I was talking to some people at a party yesterday, and we were talking about music. The people at the party were almost all my age or older, so there weren’t too many folks there under 40. No one there listens to “popular” music.
We were discussing why that was. I was talking about the fact that most popular music today is based not on the melody, or the lyric, but on the beat. Modern “composers” are only concerned about the rhythm. They don’t seem to be concerned with melodic, lyrical, harmonic or emotional content. It is very interesting to me that when modern singers, such as Queen Latifah, want to reach inside and sing really powerful songs, they turn to classic tunes from Cole Porter, the Gershwins, and the like. Why? Because modern popular music just isn’t concerned with writing music like that.
Also, most popular music today makes very little, if any, use of traditional instruments such as saxophones, trumpets, clarinets, trombones and the like. When I was growing up, you heard tunes with those horns in them on the radio all the time. Not any more.
Where do the high school or younger kids get the inspiration to play these instruments? Not from what they hear on the radio. It seems to me that we have to turn that around. Modern music needs to include these instruments and the melody and emotion in music. That is the only way we’ll keep it alive. How do we do that? In later posts I’ll discuss some ideas I have, but I’d like to hear yours. Leave a comment and let me know what you think about this.
