In my kindergarten class picture, there is one kid wearing a white dress-shirt and tie.Guess who?
This wasn't actually just because I thought it was such a formal occasion. A major part of my motivation was an excuse to dress up like the coolest guys on TV – Steve McGarret from Hawaii 5-O, and, er, Maxwell Smart from Get Smart.
At the age of 4, I didn't really understand much of what was going on in 5-O (Get Smart was generally followable for a toddler, I'm sorry to say), but there were two things I certainly understood about the show: Jack Lord's McGarrett was infinitely cool, and the show's theme music/opening credits excited me royally. The tempo and energy of the groove energized me, and the melody and chord changes whisked me away to exciting mindscapes. Perhaps it was an early, addictive high from this natural drug we call music.
Zooming ahead forty years, I was idly wiki-ing Hawaii 5-O (in this internet age, the question “what ever happened to...” is now so easily and thoroughly answered...), and I read that the newly-re-made series not only resurrected the original show's theme music, but it re-created the Honolulu montage, all fast-cuts, zooms and iconic images.
I had to check this out. Cue Youtube.
So the opening credits were now squeezed down to one minute from the original two (no repeat-with-key-change – gotta save that valuable time for commercials), but they kept the hula dancer, the jet engine, the speeding motorcycle, the fly-in to the penthouse where McGarrett is introduced, adding a slightly cheesy 'high-tech' gunsight targeting graphic to the visual mix...and the music?
The melody remained, now re-orchestrated with a fuzzy electric guitar in unison with the winds...but the inventive chord changes?
Gone.
The whole thing is played over one chord now. You could play it on the bagpipes (perhaps if there's an 'Edinburgh 5-O spin-off?). Nothing against bagpipes, but even their greatest adherents would admit the Pipes are a bit harmonically limited, what with four drones maintaining the same chord from beginning to end of all songs...but I digress.
I picked up this month's issue of “Classic Rock”, which makes a consistent effort to introduce its readers to new acts in addition to the obligatory articles on Cream, Zeppelin, Humble Pie, et al. This month's issue came with a couple of sample CD's of new music, which I was quick to check out.
Holy hackneyed harmonies, Batman! Every 'new' act seemed to be working from the same cookbook: Start with one pentatonic riff, guitar, repeat; layer with second guitar before introducing one-item-on-menu rhythm section. Vocalist then shouts angrily and curses pentatonically about abuse he has suffered and his toughness. Add sing-along chorus in similar vein, repeat and finish with a decisive stomp. No fade-out's here.
Coincidentally, Classic Rock's editor was crowing this month about how his magazine is now the second-best-selling monthly music periodical in the UK, overtaking Q and Uncut.
I certainly don't begrudge Classic Rock its success – it's a well-written, well-researched publication that actually does provide a lot of variety (this month's features including Jack Bruce, the Pixies, Kiss, Metallica, the Temperance Movement) with plenty of flair...but I was struck hard by the deeply formulaic, conservative nature of the 'new' music sampler. Is the cross-section of new rock acts so limited, or did the editor simply choose acts that fit into an extremely narrow set of parameters? And...does it matter?
Walk into any dance club, coffee shop or fashion outlet these days, and the canned background music will likely have either the simplest, minimal chord changes or (the closer you get to modern dance music) none at all – one chord for the whole song, like bagpipes. Orchestrations often show imagination these days, and catchy melodies ('though still pretty simple) are in evidence – but everything else built for public consumption seems designed to avoid provoking any higher brain function.
The question is: does the public generally prefer simpler musical structures, or is the simple stuff just produced in much greater quantity or pedalled more aggressively by cynical record labels?
I'm certainly aware that a sure way of putting an audience to sleep is playing over their heads. I don't believe in musical complexity for the sake of it, and prefer songs that can do innovative (or at least imaginative) things with the harmony, melody or rhythms without alerting the average listener to anything but distinctiveness. Ironically, that's why I still have abiding respect and affection for the original theme from Hawaii 5-O – to my ear, it took the listener to imaginative places without tipping off the listener to anything but good toe-tapping going on. Hey, if it could fire up non-musically-trained toddlers, you couldn't fairly call it intellectually demanding.
