6 responses to “Flatmates’ Thanksgiving”

1. 

   johnthebasket

   11/26/2022

   Duggles, frequently you find a piece of data that explains the world around us frighteningly clearly. I stopped ignoring your links a long time ago; I take every one. But today's "Decline of key changes in popular music" link explains, in retrospect, why it's useless to listen to pop music radio. The obvious important metric is on the right side of the graph, but don't ignore the left side. The Beatles changed music of the early sixties in many ways, but there were two significant ones (besides having a left handed bass player and a left handed drummer playing right-handed drums): three part harmony and key changes within songs. You can see a sharp rise when the Beatles started publishing albums and a sharp drop when they stopped. There's a smaller rise with the confluence of punk and metal (frequently called grunge) and a fall when it went away. Then the music dies and redlines.

   The first set of rise/fall don't all or even mostly represent Beatles tunes — the lads influenced Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan and most everybody else who was writing music.

   So thanks for the key metric.

   John

   Reply
   1. 

      Doug Holland

      11/26/2022

      As a guy cheerfully, even thankfully ignorant of music and disdainful of present-day pop music, it's further evidence that there's less imagination and intelligence and fewer surprises in popular music now than there used to be. The chart expresses mathematically what I'd already intuitively felt.

      Guess it's reinforcement of my prejudices, but this particular prejudice is borne of truth and experience.

      Do you ever listen to what "the kids today"? When I try, I have to listen quite a lot before anything sounds like something I'd want to listen to again.

      And it is good to know someone's clicking the links, thanks. They're the trail of breadcrumbs from everything my eyes have snacked on today and yesterday. Can't imagine many people would give a hoot, but sometimes I click my own links a few days later, when I've lost something I should've bookmarked.

      Reply
   2. 

      johnthebasket

      11/26/2022

      I understand being contemptuous of the pop music being manufactured and played today; the graph tells a small part of that story and the rest is about the 21st century music business, which is a sad tale indeed.

      But, my brother, I'm concerned about "thankful ignorance" of any art form. The latest theories of cultural and physical anthropologists about pre-human history suggest that music might have served as a proto-language (before we could physically and mentally articulate speech): a way to communicate with each other when no other way was feasible. If this theory is close to reasonably accurate, music is layered into our brains, so if we hear pleasing music our brains are stimulated at a deep level. We are intellectually and culturally inseparable from the resonant music we hear; non-resonant music (see also 21st century tunes) bounces off our layered brain like bullets off Superman. Of course, as we have species memory taste, so also do we have acquired taste. We're complex beings with a complex brain. So there is considerable variability in our individual response to music. But when the late Kingsmen or the mostly late Wailers (from Tacoma, Washington) play "Louie, Louie", we, most of us, dance; people confined to wheelchairs move their feet, and even people with little obvious sense of time move SOMETHING.

      The belief that music plays a critical role in both communication and stimulation of advanced societies runs so deep that NASA and other space agencies have sent recorded Earth music into deep space as an artifact they hope other advanced lifeforms find at an unfathomably distant date. It is hoped that they will know us by our music long after we have destroyed ourselves. Hot cuts include Bach, Mozart, and Chuck Berry.

      I'm not telling you what to pay attention to; rather I'm letting you know what I pay attention to, and why. There is magic in good music that transcends our brief lives.

      John

      Reply
   3. 

      Doug Holland

      11/27/2022

      Respect the music I do. Listen to it, I sometimes do. Dig deep into the history, the context, the artists, I simply never do.

      I'm interested in what I'm interested in, and my interest in music, even the music I know and love, isn't much more than an interest in hearing it. Knowing who played bass on which recording, or most of the composers' or performers' backstories, is beyond my interest unless it's made into an interesting biopic.

      Hmmm. Actually, I can't think of anything in that genre that I've seen, not even Walk the Line or 8 Mile. Oh wait — Amadeus, definitely. The Sound of Music, if that counts.

      I feel about music like I feel about trips to the art museum. Rembrandt rocks, but I never give him any thought when I'm *not* in the gallery.

      There's too much art and knowledge for anyone to hold more than a fraction of a fraction in their mind. The music that's hit my ears and heart, I listen to over and over, but that hasn't included any of Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift's oeuvre. Tell me if I'm missing something special from that generation.

      Reply
   4. 

      Anonymous

      11/27/2022

      Both the performers you mentioned in the last graph are 21st century people (Swift turned 11 and Bieber turned 6 at the turn of the millennium) and I said the 21st century music business is trash. Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, turned 66, and had 16 years to live. In the middle of those 16 years, he embarked on four world tours in four years and every house was sold out and filled with joy and some of the best music that has ever been performed: the kind of music that gives our lives contextual meaning and amplifies our joys and sorrows, so the last 20 years, as barren as it has been, has, nonetheless contained a richness of human expression amidst the dogshit.

      We included our return address on the records and other recordings we sent into the cosmos, so when the ship pulls into the inner planets of Sol, looking for the progeny of Mozart and Bach and Chuck Berry to thank them for the cool tracks, and find only waterworld, they will only be able to speak into the abyss. We can enjoy them before the rains come.

      John

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   5. 

      Doug Holland

      11/27/2022

      I like that mental imagery… The aliens come looking for the good music they've heard from this celestial nightclub, but by the time they're here, looking for parking, there won't be much of anything left.

      Went through my minimal music collection yesterday, and I do need more Cohen.

      Reply

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