I'm a voting member of the Grammys. It doesn't take much to be a voting member. You have to have worked on some CDs (if I remember correctly two is the minimum number) that have been sold through a national distributor. There are about 10,000 voting members out there, musicians, engineers and producers who care enough to pay their annual dues. The criteria for membership means that the age of the voters is a lot older than that of the pop listening public. So the vote skews old in terms of taste.
I watched the Grammys at the annual Bay Area party for Grammy members with a friend, a classical composer. The party used to be a nice affair, but the music industry is in a tailspin, which means people have stopped paying their dues, which means The Grammys don't have the money to do much in the way of entertainment. They dropped their annual Christmas party this year, and the Grammy watching party was kind of a sad thing. There was a tiny amount of food, the venue was a dump of a bar, and the attendance was low, consisting mostly of people who paid $25 for the right to shmooze with people like me, people who couldn't help them not a bit with their musical aspirations.
But I did watch the show on a big TV. I thought the Grammy organizers did a good job all things considered. There had been some work and practice beforehand on the part of the performers, people weren't just winging it, and the effort paid off. The numbers were big on dance and spectacle, with flames, rocket blasts and lots of hunky and sultry chorus dancers slithering around. That's what entertainment is mostly about today, spectacle to delight your eyes, so the effort made sense.
The music, though, was incredibly boring. Basically, it consisted of singers imitating singers of old. Bruno Mars imitated Jackie Wilson and not very well (Jackie Wilson was just too talented to be the kind of singer that can be mimicked with any sort of accuracy). Justin Bieber did a good job of imitating Shaun Cassidy (actually, he's much better than Shaun Cassidy as a singer). Lady Gaga imitated Madonna (who imitated Marlene Dietrich) minus the sex appeal (the point of that approach escapes me, but others obviously feel otherwise). Muse imitated Blondie (and Blondie imitated Jefferson Airplane). Mick Jagger, who has made a great career out of being a white version of James Brown, imitated Solomon Burke (and surprisingly showed that like Brown once did he can still bust a move in his 60s). Cee Lo Green imitated The Four Tops with the addition of the F word and the S word (kudos to Mr. Green for his wonderful drag get up, though). In the weirdest moment, Bob Dylan imitated himself and did a good of it (although Maggie's Farm isn't a song that anyone has to hear on national TV).
Pop music changed with Elvis, Motown, and the Beatles, but that change occurred 50 to 60 years ago. Every decade since has been full of a recycling of those old sounds and chord progressions. Rap dropped the chord progressions, but simply sampled those old sounds for background music and nowawdays seems to have retreated to using a very traditional verse-chorus structure, with the rapper talking out the verses and some big voiced person taking over the chorus.
I keep wondering when is "next"? When does pop music leave the Beatles behind and truly make something new. My classical music composer friend says the same thing is happening in contemporary classical, people are simply recycling the "contemporary" music of the 1950s. Sooner or later, though, it will happen. Someone will come on the scene and truly revolutionize pop music, make it new the way the Beatles did. We just aren't there yet.*
I voted in about 20 categories for the Grammys. There are over 100 categories and many of them contain "music" that is just plain unlistenable, at least to me. I think that my vote matched the winner about 20 percent of the time, which is a new high for me in terms of "success." One of the winners that lined up with my vote was Esperanza Spalding. When her win for best new artist was announced, every black person around me at the party (and me) shouted out (martinis will do that to me) in celebration. The rest wondered who is she?
Ms. Spalding isn't a pop musician, but you can get an inkling about what I mean by moving ahead from her version of jazz. She's conservative in what she does. She's not about to break with the past, but she's trying to stretch the boundaries of what makes jazz music. Ms. Spalding is also very talented. She'll be around a long time. Pop musicians would do themselves a favor if they spent some time listening and watching her instead of trying to imitate Blondie and Madonna.
*And maybe one day country singers will learn how to actually dance when they are on stage instead of being statues. We're not there yet either.
2 comments:
"I keep wondering when is 'next'? When does pop music leave the Beatles behind and truly make something new." I've wondered the same. Awhile back, Donald Fagen tweaked an interviewer by opining that the last genuine innovation in popular music was reggae. I don't know reggae well enough to know whether I'd agree it was a great innovation, but I certainly agree there hasn't been much innovation since I started listening to the radio as a child. In the past few years, I've several times heard a new or new-ish band and thought, "But they sound like something you could have heard on the radio in 1980" - same rhythms, same chords, same instruments, same vocal styles.
Of course, it could well be that innovation is happening but not becoming popular. I wouldn't know, because I haven't had time to dig for it, and I haven't been living in New York, London, or anywhere else it would most likely turn up.
And, of course, I enjoy a lot of music that isn't very innovative. Donald Fagen is a case in point. He and his friend Walter Becker are masters of putting on stylistic masks - blues, disco, funk, reggae, and many others - while remaining unmistakably and entertainingly themselves, and they both are and surround themselves with exceptionally skilled musicians. Still, I can't help wondering when something strikingly novel will come along.
I think that Arcade Fire is kind of like the new Steely Dan in that they are adventurous, quirky and exuberant. But compositionally they aren't quite in the same league. Still, like you I'm waiting for the next "next."
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