Modern Music Converging with Poetry? And What's Next in Music

Apparently I haven't been blogging enough lately, and apparently the speech and debate tournament entries aren't very interesting, so here's my latest attempt at producing some interesting thoughts.

I listen to a lot of music. I generally listen to 1-2 hours/day on average, and I play an average of about 30 minutes a day (not including rehersals and lessons which total 3 hours/week). I listen because it's fun and nice, and because my teacher claims that I'll never get anywhere without listening to at least an hour a day. He claims to have listened to 5 hours a day just of jazz when he was my age (yes, that includes during school too). Mostly I listen to jazz and some classical because it's what I play and like most. Unlike some people, I try not to be snobbishly inclined toward one particular genre of music, although I do have my preferences. I will also admit that I don't listen to very much popular music, despite the fact that this entry will attempt to loosely analyze it. I have a few popular music CDs on my computer, I listen to all of the CDs that my sister has be burn for her, and occasionally I will listen to a popular music radio station. The reason that I do all of this is simple: to broaden my musical tastes and understanding; to see just what it is that attracts people towards types of music that may not be my favorites.

In my experience with popular music I developed an interesting idea. Let me make a rather radical proposition to the reader: popular music (we're talking about the sort of post-1985 post-funk rock/pop music that you hear on a lot of radio stations) has in fact become much less music than poetry. I'm not trying to convince you that music is now all of a sudden poetry, but the musical element to this genre seems to be taking a back seat to lyrics, or poetry. Try listening to a mid-1980s U2 track and comparing it with a rock/pop track of today (one that's not disgustingly saccharine). Although the 1980s music has a notably harder edge to it, it is hard to tell a major difference. In my experience, the musical base of this modern music is not very diverse, while the diversity of lyrics is huge. In fact, to most listeners of this music that I know, the two most important things about a track is its lyrics and beat. You can find lyrics on all sorts of things, and many of them are quite inventive.

In the history of the jazz idiom, it is notable that the popular strain of the music was always chronically uninventive in a musical sense, while the harder avant-garde edge pushed the limits of the established order. True, there were great jazz singers, but the most cutting-edge of the music rarely sported vocals, and rarely was accepted by the masses. It could be that this rock/pop music with which I have experience is similar to the stagnant toned-down pop of the jazz eras. But if this is so, where is the cutting edge of music today? (I know, I'm majorly digressing and the orginal structure and focus is all messed up, but that's what blogs are all about, right?) Where are the Charlie Parkers sitting in their closets in New York's slums, reinventing the established musical forms? I don't know, I'm not sure there are any. Let me know if you find any. So here's a new idea. There is no new majorly innovative music. There is rock/pop: clever poets who know chords. There is rap: rarely clever poets who know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone who can man an electric drum machine and synthesizer tracks. Jazz is dead aside from a few professionals reincarnating covered territory and hordes of students like myself. Classical is left to arrangers. Then there's world music. To me it's the most compelling in terms of its musical explorability. There's virtually infinite depth of folk music to draw upon. But several obstacles still remain: it needs to gain mainstream commercial acceptance in some form (even a watered down one); it needs to be raised to a level of respectability in terms of serious listening and study; it needs to achieve a steady rate of evolution and growth; and (not necessarily, however) it needs to be able to succeed in providing material for extended works (like classical symphonies, or Ellington's suites). The more I think about it, world music seems like it might actually succeed as the next big musical genre. I mean think about it. We're becoming a more interconnected world, so it would make sense that various musical traditions would sort of merge into a worldly stew. Then again, the only world music I listen to is this really wierd Malian pop and Pink Martini (which gets shelved under "rock"). And the only person who listens to any world or ethnic music that I know of are Julien's parents and my mom (who only listens to things that are Irish. She loves everything that's Irish, even the cursed Celtic harp. I keep telling her that she should move back to the motherland.)

So essentially, as usual, I have wasted a small fraction of your valuable time by coming to absolutely no conclusion. This is quite possibly the worst blog entry I've ever made. Man, it's awful! I envy you if you've actually made it here. It's like a live uncensored stream of bits from my head. Now that I've given you the thoughts, you'll just have to think up the conclusion for yourself. It's called "Do It Yourself Blog-Surfing".