[Dixielandjazz] comments on music and popular culture

Tue Aug 28 07:30:37 PDT 2007

Listmates:  this is a LONG article, not specifically OKOM, but comments on
societal changes which have also changed musical listening habits of
Americans.  It's from Chronicle of Higher Education, a subscription journal,
and you're getting it FREE.  I found it stimulating-main point  is that
musical listening has gone from a community event to essentially private.
Read the story to get the details.

Norman-we still successfully present good music to an audience in
Pensacola-Vickers

Where Have All the Rock Stars Gone?

The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7.6.22
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i42/42b00601.htm

By DAVID SHUMWAY

James Brown's death last December was a much more pointed, and poignant,
marker of the changing role of popular music in American culture than the
current exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art celebrating the 40th
anniversary of the Summer of Love.

While the San Francisco counterculture did exemplify the importance of music
to the 1960s youth movement, Brown stands out as one who became more than
just a musician. He was not only the inventor of funk and the Godfather of
Soul; he was also Soul Brother No. 1, a leader about whom Look magazine
could ask on its cover, "Is this the most important black man in America?"
Today there is no popular musician, black or white, about whom something
similar might be said. Brown's televised concert in Boston the day after the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated helped prevent riots in that
city, while Los Angeles and Detroit burned. His "Say It Loud -- I'm Black
and I'm Proud," released later that year (1968), became the anthem of the
black-power movement. Through it all, Brown never made stylistic concessions
to attract a crossover audience, yet, as he himself observed, he lived the
American dream, going literally from rags to riches.

James Brown, like Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, "Bob
Dylan," Aretha Franklin, and the Grateful Dead, was and remains a cultural
icon. Those performers and others of their era had broad cultural currency;
they had meaning for people who did not like or even listen to their music.
Is there any figure who has emerged recently in popular music of whom that
can be said? This is not meant to be one of those laments about artistic
decline, in which the younger generation is compared unfavorably to the
great achievements of past ones. I have no doubt that more recent
generations of performers may be more skilled and at least as talented as
their musical forebears. Rather, my point is that the cultural position of
popular music and its stars has diminished.

Popular music, of course, remains a very important part of young people's
lives. Many of our students seem attached to their iPods as if they were
life-support systems. But the prevalence of iPods illustrates a reason why
popular music has lost its centrality. The 1960s equivalent technology to
the iPod was the car radio, but the radio was public while an iPod is
private. Not only did young people ride around listening in groups, but
everyone listening to a station -- or, indeed, during the heyday of the Top
40, to almost any station -- heard the same records. Even in the late 1960s,
after bands like the Grateful Dead became influential without benefit of AM
radio, such music was still often experienced communally around a stereo,
usually while sharing a joint. Now, each listener creates his or her own
playlist, taking individual songs and, typically, ignoring their
presentation within an album.

It sometimes seems as though this new technology is the major change in the
popular-music scene. People may therefore assume that the continuing decline
in CD sales represents merely a shift to music downloads. In fact, the
decline is greater than that explanation would allow. People are buying less
music today than in previous years. While the effects of downloading are
often discussed, it's not just the music-delivery system that has changed.
What we have long considered to be mass culture has increasingly become a
collection of niche cultures. That is true for media in general, as the
three broadcast television networks became the 100- plus channels of digital
cable or satellite, and mass-circulation magazines like Life gave way to
special-interest periodicals, both in print and on the Web.

In popular music, the decline of a genuine mass audience has meant that it
is harder and harder for a performer to attain recognition beyond his or her
niche. Those whose recordings now top the charts usually seem to be the
least culturally significant, often lacking either the musical distinction
or the political commentary that one can still find among less popular
performers. But the bigger issue is that even this music reaches a small
fraction of the total audience. One could argue that the term "popular
music" itself has become outdated because no style of music reaches a broad
enough audience. My undergraduate students typically know the music from my
college years -- the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin, and
so on -- but it is often difficult to find more than a few who are all
familiar with the same current releases. As a result of this audience
fragmentation, popular music and its performers have lost the cultural
centrality they once enjoyed, and that means that fewer people are
interested enough to pay for the product.

