Flynn on the classical side. In jazz performance and arranging, I am a disciple of the late, great Mark McDunn.
I understand the musically creative discipline that it took American songwriters such as George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers to craft what we now know as the Great American Song Book. I marvel at the melodic, harmonic and lyric genius that these great composers employed, and I am in awe of lyricists like Ira Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein. Every bar, every strain of their songs is filled with musical wonder: richness of harmonic thought, melodic and rhythmic invention, form, and lyric cleverness. And let us not forget the contribution of Duke Ellington, America’s greatest composer (along with his partner, Billy Strayhorn)
It’s no wonder that great performers of yesteryear reveled in these musical joys; Fitzgerald, Vaughn, Washington, Holiday, Simone, Bennett, just to name a few, all fashioned wonderful, legendary music careers based on the harvest of these composers. The songs were filled with deep emotional feelings of love, loneliness and pathos on the one hand, and joy of life on the other. Listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing Cole Porter’s “Something’s Gotta Give”. No matter how bad a day you’ve had at work that song plays and you can’t help but smile.
The jazz musicians know how sturdy these musical structures are. They have subjected them to endless variation of their musical elements and arranged them countless times into big band arrangements and into every instrumental/vocal jazz ensemble conceivable. They hold up, because THEY ARE WRITTEN SO WELL.
I write this big preamble because there is now a new musical-cultural phenomenon at play in today’s music. The idea is that if a song sells, it must be good. And concurrently, if a performer makes money with this material, he or she must also be good. Well let’s take a look at what we are really dealing with.
First, much but not all of this music is Rap or hip-hop. I have rapper friends and I am not disrespecting their work. They are out in the public eye and are putting their reputations on the line in performance every day. What I am critical of is often the lack of musical scholarship, the lack of craftsmanship, indeed the lack of musicianship that is evident in the “composition” of too much contemporary music. Technology has taken away completely the need to be able to read, write or play music. Anyone who is computer competent can open a ProTools session and in a few minutes, fashion a “beat”, a rhythmic ostinato that can be rapped or sung over.
Beats are sold to performers, looking to get their name out into the public via production of medium such as mixtapes. Some of these performers and their performances are indeed good; but they are covered up in the cacophony of mediocre noise that is flooding the internet. Anyone, if they have the right equipment, can produce and upload a music video to Youtube, and through blog pages such as this, social networks like Facebook, Twitter and yes, even the aging MySpace, disseminating their work to the public. The problem of course is that there is an awful lot of this music out there now and many of the people in the age groups it is intended for recognize mediocrity and won’t buy it.
Alisha Madison, a twenty-something MBA candidate from LA says that rappers define success as commercial success. The problem with this definition she notes is that there are often more talented performers in this genre out there who have not found success. So then according to this doctrine they must be failures musically.
She’s right, it’s not logical; how can somebody more talented but not commercially successful be less of a musician than somebody who just happened to be in the right place at the right time?
Marie Simone, a talented young singer-songwriter from Kansas City bemoans the fact that today’s artists have often lost the craftsmanship of true musicianship. They don’t read or write music and have no knowledge of its conventions or history. They are more concerned with learning computer programs and not musical instruments, which she feels is a must. She also feels that there is a certain lack of integrity and scruples in getting this music out to the public.
The real issue is that there is no longer a screening mechanism. In all previous eras record companies carefully screened out submissions that they deemed unsellable for many reasons. With today’s technology it’s far more democratic. Anyone with an investment of about $2,000 can open a home studio with the right peripherals, programs, microphones and an internet connection. But it also means there is a lot of bad music out there, and too many bad performers too, with far less skills than the musicians of previous generations.
It makes your job harder as the consumer and market target. You have to wade through mediocre music and decide what to buy. Yes the mainstream and independent producers are still screening diligently what they include in their catalog, but too much of even that music is also now influenced by the practice of beat writing and vocalization over stock rhythms, most often slickly produced with computerized, synthesized backgrounds. What is missing? One word: ORIGINALITY.
That’s the true definition of great music, in any genre. How original is it? When the proper skillful mix of human emotions, musical elements, lyrics and orchestration are blended with talented performers, live or recorded, musical art is produced. We sorely need to restore this lost art!
That will be the subject of a future post.
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