In any case, an initial hypothesis. Or, more precisely, a question: Whither music revolutions? Whither the thoroughgoing changes that we usually think of when we speak of Buddy Holly, The Beatles, or Bob Dylan? Popular music, it seems, is a post-revolutionary endeavor, and has been for…fifty years, perhaps? There have been changes, certainly: a thousand exciting new genres and artists have come, gone, and come again. But since about 1970, there have been precious few – no, zero – evolutions in popular music that our culture speaks of with the same reverence as those of the 1950s and 1960s. No changes that have made us say: “From that moment, from this artist, with that sound, everything
changed.”
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| "Clever girl..." (image source) |
Traditionalists will nod their head here. If I had a nickel for every time my father proclaimed the messianic virtues of Dylan, I’d have a lot of nickels. “He changed what a pop song could be.” Cue Springsteen on “Like a Rolling Stone.” The opening snare shot of that track “kicked open the door to your mind.” The Beatles, too, of course. Says AllMusic: “[T]hey were the greatest and most influential act of the rock era, and introduced more innovations into popular music than any other rock band of the 20th century.” Others might want to talk about Elvis or Buddy Holly, the way they made possible the very idea of rock ‘n’ roll. We could debate bands like The Velvet Underground, maybe The Stones. But the point is that narratives concerning consciousness-changing artists can be pretty easily found if we confine our discourse to the years between 1950 and 1970. After this time, these narratives become less easy to find, or at least the subject of more debate.
Progressives will rail against these ideas. They should: there is a lot of oldness, whiteness, maleness, and heteronormativity going on here. Beginning the conversation with Holly, Elvis, or The Beatles is problematic, for starters. Can we talk about Robert Johnson, to say nothing of Bessie Smith or Fats Domino or Bo Diddley or Jimmy Preston or Chuck Berry? And are we seriously saying that popular music has not fundamentally changed since 1970? Disco and electronic music? Grunge? Most obviously, how could we not acknowledge the contributions of rap and hip-hop? Turn on the radio (or Spotify or Pandora or whatever) and open your ears. The idea that popular music was the creation of a select group of (straight, white, male) artists in the late-1950s and 1960s is nothing but a painfully obvious social construct, developed and reinforced over the past fifty years by aging hippies to make themselves feel like their generation actually meant something to someone.
I am sympathetic to these arguments. No, I’ll go further: they’re absolutely right. It is undeniable that popular music has modified and transformed in significant ways since 1969. But that wasn’t my starting hypothesis. It was, rather, that since 1970 popular music has not constructed the kind of revolutionary narratives that we associate with artists like Dylan, The Beatles, and a few others, with the same amount of success.
Rap and hip-hop serve as interesting illustrations here. Whatever else we might want to say about these genres – their relationship to race, to class, to social and political criticism, and so forth – they have undoubtedly played a significant role in the development of popular music over the past quarter century. But, within the discourse of popular music, I’m not sure this role has been constructed as revolutionary, at least not in quite the same way as the most well-known artists of the early rock ‘n’ roll period. Yes, rap and hip-hop represented and still represent new musical genres, new modes of artistic expression, new commodity-forms, and new forums for long-ignored problems and populations. But it is still an issue of debate whether or not these genres have fundamentally destabilized the conditions of possibility of popular music itself. It is not a settled statement, for instance, that rap and hip-hop have changed our consciousness such that music produced before its popularization now sounds as if it were of an entirely different cultural paradigm. This is the case for most (all?) other popular music movements of the last fifty years, too, from disco to reggae to metal to grunge to electronica to chillwave. These genres are more easily categorized as pluralizations, fragmentations, or alternative creative possibilities that have appeared within the domain of popular music itself.
The usual narrative surrounding popular acts of the late-1950s and 1960s, however, is that they did have a revolutionary effect. Between 1950 and 1965 or so, rock ‘n’ roll emerged, developed, and virtually wiped away its cultural predecessors. We might listen to the occasional Andrews Sisters song on iTunes, then, or purchase that used Eddie Condon record, or try to impress our hipster friend by gushing about Les Paul and Mary Ford’s “sound,” but the fact remains that all that shit sounds old. Which is fine: we like it for the faux nostalgia it gives us. Rock acts are still with us, however, even if they can now complement their sound by recourse to other related genres. (One could name a host of popular acts of the last ten years one could name to illustrate the point. Scanning the Billboard Top 100 for the past ten years, I’m picking a few names: 3 Doors Down, Matchbox 20, John Mayer, Jason Mraz, Coldplay, Sara Bareilles, Buckcherry, Linkin Park, Kid Rock, Gotye, Fun, Maroon 5, Train, Neon Trees. It’s not that these artists sound like Dylan or The Beatles, of course. It’s that their genealogy traces back to pop and rock forms at mid-century, not to big bands or vocal groups of the 1930s or ’40s.)
Final considerations, then, if you’re with me on the basic premise. First, I want to be clear (as I have tried to be with my language): my point is not that Dylan or The Beatles really did revolutionize popular music, and that rap, hip-hop, and grunge artists really did fail in this respect. It is rather that the narratives handed down to us by popular music discourse often tell this story. So I’m not arguing that the latter genres are bad, weak, or derivative in any sense, but that we don’t tend to think of them as performing the same function in popular music as the former. Music in the ’60s, we are told, could not be made without referring to or emulating the work of a select few artists. Music today might still refer or emulate, but we tend to see it working within a much broader field of aesthetic possibilities.
This brings me to my second and final point. I felt the need to make that last clarification because I was worried the story I just painted would offend anyone whose favorite artist worked after 1969 (i.e. a lot of people). And I probably still will offend those people, but that very worry raises an interesting issue: Why is it that we speak about revolutionary narratives in popular music in the first place, and why is that we work so hard to give some artists this status, but not others? And let’s be clear: the issue isn’t just about newness. Grunge (for instance) was a new iteration of popular music, a new genre even, but…paradigm-shifting? I don’t think so.
But, in any case, the broader point here is that we still want to argue about music within this general discursive framework, even if we’ll disagree about who is the right artist on which to place the “this-is-where-it-all-began” pin. As I’ve made clear, I think these pins are stuck most often and most easily on a select few artists that emerged fifty years ago, and within fifteen to twenty years of one another. Revisionists may want to tear down this narrow-minded narrative and replace it with another, better one. Noteworthy, though, is the fact that this feels like a battle that needs to be fought.
I’m not sure that this orientation is a good one. I wonder, in fact, if failing to revolutionize music in the same way that The Beatles, Dylan, or Elvis supposedly did is such a bad thing. Because in failing to do so, maybe popular music has actually become, well, more popular - in a demographic sense. Like us – if I can say “us” – it has pluralized, fragmented, fluctuated. Its identity has not cohered around a stable set of objects, preferences, or tastes. So one might say it has transformed and modified horizontally: it has widened and differentiated itself from itself. Vertical shifts, meanwhile, which re-constitute the entire domain of popular music for all participants, have not appeared (or have not been said to appear). Why do we still glance back to the last of those shifts, then, if not because we hope that someone will come along to just tell us what to listen to?
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