This is not to say that music celebrities now fail to inspire great devotion
in their fans. Celebrity, if anything, has become a larger element of
popular culture since the 1960s. But celebrity is not the same as stardom.
The phenomenon properly denoted by the word "star" is best illustrated by
the movie stars of the 30s and 40s. Stars like Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart,
Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant transcended both the particular parts they
played and the medium itself, and in the process became cultural icons. They
stood for various qualities associated with physical beauty, successful
personality, or even personal integrity (in the case of stars like Shirley
Temple and James Stewart), and they provided people with compelling models
with which to identify. They were typically understood to deserve their fame
because of their talent, skill, or inherent magnetism.

Popular singers and jazz musicians were also stars during that period, but
they were much less prominent than movie stars, in part because popular
music was understood to be of special interest to youth rather than to the
population as a whole. But neither music nor movie stars before the end of
World War II were understood as having much political significance. The
production code kept political controversy out of the movies, and
Hollywood's contribution to wartime propaganda was regarded as patriotic
rather than political. The love songs that Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra
crooned threatened no one. In that era, popular culture was sometimes
regarded as morally suspect, but it was not thought to play a role in
political controversy or in society at large.

After the war, that began to change. The cold war and the accompanying
domestic red scare suddenly made popular culture controversial. The leading
star of the postwar era, John Wayne, was popular mostly because of the
political positions with which he was associated. The movie industry
committed itself to presenting America only in a positive light, but,
ironically, the need to compete with television led the movies to risk
controversial subjects, such as anti-Semitism, homosexuality, and juvenile
delinquency. In Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean, one of the most popular
movie stars of the 1950s, came to embody the delinquent, helping to set the
stage for the first great rock 'n' roll star.

When Elvis Presley was dubbed the king of rock 'n' roll in 1956, he had no
intention of becoming a political symbol, but he couldn't avoid it because
of the ways in which he unintentionally defied society's definitions of
race, class, and gender. Because of his popularity -- no performer had ever
before reached as large an audience -- Elvis unwittingly had a huge social
impact. In the process of becoming America's first rock star, Elvis began to
change how the nation perceived popular music and musicians.

Elvis and his introduction of what came to be known as rock 'n' roll to a
white, mainstream audience solidified the association between youth and
popular music. By the 1960s, the music helped to establish for teenagers a
powerful sense of generational identity. As Todd Gitlin put it in his
history of the New Left (The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage), "It was
rock 'n' roll that named us a generation." Were it not for the upheavals of
the 1960s, the significance of rock 'n' roll would probably have been no
greater than that of ragtime or swing. While the civil-rights movement
peaked and the New Left, the antiwar movement, the counterculture,
second-wave feminism, and gay liberation emerged in the 60s, the student or
youth movement was referred to more generally as including activism in favor
of many or all of those causes. Music was the glue that held young people
together, something shared that transcended any particular politics except
that of youth itself. The Woodstock festival could bill itself as "three
days of peace and music," and the connection was obvious to anyone who might
consider attending.

The vast popularity of the Beatles played a role in this new perception,
especially since they attracted a college-age audience to rock 'n' roll. But
"Bob Dylan" is certainly the central figure in the emergence of rock 'n'
roll's cultural importance. "Dylan" had established himself as the leading
young folk-music performer and as a writer of powerful topical songs. When
he went electric in 1965, he gave to rock 'n' roll a seriousness that it had
hitherto been denied. That was not because "Dylan's" rock songs were
explicitly political, as his folk songs had been, but because he presented
himself as an artist and his music as art. Under "Dylan's" influence, the
Beatles also began to see themselves as making art, as their increasingly
innovative albums, starting with Rubber Soul (1965), attest. The ambition to
produce not only art but great art spread even to already-established
groups: Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys reportedly began working on Pet
Sounds after hearing Rubber Soul.

