Someone approached me out of the blue this week outside a store on Sheriff Street to ask for advice on the music business; he was not a musician, but interested in recording and was wondering how to proceed. We got into a short but intensive chat about the music industry today confirming once again, something I’m always prattling about, how much the content of what we call popular music has changed in the last 30 years or so. Most of the popular music of this time, the songs we hear on the radio, and from the DJs, and from neighbourhood music sets playing for parties, in other words what is popular now, is a very condensed and stripped down form of song production where the emphasis, in many cases, is a powerful drum track, often with very few other instruments, sometimes not even a bass, and very rhythmic vocal renditions, often with just a single voice, and this is where the young man’s interest lay.
Flowing from that, of course, one is reminded indeed of how far removed the popular music of today is from that of 30 or 40 years ago, and music lovers are very quick to cite examples to prove their point; I hear it all the time. The fact remains, however, that the musical fare we have now is what the folks in their twenties or younger want, and that’s the end of that story, but to reflect on the popular music style of long ago is very enlightening.
I recall a man outside National Hardware who had me, as we say in Guyana, hol’ down, making his music criticism by referring to Tammy Wynette’s country classic ‘Stand By Your Man’, with its intimations of “soul” music and a very dramatic vocal. It’s a good example of the
