Popular Music and the Test of Time

When Michael Jackson died, we heard lots of wailing about this event, plus lots of tripe about how he would be remembered forever. While perusing this post on Pajamas Media, I was bemused when one commenter suggested, “A hundred years from now, orchestras and Jazz groups along with rock bands will still be playing Beatles music. No one will remember the train to Clarksville [by the Monkees].”

I always liked rock music, but at the same time I was brought up on classical music, which has stood a much longer test of time than rock music has. So, I’m always skeptical when people tell me that rock music will still be played a century from now. I’m especially skeptical when the people saying this couldn’t themselves name a single singer or hit from a century in the past. If music from a century ago isn’t remembered today, why should anyone a century from now remember our music?

So, here are some scenarios that these people should ponder.

1. A century from now people will have had nearly a century and a half of rock music to choose from, so any rock music from the 1960s will be thought of as just one small part of a very crowded field.

2. In, say, thirty years the rock music produced will be thought of as so fantastic that no one except historians will pay much attention to anything that came before. We already saw this when the Beatles came along, causing most people to ignore pre-Beatles rock.

3. While rock music will still be around, it will be overshadowed by some other currently existing genre. The increasing numbers of Latinos in this country, together with the push for multiculturalism, might eventually push Latino music ahead of rock.

4. Some new genre will emerge, pushing rock music into the shadows. When the genre changes, then everyone ignores the biggest stars and greatest hits of the previous genre. Rock replaced the previous genre of popular music, the swing era. Not many of us who grew up on rock know much about this era, though my wife and I plunged into it in the 1990s and learned a lot. Swing itself pushed aside the previous genre, whose name I don’t even know. Back in 1938, there was a mystery written called The Swing Music Murder that had an amusing illustration of the conflict between the old and the new music. The detective, who liked the older music, was at a club and wanted the band, which was a swing band, to play his favorite song, the 1917 hit “Darktown Strutters Ball.” (See here.) After a while he realized he hadn’t heard it and went up to them to complain. “We already played it,” they said. They added, “We couldn’t play the melody, so we swung it,” an answer that didn’t exactly endear him to the new music.

5. Reactionary Muslims will take over our culture and ban music.

Predicting future trends in the arts is a risky business. See here about Manet’s prediction in 1879 that in a century the artist Bouguereau would of all artists living at that time be the best remembered.

The same thing can happen in philosophy. As far as I can tell, at the time of Plato’s death the smart money was on his nephew Speusippus to become the next big name, but instead it turned out to be Aristotle, with poor Speusippus fading into obscurity. In the nineteenth century, there was Alexander Hamilton, who according to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy was thought of as a giant intellect in his time, but who almost no one today has heard of.

So, it’s best to be cautious about what will be popular a century from now.

Correction: I meant the Scottish philosopher William Hamilton (1788-1856) and not the American politician. Thanks to reader Mike43 for alerting me to this mistake.

Comments

[Mike43]

With Hamilton, the duel got his posterity.

[John Pepple]

Oops, blew it. It's supposed to be William Hamilton, a British philosopher.

[Mark Spahn]

A good slogan for the longevity of popular music is
"Performers fade away, songs endure."
Who today remembers the name of a single mistrel
singer of the 1800s? Yet half a dozen tunes by
Stephen Foster are known to almost everyone
("My Old Kentucky Home", "Way Down Upon the
Swanee River", "Camptown Races"), and a search
for "historic sheet music" will uncover for musical
entrepreneurs many out-of-copyright songs that are
ever ready for revival, such as
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgI1mQapSVI .

Bing Crosby was once as popular as Frank Sinatra.
Crosby is almost never heard today, and Sinatra is
fading away with a shallower damping coefficient.
They both will be merely historical figures, but the
"American Song Book" standards that they sang are
still around, and being sung by successive generations
of professional singers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOaBZaV28Z4&feature=related
is another old song, from 1879, and almost everyone has heard
the tune, usually played on a tinkling upright piano in a saloon scene
in a western movie. (Its printed lyrics contain the wording
"golden slippers I'm gwine to wear". The singer reasonably changes
this "gwine" to the modern "gonna". I have seen this word "gwine"
only in the context of black speech of the 1800s. Did Southern
blacks, or any Southerners, ever really say "gwine" as a dialect
version of "going"? Or was this a convention of minstrel songwriting?)

