Whatever Happened to Good Music?
by Pavlov MacTavish,,
Department of Technocultural Studies,
Greater Freelton Area College of Applied Arts and Technology
In a previous article I noted that as the quality of technology for playing recorded music has increased, the quality of the music played on it has decreased. As I noted in that article:
Over the past 40 years technology for recording sound has improved enormously. At the same time, the quality of the music it records has declined. Those of us who can remember listening to Aretha Franklin on one of the tinny transistor radios of the 1960s will always, and justifiably, prefer that experience to listening to Madonna or Britney Spears on CD. Twenty to thirty years before Aretha Franklin, though, fans of popular music were listening on devices inferior to the transistor radio to artists of the stature of Benny Goodman.Further research here at Greater Freelton has discovered that technological change was not merely correlated with the deterioration of popular music, but was in fact responsible for it. New technology changed popular music because of two characteristics that earlier technology did not have – portability and privacy.After World War II radios eventually became so small that you could carry one around easily in your hand or afford to have one installed in your car. That meant that people started listening to the radio outdoors, where they were exposed to much more ambient noise than in their homes. For example, in a car you have the noise of the motor to contend with, and in the street the noise of traffic, people talking, and so on. As a result, the softer parts of recordings become inaudible.
Record companies and radio stations dealt with this by technically altering their recordings to make the soft parts louder and the loud parts softer. However, that doesn't work very well with either concert music or with postwar small-group jazz, which depend on wide dynamic ranges. When the jazz saxophonist is taking his solo, for example, he should stand out strongly against his accompanists. Important parts of concert and jazz pieces remained inaudible when played over car and portable radios. So concert music and jazz, the two most serious forms of music today, disappeared from the radio, and later failed to turn up on the playlists of MP3 players.
Then manufacturers of transistor radios started putting earphone jacks in their products and supplying earplugs with them so that you could listen without disturbing others. A public-spirited act, to be sure, but one with further disastrous consequences, for popular music.
Over the years the old single earplug has evolved into double earplugs and headphones. Because these play into both ears they shut the listener off entirely from the outside world – in New York, the subway system is posting warnings to users of MP3 players that when they're listening to their MP3 players they are not aware of any danger around them. Musically it has meant that people are now less likely than before to be exposed to any type of music other than music they're already familiar with, and what they're familiar with is likely to have been decided for them by some transnational programming service. No longer will they have the opportunity to overhear music played on someone else's radio that they've never heard before and which they find interesting, for example.
Nor do they have the opportunity any longer to be exposed to the helpful advice of connoisseurs of music, advice like "That music stinks, you should be listening to this" – especially because there are fewer people around who are familiar with good music, anyway. Perhaps more realistically, they don't strike up conversations with other people interested in music and find out what they like.
Instead, people wander around listening to what they've always listened to. Little girls who like Britney Spears grow up liking singers who sound like Britney Spears. Perhaps more shockingly, many baby boomers who liked the Rolling Stones 40 years ago still like them today. Having grown up with earplugs they never developed the curiosity necessary to find out who the Rolling Stones were copying and to listen to those people. If you're a diehard Stones fan, listen to Irma Thomas's version of "Time is on My Side" and try to find any musical characteristic of it which is not superior to the same characteristic of the Rolling Stones' clumsy attempt to copy the song.
Alas, time has not been on music lovers' side. If current trends continue, in about thirty years microscopic, fully programmed MP3 players will be implanted in newborns' brains, and that will be the only music they listen to for the rest of their lives. And, if current trends continue, it will all be rap music.
Whatever Happened to Good Music? © John FitzGerald, 2006
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