Open Writing

Bob Dylan’s song, in a way, might serve as my plea to the music recording industry of today, which by all accounts is in a state if disarray. US recording company executives claim to be dismayed by falling sales and the maneuverings of their contracted performers. In the Pop Music field – is there such a thing as “pop music” anymore? – some performers want to give their creations away, while others want to sell it by the pound for whatever you’re prepared to pay.

For the purposes of this column, “pop music” is anything that isn’t classical or jazz, and includes Pop, Rock, Pop-rock, Soft Rock, Heavy Metal, Punk, Country and Western, Folk, Reggae, Disco, New World, Fusion, Rap, any kind of “Crossover,” and anything else I didn’t think of or know about. I should also add that I have absolutely no credentials for writing this column. I have not listened to pop music willingly or attentively since “Chicago,” “Bread,” Carly Simon in her heyday, and “The Who” were in the charts.

So stop reading now if you choose, but know that my justification for covering the topic at all is that, like it or not, unless I’m at home, I am almost constantly bombarded with some form or other of this vacuous, dare I say it, art form. There is no escape. Sitting in my car at a traffic light, the cars all around me are throbbing and shaking with several thousand watts of whatever they’re playing. When I go to the gym, the twanging and yelling starts as I approach the entrance and continues every minute that I’m there.

Construction workers and landscapers, swimming pool cleaners and house painters cannot function without a boom-box by their side. In the past, people complained about and derided “elevator music” or “musak” as it was called, but I’d settle for that any day as an alternative to the manic sounds I now have to endure in public places.

Throughout its long history, pop music, with a few exceptions, has not been noted for the fine poetry of its words, nor the clarity with which those words are delivered.

But now, when occasionally I do catch a word or phrase, I usually wish I hadn’t. The “songs,” I use the word carelessly, seem to be constructed from a three word verse, and a one word chorus repeated over and over again, to the accompaniment of a two or at the most three chord “tune.” I cannot bring myself to dignify the wailing by calling it melody.

Because the few words used in any song are unintelligible to me, I give them my own titles. There is the “Cat Song,” so named because all I can get out of it is the chorus, which to my ears sounds like Miow miow miow, muh muh, miow miow miow. Then there is the “Elvy Song,” which does in fact contain a phrase I can understand – “It’s goin’ to take some time,” immediately followed by “elvy, elvy,” for whatever reason I know not. Then there are the recordings that don’t actually have lyrics, but are distinguished by the performer repeatedly vomiting into the mike and ending the piece by having some form of seizure.

The performers themselves are a pretty sad bunch. Almost all of them complain that the only thing the recording company executives are interested in is making money. To which I say, get real guys. How do you think your publicists, agents, roadies, stylists, drug habits, girl friends, law suits and divorces get paid for if your product doesn’t make money? And if not money, what actually is it you’re interested in, fame, a place in the artistic gibberish hall of fame - what?

Almost more frustratingly irritating than the “music” its self, is that educated people, who should know better, give it credibility by treating it seriously in quasi-scholarly reviews and articles. I guess it’s forgivable in such publications as “Rolling Stone,” which, let’s face it, practically owes its existence to pop music, even though, in more recent times, it has garnered respect from more substantive reporting. But most significantly for me, even the highly respected New York Times sees fit to publish long, intellectual dissertations on the contemporary equivalents of “hey nonny, nonny no.”

A large part of the listening public’s disenchantment with the recording industry’s product is, I believe, that they are saturated by the availability of music wherever they go, and I apply this to pop and classical music listeners alike. The most worthwhile examples of either genre were never intended to be in everyone’s ear, all the time, everywhere. They most often are best appreciated as “performance pieces” in concert, before a live audience, a couple of times a year at most. Like the printed word, or a work of art, they are enhanced by the space around them.

Ever since the demise of the Motown sound, black performers, particularly the women, have adopted a style of singing rooted in the Gospel tradition. More recently, white female singers have climbed onto that same band wagon. Well, as I said earlier, most pop songs should never be played outside an arena or concert hall, and by the same token, the shrieking, wailing departures from the written melody that characterize the gospel style should be left where they belong, in a Baptist church.

It has just been announced that Boy George has been refused a visa to entertain in the USA. Yea! There really is a god. And just so that you know I’m not a complete misanthrope, I’ll confess to being a closet fan of Radio Head - serious, innovative writers and performers in a far from serious medium.

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