The World is Collapsing Around Our Ears: Some Thoughts of the Decline of Popular Music

by John Broening (September 2015)

The difference between the two “Just the Way You Are”s encapsulates what has happened to songwriting, and consequently to popular music, in the last 35 years.

The state of popular music today has much in common with the state of popular music in the early Fifties as well as the state of popular music before World War I.

The one redeeming note was ragtime, which inspired the first song considered part of the Great American Songbook, Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band.

As in the early Fifties and the pre-WWI era, we are now in a fallow period, a time of retrenchment and retreat. The recording industry has shrunk by 7 billion dollars since the 2000. As in the heyday of Mitch Miller, it is the producer, rather than the songwriter, who is paramount, and who puts his imprint on the song.

The great flowering of Sixties and Seventies popular music, similar in some ways to the Great American Era of the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, would not have been possible without the strong musical foundation of gospel.

Compared to a gospel–trained popular musician, the rapper often has no musical training at all, often just a sense of rhyme and rhythmic flow coupled with a talent for self-promotion. Usually the music is given musical coherence in the studio by a producer.

Broadway, the source of so much of the Great American Songbook, has not fared much better.  Marvin Hamlisch died in 2012, and Stephen Sondheim, the last Broadway composer with a direct link to the greats (he was a protégé of Oscar Hammerstein), is a genius, but he rarely writes songs that are detachable from their dramatic context. The traditional well-made Broadway show has all but disappeared, and has been replaced by the anthology show, like Mamma Mia or Jersey Boys, in which, instead of original tunes written by theater composers, has a book built around the greatest hits of an established pop artist. The standard lives on, barely, in the watery pastiches written for Disney movies that show up in the Best Song portion of the Oscars.

What is remarkable is that the thread of tradition in songwriting which persisted from the turn of the last century to end of the Seventies seems to have been snapped. This has not happened because today’s artists are unaware of the music of the past or even insufficiently respectful of it.

Today, with Prince retreated into eccentricity, Stevie Wonder as neutralized as any living monument can be, R. Kelly drowning in a cesspool of his own creation, and jazz long-dead, with its most famous name, Wynton Marsalis, more of a museum curator than a creator of new sounds, there is no one.

The greatness of American music has always about been about the greatness of American popular music and the vitality of American popular music has always been dependent upon the vitality of black music.

This is a highly unusual state of affairs. Think for example, of the year 1977 and think of two popular bands, say, Parliament /Funkadelic, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. One a popular black band, another a popular white band: one a funk/group ensemble, the other a pseudo-classical progressive band. No crossover, right? Different audiences, different styles of dress, completely different music.

The default style of popular singing nowadays – heavily melismatic, overwrought, syncopated – is a debased version of soul singing. It is the style you find on X Factor and America’s Got Talent and on the recently cancelled American Idol, and has even seeped into Broadway and into country music.

As the popular music critic Greil Marcus has noted in a passage about Beyonce, melisma once used to approach authenticity, as it is employed nowadays is the singer’s voice looking at itself in the mirror. Beyonce, Jennifer Hudson and Mariah Carey don’t so much try to find the song’s emotional truth as to bash it into submission.

But there has been one singer and songwriter of recent times who fulfilled the promise of the popular song, who reached back into tradition and made it as contemporary as a tweet, who had Ronnie Spector’s beehive and the tats of the girl on the bar stool next to yours and a voice that blended Aretha Franklin and Billie Holiday and just about every other great American blues-based singer.

John Broening is a freelance writer based in Denver, Colorado. His writing has appeared in Gastronomica,  Departures, The Baltimore Sun, The City Paper, The Faster Times and The Outlet and his article on the Noble Swine Supper Club was featured in Best Food Writing 2012.

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