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PAGE INDEX
~ • ~ • ~ • ~ Emerging musical genres go through a characteristic series of
phases. The Gold Standard Song List, if taken as a more or less
representative data sample of genre popularity, reveals a genre
popularity profile. This profile applies to most musical genres over
time (Figure 1 below). FIGURE 1 Genre Popularity Over Time
1. ORIGINS,
OR “UNDERGROUND” • Typically, a musical genre begins as an underground movement. This formative phase often lasts many years, even decades. • New genres and sub-genres emerge in several ways. Among them: - Musicians from outside a geographical region move in and bring new instruments and new styles of playing, singing, and songwriting to an established local musical tradition. - A genius comes along and decides to shake things up (Charlie Parker, Bob Dylan).
- New technology makes it possible to create new sounds.
• At some point the genre breaks out as a widely recognized musical phenomenon in popular culture. • The new style attracts the attention of masses of people, including musicians just getting started, musicians working in other genres, music consumers, and music business people.
• Suddenly, performers everywhere are playing in the new
style. Lots of the new music get recorded and sold. Over a
comparatively short period of time, the new genre or
sub-genre becomes all the rage. • Inevitably, within a decade or two, the popularity of the genre crests and starts to subside. • Along the way, it spins off numerous sub-genres.
• The original one does not go away.
• Instead, with few exceptions, it remains a permanent mainstream genre, co-existing, influencing, and being influenced by, many others. For example, when bluegrass was “invented” in the 1930s and 40s, it did not replace traditional country music. Neither did “new country,” a couple of generations later. When hip-hop and electronic dance music came along, they did not replace mainstream pop or rock. • So many people accept and adopt the elements of the genre that it becomes a cultural infrastructure (more on this a bit later). It settles into the mainstream of popular culture—not as popular as it once was, but permanently accepted and established.
• Every so often a long-established mainstream genre
experiences a period of renewed popularity ("revival") that
may extend for some years.
The
Gold Standard Song List
(GSSL), a sample of 5,000 songs
over 100 years, provides a visual representation of genre popularity
profiles over time (Figure 2): FIGURE 2 Gold Standard Songs by Genre and Decade
Today, many young people, while identifying mainly with their music (the music of their youth), like to sample music across genres and eras. On a single iPod you might find the Clash, Beethoven, Aretha Franklin, Eminem, Iggy Pop, Bjork, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash . . .
NEIL YOUNG GOT IT RIGHT: THE NATURE OF CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURES
It's not just rock 'n' roll that's here to stay. It's also hip-hop and jazz and country. A musical genre is a cultural infrastructure—something
so many people know about and support that it becomes a more or less permanent
artistic (or technological) fixture in the mainstream on society.
You cannot easily dislodge an infrastructure, even if you and a lot of others would prefer something else in its place. Technological infrastructures especially have monopoly characteristics. The internal combustion engine and the Microsoft Windows operating system are technological infrastructures. A lot of people don't particularly like either of them. But, as is a characteristic of infrastructures, that they stick around because so many people use them, and alternatives have unappealing drawbacks (inconvenience, lack of support, expense, etc.).
HERE TO STAY: THE LANGUAGE YOU SPEAK The language you speak is a cultural infrastructure. Everybody who speaks the language you speak shares the same vocabulary (more or less) and uses the same grammatical rules. Artists working with language manipulate words and grammar to create works of art such as novels, plays, and song lyrics. Successful language artists innovate with words and grammar, but preserve enough of the language's commonly-used vocabulary and observe enough of its grammatical rules to ensure reasonable audience accessibility. As discussed in Chapter 1 of How Music REALLY Works!, artists who break all the rules do not communicate with anyone on any humanly accessible level. If an artist working with language employs too much fractured grammar and too many twists of vocabulary, the novel or play or song lyric becomes incomprehensible. Without adequate adherence to convention, audiences find the work inaccessible and simply turn away from it, confused and irritated.
HERE TO STAY: THE MUSICAL GENRE YOU WORK IN When several
languages blend to form a new language, the new language tends to have a unique
identity with a unique vocabulary. Those who don’t know the language cannot
understand it until they learn the language, because words have referential
meaning.
Not so with music.
