Some thoughts on the very nature of music... and how it has changed
In many ways, the albums traced the arc of my life through music. Listening to my parents play their albums and learning to love a pure melody from Abbey Road. Moving into youth and discovering noise and speed and attitude with the 80’s rock albums. And as I got older, the noise met a worldview, reflecting both my inner world, my search for individual identity in the era of grunge, as well as my discovery of revolutionary fervour, all Che Guevara and Rage Against The Machine.
Right until the beginning of the 21st century, albums were the soundtrack of my life all the way through to Radiohead’s epic trilogy (OK Computer/Kid A/Amnesiac) that seemed to capture all the isolation and confusion of the electronic age, all bleeps and sound collages, aural textures generated by or manipulated by machines, distorted voices and instruments, music for the computer age but soaked through with human emotion... hour long immersive expressions of our collective neuroses and anxieties.
And then, next to nothing. Nada.
There were a few album bands. Arcade Fire for one. War on Drugs for another. But they were few and far between.
And it wasn’t a rock thing. I saw hip hop move away from Wu Tang Clan and 2Pac and even from the last final flush of Kanye when he was still an artist and a musician with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
I saw Amy Winehouse pass away and take with her the idea of an album being more than a collection of songs (with apologies to Billie Eilish).
The album didn’t become extinct. But it was critically endangered.
I don’t know if this is good or bad. I guess it’s just different. It’s evolution. Music reflects society and it’s silly to assume something is bad just because it doesn’t seem familiar to you.
But the realisation led me to more questions. How else as music changed? Have the songs changed? Not in terms of genre but the very structure of songs and music. And what does it mean for how we discover, understand, experience and create music?
I looked at the albums I have loved in the last two decades like Neon Bible or Lost In The Dream. Even accounting for work and limited time, I realised I couldn’t really name all the songs on the albums, leave alone know every single word and every single note like the music I grew up with. As I wondered why I started to look at the role of money, access and time and how they impacted my experience of music.
Growing up I got a hundred rupees a month as pocket money. I would save it all to buy two tapes a month for Rs.45 each and listen to the two tapes endlessly, every single day for a month. I would pore through the album art, read the lyrics and sing along. I had a collection of close to a hundred tapes, which was one of the biggest collections in my class but still less than a hundred hours of music. Sometimes I would borrow and exchange tapes with my friends. But it was largely the same hundred hours that I would listen to every single day, every single year.
You listen to an album again and again. And every word and every note becomes an emotion and a memory and soaks through your pores. You listen to it first as melody, then as words, then you listen to the guitar track and it’s sweeping arpeggios and then you listen to through the rhythm section, shaking your head and tapping your feet to the beat. You learn to appreciate melody, rhythm, texture and craft distinctly, and you are drawn into the creative process that weaves them all together and you listen to it all come together as a fully formed piece of art. These are secrets that unfold and gifts that are given only through repeated listening.
The very nature of music discovery has now changed. We started with the few bands and musicians that our friends had heard or that we read about and that was all our discovery was limited to in the 80s. There was a limitation of access and a limitation of money.
That changed with the advent of MTV. But even MTV (or radio for that matter) was pocket change in comparison to today. It played around 200 songs a day, and the most popular songs would play 4-6 times. Most importantly, you didn’t control the discovery process. You heard what was played. And when you wanted to exercise choice you went back to your tapes.
Today on the other hand, your music discovery process is controlled by you (to be honest, it is an illusion of control... it’s the algorithm that’s in control). Your financial barrier to discovery is zero, your universe of discovery is limitless, and your ability to exercise choice is apparently complete. The only thing that continues to be finite and unchanged is the amount of time you can spend discovering music. As a result the very nature of music discovery has fundamentally changed, becoming an experience that is dictated by breadth and not depth in the exact same amount of time.
The other big change when I look at how I listen to music compared to my children is skipping. This again has been a function of technology and how music has been consumed over the centuries. There was a time when all music was consumed through live performances. That meant a commitment of time that lasted at least an hour or two, leading to musical compositions, whether symphonies or ragas, that unfolded slowly, following a certain narrative structure, ebbing and flowing through crescendos and moments of calm. With the rise of recorded music, people started experimenting with other, shorter forms. We had the ability to listen to a song or a series of songs, to pause, to listen again, to control the listening experience and to compress the time we spent on it.
However until the creation of CD’s we still committed close to thirty minutes to listening to each side. That meant every song would be heard beginning to end, and that every album would be heard beginning to end. That allowed musicians to sit and work through different movements and moods within a song or within the arc of the album. This allowed not just for albums like The Wall but songs with distinct movements like Stairway to Heaven or Bohemian Rhapsody or One. Or it allowed for songs that told long, poetic tales like The End. Even though CDs allowed you to start skipping songs we wouldn’t skip within a song, and human nature and the sunk cost fallacy behind the purchase price of a physical product meant you would still listen to a song or an album all the way through at least once. We wouldn’t sample and skip within song itself, so music lent itself to longer form narratives.
When I watch my kids listen to songs today, they typically listen to the first 30 seconds and skip to the middle. We don’t usually listen to a piece beginning to end. That has profound implications for how music is composed and structured.
Today, a piece of music has to incorporate the idea of a product that feels consistent regardless of at which point in the song you’re sampling it. The structure is more steady, the hooks more distributed, the chord progressions simpler. There can be narratives within each song and thematic coherence. Some musicians like The Weeknd are able to pull this off with true brilliance and artistry but the idea of longform narrative, whether musically, structurally or lyrically, is hard.
Today a musician who creates a Stairway to Heaven knows that their music doesn’t lend itself easily to the algorithm, to the process of discovery, to the act of experiencing music and listening to it. To seek complexity and depth is at odds with the tidal forces of technology and commerce.
What does that mean for today’s music. The easy answer is that the golden age of music has passed. That this generation will never ever experience music with the power to change the world, music that expands your mind and transforms you, music that makes you lose your religion and find your faith.
But that’s bullshit.
It is the same bullshit that our forefathers said when Beethoven gave way to Chuck Berry.
They were wrong then and we are wrong now.
A wise man once said that all you need is “three chords and the truth”.
That’s the beauty of music. All it needs is the truth. And for generations of young people before us and untold generations to come, music will always BE truth.
Comments