After his DUI, perpetual chart-botherer and abject waste of carbon Justin Bieber now derives 78% of his income as a spokesperson for Right Guard.
Contemporary music, alongside other contemporary efforts in art and culture, tends to err on the side of vapidity, shallowness and pointlessness – it’s dull, banal conformity is a product of the conservative era we currently live in.
I should begin of course by acknowleding the obvious; the quesiton of what’s “good” and what’s “bad” in any kind of artistic discipline is completely and utterly subjective. There will be those of you reading this post who think I’m completely wrong, that my ears have stopped working, that I don’t “get” contemporary music or that I’m lumping the few genuinely interesting musicians active today in with the vacuous, auto-tuned wannabes predated upon and comodified by the likes of Simon Cowell into a source of quick cash for his record label. From your perspective, these criticisms may be valid, but please allow me to explain and expand upon my opening gauntlet – “modern music is rubbish”.
Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge over troubled water found a home in many record collections in the 1970s
I should begin by explaining what I mean by “modern music” and also giving you some insight into my frame of reference and musical context. I was born in 1984 – and that means I’ve had to discover a lot of the music that I like retrospectively. Like many people in my cohort, my parent’s record collection offered the first real window into the popular music of the near-past. In my mum’s case it would have been things like T-Rex, Simon & Garfunkel, the Beatles and the Stones. In my dad’s case, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd and ELO. In the grand sweeping view of the history of music you could argue that all this counts as modern. Most of these records would have been pressed to vinyl in the 1960’s and 70’s – i.e. within living memory and not exactly vintage when held up to Bach or Mozart. And it’s for that reason that I’m not talking about chronological age when I talk about “modern” music.
By “modern”, I’m referring to the kind of output that currently dominates our culture’s music space. Vacuous, superficial, devoid of content, programmed rather than played. Ironically, with the exception of digital tricks, this kind of music isn’t really all that new. It’s been around pretty much since record companies decided to base their business models on the premise of separating teenagers from their pocket money. The 50’s and early 60’s were dominated by this impulse – short sugar-coated pop singles from short-lived groups peppered the music charts. It’s probably fair to assume that by “modern” what I really mean is “orthodox”.
While this kind of thing has existed for a long time, it hasn’t always been culturally dominant. There was a period through the 1960s where a viable counter-culture movement in music, film and art gained a foothold and managed to gather enough momentum to uproot the incumbent, established cultural norms and effectively become the culture. It did this primarily through the quality and strength of it’s output – it just made everything that came before it seem silly and twee by comparison. Who cares about Pat Boone after you’ve heard Led Zeppelin?
Polished 50’s crooner Pat Boone: vapid tunes, conservative leanings
There’s an old adage in music that nothing is created in a vacuum – and when you take a wide, macro view of musical trends over the decades you can see the interconnectedness which underpins the machinery of music and art to the society which consumes it. There’s a feedback loop – art imitates life and life imitates art in return. Both can be mirrors for the other. Music is imprinted with the characteristics of the time and place in which it was made, and in turn goes on to become a central pillar of that same time and place in our memories. Music – and pop music in particular – is a window into the social and political past.
Take the 1960s – there’s probably no clearer example of the synchronicity between prevailing culture and art than the period in 1967 dubbed the summer of love. To use a modern phrase, it was a mash-up of cultural ideas, artistic interpretations of those ideas and calls for political action to see their implementaiton. It was an experimental moment in politics, art and culture. It also produced some extraordinary music – I argue not as a co-incidence, but as a function of the nature of the time. The experimental ethos of the time didn’t just apply to music, but also to politics and society.
Pink Floyd’s original lineup: Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason and enigmatic front-man Syd Barrett
If the 1965 incarnation of Pink Floyd were transported to the present day via some kind of wierd rock ‘n’ roll time vortex, I’d be surprised if any label would be prepared to take them on, or if any venue would be prepared to book them – and while the decline of the record label and the atomisation of the alternative music scene does have some positive elements in terms of creating more of a level playing field between those acts inside a particular music scene, it does have a sizeable but hitherto largely unconsidered downside in the respect that it makes the scene itself weaker and less able to challenge the cultural hegemony of the vapid, auto-tuned Cowellites who currently dominate popular music.
The grip of orthodoxy on the mainstream music of the present day remains as strong as the grip it holds on our politics – but, at least in politics, there is a rumbling at the gates. The transformation of the established political system into something which is itself more atomised, more disparate, does give some cause for optimism. As the old, established parties shed members from both left and right flanks, only the die-hard tribal loyalists remain. If I’m right, and there is a correlation between a dominant conservative political climate and shit, vapid music then the possibility of uprooting the political establishment might give cause for hope of a musical revolution as well as a social one.