When
several musical genres blend to form a new one (such as rock, originally a blend
of R & B and country), the new genre can easily be understood. You can recognize
a tune whether it’s played as a rock, jazz, or country arrangement because
musical notes do not have referential meaning. Like languages, musical genres are cultural infrastructures. Most musical genres, once established as infrastructures, do not fade away (although, like some languages, some musical genres have become extinct for various reasons. A couple of examples are noted below). A musical genre functions something like a language. Each musical genre has a particular set of stylistic elements, which millions of songwriters and performers working in the genre observe. These elements define a genre, just as vocabulary and grammatical rules define a language. An established genre does not go "out of date," any more than an established language goes out of date. Musicians use various technologies to create music, and those technologies go out date. New instruments and electronic gear render old gear obsolete. But musical genres, being art forms and not technologies, do not progress. • Punk rock, for example, emerged in the 1970s. Today new punk bands are forming all the time. Their members write new punk songs and record them on equipment that’s different than the gear that existed in the 1970s. Moreover, when hip-hop and electronic dance music came along, they did not replace punk. • Same with bluegrass. New bluegrass bands are constantly forming, performing and recording both classic and new tunes in the bluegrass tradition. When bluegrass was “invented” in the 1930s and 40s, it did not replace traditional country music. Neither did “new country,” a couple of generations later. All of this applies to every major genre and sub-genre: heavy metal, hip-hop, jazz, blues, reggae, folk, electronica. Songwriters
and performers create new genres and sub-genres of music all the time. Some
stick around and become cultural infrastructures, some don’t.
KNOWING SOMETHING ABOUT “FOREIGN” GENRES WILL HELP YOUR MUSICAL DEVELOPMENT Listening to the great songs of other genres will spark your musical
imagination. You will be able to better envision how you could
incorporate elements from other genres into your own musical art,
the way language artists incorporate elements of style, grammar and
vocabulary from other languages into their works.
The more you listen to, remember, and absorb at least a sampling of the best songs of genres other than your own, the more likely you will be able to create a unique body of original songs and a performing style that sounds like nothing anyone's heard before. A sound that grabs the ears of audiences and holds them. A sound that makes them wonder, “Now where did that come from?”
GENRES OF THE GOLD STANDARD SONG LIST What conditions define the emergence of a new genre in popular music? • The new music contains a set of several significant stylistic elements not widely heard in that particular combination in other musical genres. • A lot of performers and songwriters adopt the new set of stylistic elements in their playing, singing (including rapping) and songwriting (including beatmaking).
• A large number of performers and songwriters maintain the
use of the set of stylistic elements over time. Recall from Chapter 1 of How Music REALLY Works! that music is combinatorial. A finite set of stylistic songwriting and performing characteristics define a particular genre. For example: • Musical instruments of choice • Dominance of vocal vs instrumental songs • Characteristic vocal style • Dominant subject matter of lyrics • Variable emphasis on elements such as rhythm, harmony, melody, vocal style, instrumental solos • Dominant type of rhythmic pulse • Characteristic tempo range • Degree of emphasis on improvisation • Degree of emphasis on syncopation • Variable use of modes and scale types And scores of others. Since music is combinatorial, all it takes is a handful of musical
elements and a set of rules governing each that a significant number
of musicians agree to play by. The result: music strikingly different
from any other. Imagine, for example, what country music would have sounded
like if, in place of the steel guitar as a key element of the country
sound, bagpipes had had that role from the beginning. That one
instrumental difference would have made country music sound a whole lot
different from what we’re accustomed to hearing today. A major genre of popular music typically spins off numerous sub-genres. For example: • In jazz, a couple of spin-offs were bop and fusion (among many others) • In country, honky tonk and bluegrass (again, among many others) • In rock, metal and punk • In R & B/Soul, Motown and funk
• In hip-hop, gangsta and crunk There are hundreds and hundreds of sub-genres and sub-sub-genres. At last count, there were 647,512 genres and sub-genres in
popular music.
No, wait! Some guy with his laptop in his bedroom in Milton
Keynes, England, has just created another one. That makes
647,513.
No, wait!
A
trio of 14-year-old girls in Amarillo, Texas, has just created a sub-genre of a
sub-sub-genre. Now we’re up to 647,514.
No, wait! ... Figure 3 below shows the major genres of Western popular music
(at least in the main English-speaking countries) from approximate
breakout dates to the present. The GSSL only applies to the right
half of Figure 3. FIGURE 3 Genre Breakouts In Historical Perspective
Occasionally, a major genre, after flourishing for a time, becomes
extinct, such as ragtime and American minstrelsy. Usually the
reason is that another genre comes along with similar, but not
identical characteristics, and absorbs the first one. For example,
vaudeville took over from minstrelsy. Later, the Broadway-style
musical succeeded vaudeville. That does not mean the Broadway
musical represented artistic progress over vaudeville. Many
Broadway style revues use elements pioneered in vaudeville, but
presented with technologically updated stagecraft.
Next, brief sketches of each of the genres in Figure 3 above.
FOLK
/ ROOTS
MUSIC,
CA. 200,000 YEARS
AGO
TO THE PRESENT Origins • Folk music has several alternative names, such as community music, peoples music, and music in the oral tradition. • Folk music likely goes back 100,000 to 200,000 years— before Homo sapiens walked out of Africa and colonized the rest of the planet. • To get an idea of how old folk music is, have a look at the horizontal bar at the top of Figure 3. It represents only 200 years. Now imagine this: to accurately represent 100,000 to 200,000 years, that horizontal “Folk/Roots” bar would have to stretch to the left roughly 190 to 380 feet (58 to 116 metres)! That’s how old folk music is, compared with all other musical genres.
