The Face of Music Versus Just Good Music

Our contemporary music scene has taken a tendency that began creeping in with Elvis in the fifties and reduced then inflated that reduction to a gaseous extreme: music is not so much something you listen to as something you relate to because of the image of the people (or featured person) making it. They've got the look and social attitude you want to cop to make your own reputation in the social milieu. This appeals especially to the image-obsessive psychology of the teenager and (with a veneer of added sophistication) the early-twenties set. Because of this, we have a highly odd situation which has occurred in at least American culture: only young people listen to contemporary pop musicians. Older people either get interested in other forms of music or just lose interest in music. In other countries, say at a wedding or family reunion, contemporary music can be played and you will find all age groups on the dance floor, all of them sincerely relating to it. American pop music is different. It appeals to a narrow set of concerns, social nuances and life experiences. Thus you have people who were once part of the younger age group for whom the music industry temporarily catered, occasionally giving a dusty disc a spin from their youth to escape into nostalgia. How pathetically unfortunate! A part of the problem is that music today doesn't have any depth, and that lies in the fact that a pop artist is encouraged to be as obsessed with their image as an actor or model. That takes away from time practicing your instrument or writing deep lyrics. Yet this worm in the cheese has been growing from early on, and I don't mean to insult the memory of Elvis, but he became trapped by his looks. He definitely had real talent, musical gifts, a beautiful and powerful voice he could modulate into many forms of emotional expression, and he knew a thing of two about blending and adapting different musical traditions. Unfortunately, his producers soon got him on the fast track out of revolutionary rock'n'roller to sanitized teen idol, and he thus became tragically moribund (despite a passionate and appealing attempt in the late sixties to break free). Rock artists sometimes are aware of the trap, and find ways to mock it or disentangle themselves from it with cleverly appealing rebelliousness. Groups with such names as "The Faces" and "The Small Faces" were mocking the desire of the record producers to have only the pretty boys and girls doing the singing and playing. There are tragicomic examples of this, including among the Rolling Stones, who were not known for being pretty boys but were presented as being appealing "bad boys" with scruffy good looks. Yet the factor of "cuteness" played a role even among them, when they were told that their keyboard player was too "square looking" to be an official member of their group. To their credit, the Stones retained him in their recordings and increasingly in their stage performances as a "guest musician", because he was simply too talented and creatively conducive to work with to give up entirely for the sake of "image". Well, some might say that the reason the pop music industry has refined things to the absurd point in which we now find ourselves is because it simply works in terms of raking in the profit. Well, I am here to argue, that there are greater profits to be reaped when the music is put forward as the more important matter of concern, instead of making it (unbelievably!) a side issue that the computers can take care of. In the late sixties and early seventies (a cultural window of time when some of the greatest rock music ever was made), we already had record producers trying to build upon image to enhance sales. Consequently, you had rock musicians who were living in mansions with servants dressing on the stage as though they lived on a tribal hippie commune in Northern California. Artists in concert, whatever their real talent, really played up the idea of Hippie Messiah or Hippie Goddess, as symbolic leaders of the Countercultural Revolution. Many of them to varying degrees sincerely meant it. Others were just interested in making music and expressing whatever moved them, and hoped it would appeal (the costumes were just for fun and added insurance). In that golden era, if you were talented, your music would indeed likely appeal, because the generation for whom they were performing generally had the highest standards and the most sophisticated ears attained by a popular audience. As their fans grew out of their youth, they remained loyal to their favorite music artists, because those singers and musicians had created such depth of work. It was an investment that paid off, for it allowed those artists to evolve with their own growing maturity in life, and the record companies kept producing them (at least for awhile). Consequently, there was nothing foolish or self-deceiving about a thirty-year-old man or woman going out and buying the latest album by an artist they had first enjoyed when they were fifteen, and nor was it strange for them to go the record store and purchase a brand new album by a brand new artist. Newcomers too were expected to at least equal the standard of quality set by the established artists who had made precedents of musical achievement before them. In the midst of this idyllic era, there emerged a group that was only minimally concerned with image, and certainly not anything that wasn't who they really were in their everyday lives. What is more, they were super talented, not merely in terms of raw playing ability, but compositional ability, and because they worked together like a true music ensemble rather than a nest of feuding egos nipping at each other. This group was the Moody Blues. When they came on stage, they might create temporary confusion, because they were dressed in sophisticated yet understated ultra-modern jet-setter fashions of French salon intellectuals with longish but quite neat hairdos. Yet once they started playing, all was "forgiven". They didn't need to dress like faux American Indians or cowboys or gypsies or circus performers or in any other costume out of the mythical trunk of childhood's imagination. They came to make music, and putting all their efforts into that rather than theatrical acts of superficial bravado or egoistic posturing, they could put on a show that took people on focused and utterly captivating journeys their imaginations and spirits had not yet begun to explore. In other words, these musicians were confident in what they had to offer as art, as being quite capable of standing on its own. Their albums are a statement of their commitment to excellence, and their live performances did not shame them but proved they had done all their own work on those records and that it lived on fully within them. They did not make any claims of definition, they just created their own unique thing, but no musician later drawn to the Prog movement can escape thanking The Moody Blues for how many tools they gave their successors to work with in terms of creative expression in the arena of popular music. So, if in a time where music and image had reached an equilibrium of importance in the fashioning of musical careers, there could emerge a group wholly concerned (aside from the maintenance of a modest courtliness of manner) with making good music, then perhaps in our age where good music has been nearly wholly eclipsed by image, it is time for another group of greatly talented singers and instrumentalists, who care more about musical expression rather than how cool they can snarl for the camera, to force their way through and liberate young adults and adults of all ages from this musical desert in which we now find ourselves. There has come a time when all should feel capable of dancing together to the same music, and for the young not to feel it is an intrusion by the old.

