I’m going to take one more crack at this, and then I’m going to leave it alone.
The folks who complain about popular music today; the ones who say “it’s just garbage”; the ones who say “it’s leading young people astray”; the ones who say “it’s not music; it’s just noise” – they’re wrong; they’re completely wrong, and here’s why:
Three things to understand:
To begin with, popular music is a reflection of the time.
The mood of a culture; the priority it gives to things; the concerns of that culture; the expressions of that culture in style and talk and even dress; the morals of that culture; its taboos – all those things become expressed in the popular arts (music; dance; literature; etc.) that culture embraces. When Elvis Presley burst on the scene with his, then, outlandish hair style, swivel-hipped dancing, and borrowings of black music, he was shocking adults (television wouldn’t show him below the waist) but youngsters just flocked to him because he was reflecting what they were already into. The young black singers in America didn’t invent rap music; that style was developed by black kids in the ghetto rhyming without music about life around them; the popular rap singers just copied it. Notice that even the very black argot they used in their lyrics indicated a “respect” (very germane word in rap culture) for their own lexicon that had emerged among blacks in the US. Reflection, not invention.
Michael Jackson didn’t invent his mesmerizing double-jointed dancing, full of spasmodic movement – that too, Jackson often said, came from kids he saw in the ghetto. The music of Bob Marley, wailing against injustice and inhumanity in his homeland, is Marley holding a Jamaican mirror.
Second, popular music is constantly changing because the culture that it reflects is itself constantly changing. An Elvis Presley wasn’t possible in the USA in 1945 because the culture he would later reflect hadn’t arrived. In the less virulent Martin Luther King era of civil rights in the US, the popular music of the day was soul and r&b; when black people in America became more strident and aggressive, look what happened – rap music emerged. Change of reflection.
Third, it is driven by young people. They are the ones who are out there on the cutting edge of the culture – the adults are chasing careers or raising a family – and they are the first to spot the differences. When cultural shifts take place, young people are onto them like flies to salara. They make stars of the artists who reflect the change; they buy their records; they attend the concerts.
This concept of reflection is essential to understanding popular music tastes that bother us. The behaviours our popular artistes extol are drawn from what they have seen or heard in the environs of their lives. In other words, the conditions of life the people know are contained in the music their creative people are giving them, which is why they relate to it. Eminem is talking about the disjointed, sordid life he’s been through; his audience has been there, too. He’s not imagining anything. He’s telling you how it is. (And by the way, before somebody writes me about Eminem: “black” is not a colour; it is a culture. So that USA Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is “white”; the rapper Eminem is “black”. You with me?)
If you know Jamaican culture at all, you know that Buju Banton’s homophobic views are not going to draw wide condemnation in that country, no matter how many countries in Europe may ban him. Buju is not directing public opinion; he’s only presenting it.
I was frankly stunned, for a day or so anyway, when the current spate of chutney songs glorifying rum first appeared. How could Caribbean people be buying these records and eulogising these singers? The answer is that in large sections of those societies, that behaviour is part of their cultural life.
Sexually suggestive win’ing (the white people call it “pelvic thrusts”) which is an essential ingredient in soca music presentations, has been repeatedly condemned for its lewdness, but crowds continue to be galvanized by it, even when children are involved. There, as well, the answer is that the majority of the concert public dance that way – another reflection.
There are many other factors at play in music popularity (performer charisma; media push; topicality; new direction; etc.) and a critical one today is danceability which is there in the modern emphasis on drum and rhythm – lyrical as well as musical – but the major impetus is one of relevance to the current majority culture.
In the long run, cultures do not remain static; they change. (Understand that individuals may differ substantially from all this, and we’re not talking about isolated aberrations, such as some Amerindians slaughtering sea turtles; we’re dealing with the behaviour of a major group, or, to put it another way, what the majority position of a culture is on things within that culture or things outside it.)
In a free society, by the simple action of majority choice, each culture, in its behaviours, reflects what those choices are in its arts. So the behaviours and ideas you see in the popular music of a culture are a reflection of what already exists in that culture. In effect, it is them. Remember that as you rail against those expressions. The tension and anger of a dancehall track is a sound that the poor people of Kingston can identify with. The grinding slum conditions of the Baltimore “hood” are synonymous with the rage and hatred of gangsta rap. People who see heavy rum-drinking in their daily lives, see no problem in a song about it. In fact, in each of those scenarios, the psychologist will tell you that release from tension is at play in those musics, and that it is a key ingredient in their appeal.
Generally, it is very difficult to try and eliminate these things once they become popular, and that is a truism in any open society. One approach is to hold strain and, as was the case with the folks who hated rock-and-roll, wait until the fever for it wanes, and a new popular music arrives behind some cultural shift.
For the many who are distressed by today’s music, there is a small consolation: what is popular today will fade and a new music will come along. It’s guaranteed. Of course, what follows dancehall or rum-drinking chutney may be even more aggravating.
Unfortunately, in modern life, more often that not, so it go.