And what performer from the 1840s is known today?
Only Franz Liszt, but he is remembered as a composer.
Yet the dance craze of the 1840 -- the polka -- is still with us:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeffKnZ4I78

[Mike43]

Now, it's even more funny. Well, since I specialized in economics, military affairs and educational psychology, translation; I was a military officer, teacher and now, psychometrician, a British philosopher didn't even occur to me.

But, hey, my kids think my sense of humor is warped, anyway.

[John Pepple]

Mark Spahn, I'm finally getting around to answering your post. To begin with, I guess I'm not at all confident the way you are that some of those songs are known by nearly everyone. The people I was criticizing in my post are the ones I think are least likely to be familiar with anything other than rock music. I don't think they watch Westerns, either.

Also, I think very few songs actually endure, as far as the average person is concerned. I think the number of songs created in any era must be enormous, and only a small fraction of them will be known by the average person from a century in the future. So, I'm guessing that if songs of the Beatles are known a century from now, it will probably be only one or two of them.

Frank Sinatra got a boost in popularity back in the 1990s when there was a small craze in swing dancing. So he may hang on for longer than you think. I would hear that there were 16-year-olds requesting his songs on the radio.

[Mark Spahn]

About "songs known to almost everyone", maybe I should say something less broad: that there exist bits of melody that almost everyone has heard, even if they don't know where it came from. I am thinking of note-sequences as simple as "Shave and a haircut, two bits", or Wagner's "Kill the Wabbit" theme:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGhQ2BDt4VE

Singers and their popularity fade, but songs endure. The way to have long-lasting musical fame is not to be a performer but to be a songwriter. Of course, only a very small proportion of songs last. The entertainer Steve Allen (of whom I have heard or read nothing in the last ten years) is said to have written 9,000 songs. But the only one I can think of is "This Could Be the Start of Something Big":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFfqbDQ4CKM
(and I have not heard this in the last ten years either; you'll notice how dated the references in the lyrics are).
Singer cannot come back, because they die. But a once-popular song that fades into obscurity is always there, in some digital archive of historical musical notation, and might be repopularized by an enterprising musical archaeologist.

[John Pepple]

9,000 songs? Sheesh. Here's a story I read somewhere about the production of the British Dictionary of National Biography. A clergyman came to the editor and said he had a list of 1,100 "important" hymn-writers who needed to be included in the work.

Notice that this wasn't the writers of 1,100 hymns, which might mean as little as one or two hymn-writers, but 1,100 writers of hymns. Incredible.

Anyway, at this point I'm not sure we're disagreeing on my original thesis, which is that we have no guarantee that rock will be dominant a century from now.

[Mark Spahn]

Your "Sheesh" about Steve Allen having written 9,000 songs led me to wonder whether I hadn't taken literally someone's exaggerated remark (heard on the radio, I think) that "He wrote 9,000 songs, but only a few were any good." But
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Allen
says he was "a prolific composer, having penned 14,000 songs." 14,000! Let's assume he had a very long songwriting career, 50 years. 14,000 songs in 50 years means 14,000/50 = 280 songs per 365-day year, which works out to one song every 31 hours. I don't believe it! When he died he must have left crates and crates of sheet music to be sorted out by his heirs.
Reading further in that article, we find:
"In one famous stunt, he made a bet with singer-songwriter Frankie Laine that he could write 50 songs a day for a week. Composing on public display in the window of a Hollywood music store, Allen met the quota."

[John Pepple]

It's hard to believe he wrote so many. I wonder what definition he used for "song." Does just a few notes count as one?

By the way, the Wagner theme is one that I don't think I heard till I was an adult, though something I heard many times on the cartoons I watched was a storm sequence from the William Tell Overture.