I was getting a haircut on Sunday and the chit-chat with the barber was about music. She is my age, mid-40’s, so she thinks the new pop music is mostly crap. Her son is listening to hip-hop, which is crap. Whatever artistic merit there was disappeared when white boys in the suburbs became the prime demographic. That and the “artists” cannot carry a tune, read or write music or string together lyrics. But, there’s lots of crap that is not hip-hop so it is not just the brothers that suck at music these days. There has always been lots of crap. Read the book The Wrecking Crew and you will learn about how the early rock music was mostly manufactured by middle-aged Jews from the Jazz era. The difference between now and previous eras is that there used to be talented musicians and groups producing some quality stuff amongst the crap.

A good example is Bob Seger. He got famous in the 1970’s with a bunch of hits that still get airtime today. Go into a college bar and you will still find a few Seger songs getting played, particular later in the night when even the best get tight. Seger was before my time, for the most part, but my generation was playing his stuff in the 80’s and 90′ so it is not like he is a newly re-discovered fad because of a TV commercial. The reason he had some staying power is the quality of the music. I was never a big fan, but I have been listening to his greatest hits lately. The arrangements, lyrics and pacing is phenomenal. It is what you get when experienced professional musicians with talent make records. In all probability they hammered out each song on a piano and then brought in the rest of the instruments. The studio sessions were about getting the sound on vinyl, not making bad voices and bad musicians sound good.

There are probably dozens of examples from each decade that you can point to like this. The 1950’s was dominated by manufactured pop hits, but Chuck Berry made the electric guitar do things unheard of before his time. Fifty years from now people will find his licks beguiling. The Stones, The Who, and Hendrix will hold up and have held up. The 70’s has Zeppelin, which may have been the most sophisticated rock band ever. I’m still amazed at their range and complexity. It is not Beethoven, but for pop music it is incredible. I’m not sure who from the 80’s will stick around, probably metal acts like Sabbath and Maiden. The 90’s see things starting to peter out and the 2000’s bring nothing to mind. It is hard to imagine anyone getting out the Madonna or Michael Jackson CD’s again.

This apparent decline in high end quality music the last two decades is a mystery. Where are the talented musicians going if not into the garage or basement to create something good? Part of the answer is nowhere. Young people are simply not picking up instruments as they did in the past. When I was a kid, everyone played something, even in poor neighborhoods. It was just the way. I was started on the trumpet at six and took lessons until I was 12. Most kids dropped it for sports or other stuff, but many stuck with it. Today, the only kids I see with an instrument are Oriental and Hindu girls carrying violins. Blacks have abandoned the guitar and seem to be losing interest in the drums.  Whites have dropped music entirely. This old post describes the plight of the guitar in music.

The argument is that computers are filling the void. Anyone can now sit down at their PC, load some software and create the sound of drums, guitar, piano, etc. They can make their voice sound like something other than a bag of cats. There’s no longer a need to learn to read music or play an instrument. Certainly studios stopped using drummers when they could use computers instead. The problem here is the computer does not improvise, experiment or make adjustments. Maybe one day, but right now it is dependent on the talentless blockhead pushing the buttons. That’s why pop music is collapsing in a sea of mediocre crap that sounds like all the other mediocre crap.

That brings me back to Bob Seger. He did not hit it big out of the womb. He kicked around for years learning how to play music that people enjoyed. Good musicians have an ear for what others will like. That comes from many nights in many clubs. Dragging your computer gear into the club and “DJ’ing” is really not the same thing. When you get down to it, you’re just wearing another man’s suit, pretending you look better in it. Without the training and the training grounds, there can be no Bob Seger. Like so much of post-reality America, our pop culture is withering, living on the past with autumn closing in…

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