• With the advent of the printing press in the 15th
Century, vendors hawked “broadside ballads” in the streets—folk ballads printed
on one side of a sheet. Early journalism. Breakout
• In the English-speaking countries, the folk music of the UK
and Ireland had a major revival that began in the late 1950s
and rocketed in popularity in the early 1960s. Countless
musicians in the UK, America, Canada, and other
English-speaking nations wrote countless original songs in
the English-Celtic folk tradition.
Crest
• The folk music revival crested in the latter part of the 1960s
and gave rise to sub-genres such as folk-rock (Dylan, the
Byrds, etc.) and the folk-soul music of artists such as Van
Morrison (for example, the beloved album Astral Weeks).
Mainstream Genre • Today, the term “roots” often appears in conjunction with folk music. The folk music revival subsided in popularity, and folk/roots settled into the mainstream of popular culture by the 1980s.
You could define classical music ultra-narrowly as the period of European art music of ca. 1750 to 1825 (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) that followed the Baroque era and preceded the Romantic. Or you could define classical music broadly as formally-notated art music, starting with some of the music of the Greeks, 2,500 years ago. In which case, the bar second from the top in Figure 3 would need to stretch to the left about 4.8 feet (1.5 metres). Not a long time compared with folk music, but much longer than the genres of popular music with which we’re familiar today. Historically,
racism prevented music from crossing cultural lines. For centuries, Europeans
and white Americans considered African music “primitive” and inferior to music
of European origin, especially the music of the baroque, classical, and romantic
composers of the common practice period (1600 - 1900). People with classical
music backgrounds have historically tended to value melody and harmony over
rhythm and rhythmic lyrics. The European aristocracy of the common practice
period who patronized composers actually believed they were fostering the
“progress” of music. At classical music concerts, audiences were (and still are) expected to sit quietly and listen to The Music. No nodding to the beat (or nodding off), no tapping, clapping, or (horrors) singing or dancing. Pretty much the exact opposite of, say, a hip-hop or rock concert.
MINSTRELSY (AMERICAN), CA. 1830 - 1905 Origins • American minstrelsy emerged in the 1830s. White musicians, mainly solo or duo acts, would black-face themselves and perform songs and dances from African American culture.
• Horrible
racist stereotyping (“See the happy dancing plantation slaves!”) didn’t bother
audiences of the day. Even Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), author of the famous
phrase, “All men are created equal,” kept a couple of hundred slaves and did not
see fit to free them. Breakout • By the 1840s, troupes of 5 or 10 players were common, mainly white males, but not exclusively. • Abolishionist minstrel troupes had some success.
• America successfully exported the minstrel show to Europe.
Of course minstrels had been a fixture in Europe for
centuries, but the American style minstrel show was
something else. Crest • After the Civil War, troupes grew larger, and there were more African American troupes. • Here is one description of American minstrelsy:
Mainstream Genre • James A. Bland, America’s first great African American songwriter (“Carry Me Back To Old Virginny,” official state song of Virginia), wrote hundreds of songs but did not make any money on royalties. However, he did earn a good living as a member of various minstrel troupes. • Stephen Foster, an abolishionist northerner, wrote many songs for minstrel shows, with lyrics in dialect that did not mock or denigrate plantation slaves.
• In the decades following the Civil War, the racist nature of
much of minstrelsy led to its demise, concomitant with the
rise of vaudeville, which had taken over from minstrelsy as
variety stage entertainment by the first decade of the 20th
Century.
Origins • The Industrial Revolution began in the latter half of the 18th Century and dramatically transformed European and North American society. Decade after decade, people migrated from the countryside to work in urban factories and foundries.
• Workers demanded more and better entertainment than
simply congregating in ale houses and singing traditional
songs. By the mid-1800s, music halls were meeting that
demand with a variety of entertainment for the working
masses. Breakout
• Some musicians became professional songwriters, furnishing
music hall entertainers with new songs. This marked the
beginning of the modern popular music industry. Crest • In America, a decade or two after the Civil War, music hall entertainment became established in North America in the form of vaudeville. It eventually superceded American minstrelsy. • Other varieties of music hall entertainment included operetta (in both Europe and North America) and cabaret (mainly Germany and France).