Now I know there are plenty of musicians out there who understand harmony/chord changes better than I ('though I suspect most of them would be jazz musicians). The simplification trend isn't likely due to a dearth of capable composers. My tentative and somewhat disturbing conclusion is that nifty turns of harmonic phrase are simply out of fashion at this time, in the same way imaginative vocabulary, sound sentence structure and even accurate spelling are bordering on dowdy. It's literally all too cool for school.
From this point in time, two very different things could happen. Fashions in music and speech will continue as they are – increasingly less original and less challenging - or the pendulum will swing back the other way. There is certainly plenty of cause to believe either scenario. Folks who made their names and fortunes songwriting in the '40's lamented the relatively brain-dead rock and roll of the '50's and '60's*– and a typical dance hit today is hardly more inventive than, say, “Wooly Bully” (1965). Still, there have been waves of fashionable inventiveness, from the Beatles' '60's to the prog/improv rock of the '70's, the '80's songsmithing of the Police, the Squeeze and Crowded House, and even the way-outside-the-box of plenty of grunge bands of the '90's. The general public might not like being intellectually challenged, but they do like a fresh change every so often. Meanwhile, 'though I'm happy to see a magazine like Classic Rock outsell magazines about current club hits, I'd hope Classic Rock remembers what made rock classic – in the day, it was subversive, challenging, edgy, a little disturbing. Circulation couldn't be hurt by sampler CDs full of music that takes you somewhere new...or at least Honolulu.
*There is a story that shortly before his death in 1955, jazz god Charlie Parker came to hear a friend's gig. The friend was attuned to the winds of commercial change, playing saxophone in a newfangled rock and roll band. During a set-break, the guy noticed his saxophone had gone missing. Rushing out the exit to catch the thief, he found Charlie Parker playing the horn as he sauntered down the alley. “Sorry, man”, Parker explained, “I just wanted to see if it could play more than one note.”
This wasn't actually just because I thought it was such a formal occasion. A major part of my motivation was an excuse to dress up like the coolest guys on TV – Steve McGarret from Hawaii 5-O, and, er, Maxwell Smart from Get Smart.
At the age of 4, I didn't really understand much of what was going on in 5-O (Get Smart was generally followable for a toddler, I'm sorry to say), but there were two things I certainly understood about the show: Jack Lord's McGarrett was infinitely cool, and the show's theme music/opening credits excited me royally. The tempo and energy of the groove energized me, and the melody and chord changes whisked me away to exciting mindscapes. Perhaps it was an early, addictive high from this natural drug we call music.
Zooming ahead forty years, I was idly wiki-ing Hawaii 5-O (in this internet age, the question “what ever happened to...” is now so easily and thoroughly answered...), and I read that the newly-re-made series not only resurrected the original show's theme music, but it re-created the Honolulu montage, all fast-cuts, zooms and iconic images.
I had to check this out. Cue Youtube.
So the opening credits were now squeezed down to one minute from the original two (no repeat-with-key-change – gotta save that valuable time for commercials), but they kept the hula dancer, the jet engine, the speeding motorcycle, the fly-in to the penthouse where McGarrett is introduced, adding a slightly cheesy 'high-tech' gunsight targeting graphic to the visual mix...and the music?
The melody remained, now re-orchestrated with a fuzzy electric guitar in unison with the winds...but the inventive chord changes?
Gone.
The whole thing is played over one chord now. You could play it on the bagpipes (perhaps if there's an 'Edinburgh 5-O spin-off?). Nothing against bagpipes, but even their greatest adherents would admit the Pipes are a bit harmonically limited, what with four drones maintaining the same chord from beginning to end of all songs...but I digress.
I picked up this month's issue of “Classic Rock”, which makes a consistent effort to introduce its readers to new acts in addition to the obligatory articles on Cream, Zeppelin, Humble Pie, et al. This month's issue came with a couple of sample CD's of new music, which I was quick to check out.