Staying Power and Adaptability

When you think about it, the great musical artists that first began emerging in the mid-sixties accomplished something no rock, pop or even rock'n'roll musicians have accomplished before or since. They had the will and the musical skill to keep their work relevant and contemporary over time. Only when pure exhaustion and a drying up the creative well took over did these artists bow out, and even then, they could come out to play with great skill for special occasions. The rock and rollers of the fifties always played the musical style of their era of fame -- they never changed. The crooners of the early sixties never evolved (with the exception of Neil Sedaka, who revived his career in the seventies as a singer/songwriter). The New Wavers and Hair Metalists never became relevant again, except on the nostalgia/reunion circuit. A crop of musicians who emerged as talents in the mid to late sixties were a different breed. For them, musical inspiration was the main thing, not just giving the crowd what presumably the crowd wanted. Instead, they taught the crowd to appreciate new things. So whenever new musical textures, palettes, instruments, dynamics, voicing, and idioms became available, they adapted them to their central need to express something fresh artistically from within themselves. They kept evolving, and the best of them remained true to their core artistic self through all the different musical tools of which they availed themselves over time. If they ever lost this sense of who they were as real creative people, they crashed up on the rocks of musical superficiality, and many of them did lose their way in the eighties when music producers and record company executives developed an autonomic fetish for the predominance of synthesizers (which had once been tastefully used in the seventies) but became a musically-ephemerizing monster of the succeeding decade. Yet many of those sixties artists who were still determined to make authentic music, but who had been tricked into making one of those cod-New Wave albums, soon recovered their true sense of artistic identity and came out with great albums that proved that non-computerized music is still the most satisfying to the soul and the imagination. Today, we cannot even speak of musicians adapting. Most groups only last two to four albums, and then, they move on to become computer technicians or tattoo artists (or some such obscure profession). In the hyper-drive fickleness of today's culture, we have rendered our pop musicians more disposable than even their music. Be that as it may, here are some good groups or artists rooted in the sixties to follow through the musical changes of culture in the latter half of the twentieth century (though some of them, admittedly, don't break through the eighties barrier, while others find resurrection on the other side of the eighties, or, miraculously, manage to make meaningful music amidst the surface gleam of the eighties milieu): The Who, The Kinks, The Beatles (and the solo careers of its various members), The Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, Yes, Steve Winwood, Joni Mitchell, Crosby-Nash, Stephen Stills, Van Morrison, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Carlos Santana, King Crimson, Genesis, Peter Gabriel.

Review: George Harrison's Thirty-Three and Third

Talk about a quintessential work of what was best about skillful seventies pop, this album from 1976 is it. Harrison's voice is sweet and strong, his slide-guitar work is as good as any master's, and he's got a great horn and rhythm section. The instrumentation is gracefully interplayed, every instrument well-voiced and balanced. The songs each have a distinct personality, while fitting well with the overall mood and style of the album. This is not a minor album or background music, as some claim. It is funky, jazzy, soulful, reverential, compassionate, mirthfully rebellious, tender of heart, graciously laudatory, merry -- and indeed thoroughly artful. Some of the songs are mellow, but appropriately so, and mellifluous to boot; others have delightful energy and plenty of punch. There is no filler, and the bonus track for the remastering (a non-album single), though not from the time of the album's original release, does fit perfectly the tone and feel of the rest of the album (which is probably why they included it on this one rather than a later release). You could know nothing of George Harrison the Demigod Beatle, or George Harrison the Hippie Hero, and become a fan just from listening to this album alone. Living in the first decade of the 21st century and looking at this cultural product from of the heart of the 1970s, my central afterthought is: people then, like Harrison, had issues of moral concern, just as we do now, but they had so much to celebrate about the prospects of their world.