past is prologue…. there was a dark age ( actually many ) then an age of partial enlightenment… the road is clearly not always UP…
There is a lot of great music arriving hourly…
The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse!!
I'm not a big Beato fan but he makes some good points at time. This is one of those times IMO. I know some of the younger generation will disagree with the whole premise. Being born in 1951 the boomer gen was hit with the same indictment about the new Rock & Roll music. There was some truth in it. But we didn't care because we liked R&R. I expect the same from some today who like today's music. but I think if you listen you may find some morsels which can be enlightening. This is especially true for musicians who may find they agree wholeheartedly..
Ah, yes. The ages-old “Why in MY day…” Applicable to just about everything from music to literature to politics… well, maybe not politics. I think my grandmother had that right when she would look at some politician on TV and say “they’re ALL thieves.” Or, in the words of the immortal Jerry Doyle “Washington DC is Hollywood but for ugly people.” Ahem.
Yes, music changes. Hardly anyone uses a Hurdy-Gurdy anymore (well, Lludvig Swärt’s FORNDOM, or FAUN, out of Germany… but I said HARDLY anyone), and who uses bones of ancestors to tap out rhythms like Urg once did while sitting around the dying embers of the Allding Feuer (and his father before him) except maybe Heilung. Hammered dulcimer players certainly got torqued when some clever person reassembled all those strings (and more) into a box on a massive bronze frame with an amazingly simply row of “keys” one tapped with their fingers and the strings would be PLUCKED like a proper LUTE then eventually HAMMERED and they called the thing a piano. THAT really upset a lot of people, not least the friends of the piano player who had to come practice at HIS house ‘cause nobody wanted to move and retune the darned thing every time they wanted to rehearse. Nowadays a keyboard fits in a suitcase, weighs about as much as a couple of six packs and it’s the drummer’s house that gets filled with noise several nights a week while the parents moan “Oi-veh ist mir! Is it too much to ask he should be a DOCTUH!?” Music certainly changes. Who can forget that #1 in the hit parade of 1946 (IIRC) “I’m a Cranky old Yank in a Clanky old Tank on the Beach of Yokahama with my Honolulu Mama doing those Beat-o, Beato, flat on my Seato Hirohito Blues” by Hoagie Carmichael? Or the venerable tune sung by doughboys throughout the Maginot Line circa 1918 “Roll Me Over” (in the clover, roll me over lay me down and do it again) which had the Karens of the day protesting in front of sheet music stores where the pimple-popping gum-chewing teenagers were being corrupted by such evil lyrics. Fast forward to MY day and there was Todd Rundgren’s “S-L-U-T” or Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” to upset the musical purists. As Sonny Bono once wrote “The Beat Goes On.” Flat on my Seato. I mostly just listen to what I like. |
+1 @normb Well written and accurate. |