Holy hackneyed harmonies, Batman! Every 'new' act seemed to be working from the same cookbook: Start with one pentatonic riff, guitar, repeat; layer with second guitar before introducing one-item-on-menu rhythm section. Vocalist then shouts angrily and curses pentatonically about abuse he has suffered and his toughness. Add sing-along chorus in similar vein, repeat and finish with a decisive stomp. No fade-out's here.
Coincidentally, Classic Rock's editor was crowing this month about how his magazine is now the second-best-selling monthly music periodical in the UK, overtaking Q and Uncut.
I certainly don't begrudge Classic Rock its success – it's a well-written, well-researched publication that actually does provide a lot of variety (this month's features including Jack Bruce, the Pixies, Kiss, Metallica, the Temperance Movement) with plenty of flair...but I was struck hard by the deeply formulaic, conservative nature of the 'new' music sampler. Is the cross-section of new rock acts so limited, or did the editor simply choose acts that fit into an extremely narrow set of parameters? And...does it matter?
Walk into any dance club, coffee shop or fashion outlet these days, and the canned background music will likely have either the simplest, minimal chord changes or (the closer you get to modern dance music) none at all – one chord for the whole song, like bagpipes. Orchestrations often show imagination these days, and catchy melodies ('though still pretty simple) are in evidence – but everything else built for public consumption seems designed to avoid provoking any higher brain function.
The question is: does the public generally prefer simpler musical structures, or is the simple stuff just produced in much greater quantity or pedalled more aggressively by cynical record labels?
I'm certainly aware that a sure way of putting an audience to sleep is playing over their heads. I don't believe in musical complexity for the sake of it, and prefer songs that can do innovative (or at least imaginative) things with the harmony, melody or rhythms without alerting the average listener to anything but distinctiveness. Ironically, that's why I still have abiding respect and affection for the original theme from Hawaii 5-O – to my ear, it took the listener to imaginative places without tipping off the listener to anything but good toe-tapping going on. Hey, if it could fire up non-musically-trained toddlers, you couldn't fairly call it intellectually demanding.
Now I know there are plenty of musicians out there who understand harmony/chord changes better than I ('though I suspect most of them would be jazz musicians). The simplification trend isn't likely due to a dearth of capable composers. My tentative and somewhat disturbing conclusion is that nifty turns of harmonic phrase are simply out of fashion at this time, in the same way imaginative vocabulary, sound sentence structure and even accurate spelling are bordering on dowdy. It's literally all too cool for school.
From this point in time, two very different things could happen. Fashions in music and speech will continue as they are – increasingly less original and less challenging - or the pendulum will swing back the other way. There is certainly plenty of cause to believe either scenario. Folks who made their names and fortunes songwriting in the '40's lamented the relatively brain-dead rock and roll of the '50's and '60's*– and a typical dance hit today is hardly more inventive than, say, “Wooly Bully” (1965). Still, there have been waves of fashionable inventiveness, from the Beatles' '60's to the prog/improv rock of the '70's, the '80's songsmithing of the Police, the Squeeze and Crowded House, and even the way-outside-the-box of plenty of grunge bands of the '90's. The general public might not like being intellectually challenged, but they do like a fresh change every so often. Meanwhile, 'though I'm happy to see a magazine like Classic Rock outsell magazines about current club hits, I'd hope Classic Rock remembers what made rock classic – in the day, it was subversive, challenging, edgy, a little disturbing. Circulation couldn't be hurt by sampler CDs full of music that takes you somewhere new...or at least Honolulu.
*There is a story that shortly before his death in 1955, jazz god Charlie Parker came to hear a friend's gig. The friend was attuned to the winds of commercial change, playing saxophone in a newfangled rock and roll band. During a set-break, the guy noticed his saxophone had gone missing. Rushing out the exit to catch the thief, he found Charlie Parker playing the horn as he sauntered down the alley. “Sorry, man”, Parker explained, “I just wanted to see if it could play more than one note.”