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Who speaks to the common listener?

Yesterday I sought gently to chide the young fellow in charge of booking musical talent at Morehead State University, hoping they might use their muscle to bring more interesting sounds to our little town. He turned the tables and asked who I thought they could afford who the freshmen would have heard of, and of course I had no ready answer. More to the point, he said they'd surveyed the students and THEY had no consensus, that twenty percent wanted one kind of music, twenty percent wanted another, and so on; and that within each of those segments there was no ready agreement.

My brother, responding to a previous entry here, wrote: "I haven't heard anything approaching music which could appeal to what Copland referred to as The Common Man in many years, and don't actually think any is being recorded right now. As we discussed when you were in town there is no contemporary rock station in Seattle right now, and I am forced to believe that there's damned little contemporary rock to play even if there were such a station. Can it be that the Offspring are the last American rock 'n' roll band? Say it ain't so!"

Leaving off his dubious taste (although he did bring both Waylon and AC/DC into my life, and Hoyt Axton, and Weather Report, so who am I -- the guy who still likes Styx, occasionally -- to throw stones?), Bryson has a point. Otherwise Tom Gillam and the Bottle Rockets and several dozen other worthies would at least be driving nicer cars right now.

So does Ed Ward, in a longer note I will condense slightly:

"There hasn't been a consensus artist in popular music since the Beatles broke up. Why do you think Beatle-stalgia is as widespread and pernicious as it is? Why, for that matter, do you think John Lennon was shot? 

"The nature of the way music was sold in the post-Beatle era caused the consensus to be shattered just as the number of consumers was growing. You didn't need to have a hit single any more -- and because you played heavy metal, you weren't going to get one anyway. But you could sell a buttload of records and make more money, potentially, than the Beatles ever did....

"So if you couldn't chase consensus, you could aim for dominating your niche. More and more people were buying records, and being number three in your niche meant fame, power, and money (at least for your manager). Under circumstances like that, who'd WANT consensus? 

"Furthermore, consensus was built on radio, singles, and the charts. Radio went into formats in the early '70s, the average singles buyer went from a 16-year-old with a 60% chance of being female and an 80% chance of being white to a near 100% chance of being a 14-year-old 'minority' female by 1980. Ten years later, singles were dust: it was all about radio play, which meant there couldn't be a consensus because you HAD to aim towards a format, which by definition excluded consensus. 

"I'm old enough to remember those legendary radio stations that'd play Frank Sinatra, the Penguins, Ricky Nelson, the Ventures, Bobby Rydell, the Frank Chacksfield Orchestra, Lonnie Donegan, Brenda Lee, Sam Cooke, Don Gibson, Nat 'King' Cole, the Impressions, and Dion in proportions that would show up, more or less, on the pop charts. That list, in fact, is a bit misleading, because there was way more crap in a given serving. But nobody stopped to think whether Sam Cooke, let alone Nat Cole, was'urban,' and I remember being amazed when I re-encountered Don Gibson as I was discovering country in the early '70s and realizing how many of the songs on his Greatest Hits I recognized from listening to the radio...in New York City. But stations like those were consensus builders. There WERE teenage black girls who hid their Ricky Nelson records!

"Where is the artist who can touch the market? Build me a model of someone like that. I myself can't even conceive of it. 

"Where is the song which will define this age? For whom? 

"Yeah, I hate that it's like that, too, but I do think the toothpaste is out of the tube on this one. Sorry."

I don't have standing (nor the years; not quite) to dispute Ed's reading of history, but even within the increasingly discrete markets of pop music there have been songs (and artists) which came to speak to broad if not entirely inclusive segments of our society. I think of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and Nirvana's "Teen Spirit" and the hoary "Stairway To Heaven" (whatever the hell that song is really about) and even "Behind Closed Doors." Past "Who Let The Dogs Out?" all I can guess as a defining song for the last few years might be something from Eminem, but...I don't pay attention there, and it didn't speak to me. Well, there's one more: Alan Jackson's "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)."

Speaking of toothpaste...I ran onto another troubling comment in the current Mother Jones as part of a one-page essay by Giles Slade called "iWaste": "As Steve Jobs said, 'If you...want the latest and greatest...you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year.'" This appears as part of a larger discussion about the batteries in iPods, which apparently lose half their strength after 13 months of use and are expensive to replace (and are not meant to be replaced by mere mortals at home). And which is part of a larger discussion about the marketing march of new technology, and when we consumers will quit buying in.

But let's just think about the implications of Mr. Jobs' remarks (beyond the iPod's potential as decorative landfill): If the iPod is the platform of choice for the youth of today, and we really expect them to buy a new one every year or so, how much of the potential market for music have we just priced out of the business entirely? And how idiotic is that? Is it any wonder they're not buying more music from iTunes or whomever?

I still have the second turntable I purchased, a pretty decent Thorens with a SME-III tonearm that I no longer remember quite how to align, but use so infrequently that I've agreed not to worry about whatver minor damage that does to my vinyl. And I still don't have an iPod, though I'm grateful to Mr. Slade for providing me with a new excuse. Are we now subordinating music to the gizmos which play it? Or did I just notice...

Posted by grant on February 27, 2007 10:37 AM | Permalink