• Great composers and entertainers of the music
hall/vaudeville age include: Gilbert and Sullivan, Noel Gay,
Harry Lauder, Vera Lynn, Victor Herbert, George Formby,
Noel Coward, George M. Cohan, Albert and Harry von Tilzer,
James Reese Europe, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Al Jolson,
Sophie Tucker, Bert Williams, and Rudy Vallee. Mainstream Genre • At the turn of the 20th Century, vaudeville was the most popular form of entertainment in North America, as was music hall culture in England. • All major cities and towns in Europe and North America had music halls to accommodate “light” entertainment variety shows. • In America, other ways of presenting variety entertainment, especially radio and film, began to displace vaudeville in the 1920s. However, the music hall genre lived on in Europe for several more decades. • The Broadway style musical replaced the vaudeville show as stage entertainment. Eventually all of the elements of vaudeville and music hall had migrated to other media or were no longer referred to by their original names (e.g., musical revues, movie musicals, and television variety and talk shows).
• The Beatles recorded a landmark album in the British music
hall tradition: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).
Origins • Jazz started in the port of New Orleans in the early 1890s, when the city was still a French colony. The African American musical culture of syncopation, polyrhythm, melodic embellishment, and improvisation mashed up with European (especially French military) musical traditions and instrumentation: marches and rhythmically “square” dance forms; brass instruments and the upright piano.
• New
Orleans Creole musicians (American born, of African American and
European—especially French—ancestry), such as Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Kid Ory,
and Jelly Roll Morton, lived with, and played music with, self-taught African
American musicians. Altogether they created a new genre, jazz. Breakout • The Original Dixieland Jazz Band made its first recording in 1917. By the 1920s, the Mississippi riverboats had carried jazz north to Kansas City, Chicago, and New York. Not long after, jazz had spread all over America and on to Europe. (Recall that in the 1930s, the Nazis banned jazz.)
• White musicians played alongside black musicians, helping
to focus more attention on the appalling state of racial
discrimination and segregation that had existed since the
botching of the emancipation at the end of the Civil War in
1865. Later, jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong played
a role in sparking the civil rights movement of the 1950s and
1960s. Crest • By the late 1920s and early ’30s, jazz musicians were transforming hundreds of well-crafted songs for Broadway musicals (written mainly by Jewish immigrants and their progeny, who had fled persecution in Europe and Russia) into what would later be known as jazz standards. • Composers and band leaders such as Duke Ellington were writing brilliant pieces for the jazz orchestra. Historically, most of the great innovators in jazz have been African Americans: Louis Armstrong, Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis.
• By
the late 1930s, with the success of swing-era big-bands lead by the Dorsey
Brothers, Benny Goodman, Glen Miller and others, jazz was the most popular
musical genre in America, eclipsing “square” interpretations of Broadway show
tunes. Mainstream Genre • At the end of World War II, the popularity of jazz was starting to decline. The advent of bebop sustained a healthy interest in jazz well into the 1950s, after which several other emergent genres took the spotlight. Today, jazz remains a solid mainstream genre, showing no signs of fading away.
• Jazz
brought improvisation back from near-extinction in Western music. Improvisation
combines the creation of music with the performance of music. The hallmark of
jazz is that the performer composes while performing—improvises—although the
performer follows some sort of model or form.
Origins • After the emancipation, African Americans found themselves shut out of mainstream society, living in nightmarish conditions of poverty and racial segregation. The Ku Klux Klan organized lynch mobs that murdered thousands of African Americans, beginning in the 1880s and continuing into the 1960s. • The blues began in the Mississippi delta in the late 1880s or early 1890s, with former slaves and their progeny singing about their tragic lives of discrimination, broken dreams, shattered families, and alienation. And disappointment with lovers. And satisfaction with lovers. And ambiguity about lovers. • Unlike jazz, the blues was mainly rural in origin. It began as a wholly African American folk music genre.
• With
voice, guitar, and harmonica, blues musicians combined pentatonic and diatonic
scales to create blues scales—hybrid scales with “blue” notes (see
Chapter 4
and
Chapter 5 of How Music REALLY Works!). This black folk/country music didn’t sound much like either jazz or
white country music.
Breakout • With the proliferation of recording studios and the advent of radio in the 1920s, the blues began to find audiences to a limited degree outside the deep south. But the blues never did break big time, not the way jazz did.
• The
ASCAP musicians’ strike (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers)
helped the cause of the blues. The strike led to the formation of BMI (Broadcast
Music Incorporated) in1939. New labels and BMI publishers signed a lot of
African American blues musicians to make recordings to fill the need for fresh
music for radio broadcast. Crest
• In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the folk music
revival rekindled interest in authentic African American folk
music. Many blues musicians who had been playing in
obscurity for decades suddenly found themselves with large
and appreciative audiences. Mainstream Genre • As with other genres, interest in the blues waxes and wanes. Like jazz, the blues will be around for generations to come. • Some Important blues songwriters and performers include Blind Lemon Jefferson, Pine Top Smith, Leadbelly, Charley Patton, Leroy Carr, Bessie Smith, W. C. Handy, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, Blind Willie McTell, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Etta James, and B. B. King.
Origins | ||||
