The Day the Music Stiffed
A valediction on popular music I’ll tell you exactly what day it was when ‘the music’ died, and Buddy Holly had no involvement in it whatsoever. ‘The music’ was still being born when he had his plane crash (but he endowed it with some welcome DNA). No, music still had a long way to go back in February 1959: all the way to the ‘toppermost of the poppermost’ (to quote a mildly successful quartet) and all the way back down again. The day the music died, and I can say this with immense precision, was January 15, 2007. It had been diagnosed as terminal as early as the previous November, when the record responsible first began to receive airplay on Radio One. By December, it had topped the MTV Two/NME video charts (like anybody even cares what they were or are – I’ve derived these statistics from Wikipedia), but its official release date was January 15 2007. On that day, for me at any rate, ‘the music’ was declared moribund, dead and buried, case closed. The ‘levee’ of original...