While not everyone was willing to concede that rock 'n' roll was art, the
media began to treat it as if it were. English majors named "Dylan" their
favorite poet, and some poets agreed he should be considered one of their
number.

Finally, and perhaps most important, "Dylan's" lyrics became a major part of
the rhetoric of the New Left, less because of what they said about politics
than because of what "Dylan" represented -- the power of a generation to
express itself. Rock 'n' roll became the soundtrack of "the movement," and
the music became increasingly associated with marijuana and LSD, both of
which were understood to be more than just recreational. They were touted as
having the potential not only to temporarily alter an individual's mental
state, but also to permanently change public consciousness. Stars like the
Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix embodied that conception
of personal and cultural transformation.

By the early 1970s, rock stars had moved from the margins to the mainstream
of American popular culture. The Rolling Stones were the epitome of the new
entertainment royalty. The word "entourage" may have first been used about
the retinue of staff, friends, celebrities, and other assorted hangers-on
who accompanied them on their tours of 1969 and 1972. Truman Capote -- then
himself a significant celebrity in the wake of the success of In Cold Blood
and by virtue of his assignment to cover the Stones' 72 tour for Rolling
Stone magazine -- appeared on TV talk shows with gossip about the band and
the excesses of its decadent lifestyle. Robert Greenfield, then the
associate editor of Rolling Stone's London office, who also covered the 72
tour, wrote: "With the golden days of Hollywood long gone, and the movies
having given way to pop music and pro sports as America's prime fantasy
obsessions, a new kind of star had come along. The rock star."

It is symptomatic of the current popular-music scene that the Rolling
Stones' 2005 tour was the largest-grossing such event in history, at
$162-million; their 2006 tour ranks third, at $138.5-million. While U2's
2005 tour grossed $138.9-million, no newer groups have come close. Mick
Jagger remains a bigger star than any performer who has emerged in the last
20 years. Bono, whose political advocacy in the courts of real-world power
has expanded his reach, may have been the last rock star to capture the
imagination of a broad spectrum of the public. But even this case reveals a
change. Bono's advocacy does not seem to be of a piece with his role in U2,
the way, say, John Lennon's antiwar activism seemed to be a natural
continuation of his role in the Beatles.

The rise of rock stars in the 1960s meant that popular music would be
treated differently afterward. Performers would never again be dismissed out
of hand as mere purveyors of silly love songs. Even today, the news media
are inclined to assume that popular musicians have something to say about
serious matters -- and many of them do. But the fragmentation of mass
culture has meant that they are able to say it to smaller and smaller
portions of the population.

The fate of hip-hop may be the best illustration of the increasing
marginalization of popular music and its impact on American culture. Hip-hop
is arguably the last great innovation in popular music, the successor to
ragtime, jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock 'n' roll. All of those forms
emerged out of African-American culture and changed the tastes of Americans
of all races. Hip-hop also attracted a large audience of young white
listeners, but it did not come to dominate public consciousness the way its
predecessors had. That has less to do with the particular qualities of
hip-hop than with the fragmentation of the market. Most Americans didn't
hear the music routinely, so it remained foreign to their ears.

Early hip-hop stars like Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy were at least as
critical of American society as "Dylan" ever was, and they led some
commentators to imagine hip-hop artists as authentic and politically
significant spokespeople for poor, urban African-Americans. But in the last
10 years or so, even though hip-hop artists like Jay-Z are popular music's
most innovative contributors, the form has become less political, and its
performers seem less culturally central.

In a different, more unified market, hip-hop stars might have become leaders
like James Brown. As it is, popular music seems headed back to the margins
of cultural life, and that is a loss for all of us.

David Shumway is a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at
Carnegie Mellon University. He is finishing a book on rock stars as cultural
icons, to be published by New York University Press.