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 originality and inspiration that had fed popular music since the mid ’50s had finally, and unmendably, run dry.

The record whose release I determine as fixing that date in history was by a band called The View. The who? I had to look them up myself. The song was called ‘Same Jeans.’ The lyrics, or as many of them as I can bring myself to repeat, ran thus: ‘I’ve had the same jeans on for four days now.’ And they did it to the tune of ‘Brimful of Asha’, a song from ten years earlier. And they were singing it as if it mattered, or somehow conferred upon them some kind of status as real rock and roll rebels. Wearing the same pair of trousers for four days? Man, how wild can it get? I mean, even if the jeans in question had been worn continuously (which the song failed to specify) it’s hardly a paradigm-busting event, and utterly unworthy of comment. The day anyone decides it’s worth writing a song about that, and doing so with a borrowed tune from another song, and, more to the point, gets the whole worthless effort released on a record and into the equally worthless pop charts – well, that’s the day the music died, and Buddy Holly can call off his lawyers.

This isn’t an opinion I’ve cobbled together in retrospect: I thought it at the time, and still do today. It gives me a slight sense of satisfaction to report that The View haven’t bothered the charts from that day to this, not that the charts actually matter any more. However, the band is still going, still signed, and sold out their tenth anniversary hometown gig in twenty minutes. Well, whoop-de-doo. I still say they were the final nail in the coffin of creativity in popular music. Rock and Roll, which had once stood for rebellion, non-conformity and invention was now less than a shadow of its former self, a shadow of the kind that, to Punxsutawney Phil, signifies the impending end of winter. Not much of a shadow at all, in other words. What we faced instead was the impending end of pop music, a slow death that's been ten years in the making by now... ten years of vapid, uninspired stratus where we once had mountainous clouds blazing with lightning. Ten years of music with the same jeans on and nothing more to say for itself than that.

Looking at the efforts of today’s crop of pop performers, I think the evidence speaks for itself. Who are the acts that populate the charts of 2018? Does anybody above the age of puberty either know or care? I occasionally visit the website of the Official Charts, purely to look up some statistic of long ago, and their website is crammed with pictures and links to stuff that’s going on in today’s charts, as well as a breathless countdown to the moment at which the next one will be released. I have this laconic message for them: nobody fucking cares, okay? Chart music is a hollow, worthless endeavour reflecting either some sentimental spike in downloads of the dead, or the vacuous posturing of whichever pimped-up teen sensation is strutting their stuff this week. Oh, and Ed Sheeran.

Sheeran proves my point about the moribund state of popular music as well as anyone, and he’s got a punchable face, so why not? The thing is, he’s quite welcome to write and record his twee sentimental tosh in the privacy of his own bedroom, but the importance attached to his songs, and the man himself far exceeds the limits of credibility. In essence, Sheeran is a bearded geek, looking not unlike a junior, ginger version of Oliver Reed (as the Wolfman), who strums a guitar several sizes too small for him, which has been meaninglessly decorated with two pieces of sticky tape. His songs themselves aren’t even worthy of comment. Every one is the same: safe, sanitised, sentimental, more often than not dribbling into his soundhole about how great his girlfriend looks tonight. This is so far from the image of acoustic-wielding singer-songwriter once typified by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, that it seems safe to conclude thet Sheeran has dropped in from a parallel universe where everyone is ‘nice’. Guthrie’s beat-up guitar was famously and threateningly adorned with the words: ‘this machine kills fascists.’ All Ed Sheeran’s guitar can do is sell a lot of rotten Ed Sheeran signature toy guitars. It couldn’t kill an ant, even if you dropped it on one. Balls to the man, and all his kind. Frankly, he could use a pair next time he dons his composing trousers (for four days or however long).

Sheeran himself isn’t entirely to blame. He’s got in through the cracks in a music business so fragmented that nobody even professes to know what’s going on any more. But consider where he is: anyone in a position like that, capable of virtually selling out the ‘top twenty’, with even an ounce of integrity, could use their status as a mass communicator to say something new and relevant that might shake their snowflake, millennial fans out of their mental torpor. ‘Get off the internet and do something real’, he might say, but he doesn’t. Instead he continues to burble on about how wonderful his girlfriend is. Words fail me. And in their absence, he can just fuck off.

Maybe it’s unfair to single out Ed Sheeran. I suppose he can’t help being popular (although he could certainly try). There are many others out there guilty of crimes against music that are just as bad, and even worse. I’ve long felt that there is a tendency amongst songwriters of any era to kind of ‘go with the mode’. That’s just a slightly abstract way of saying they rip off what others have done before them, but if you listen to the popular music of any era, you’ll find there’s always a kind of ‘zeitgeist mode’, a tendency towards certain melodic and harmonic forms and rhythmic structures that lends many pop songs a ‘samey’ quality. It’s pretty well all we’ve got left now, certainly judging from the state of Radio Two’s daytime playlist. But it was in place back in the 1950s: just listen to any two random rock and roll songs from the era, and you’ll immediately detect familiar musical tropes, chord changes, guitar arpeggios, you name it. Then as now, the worst offenders were playing a fairly worthless game. There have always been innovators, way out ahead of the pack, playing by their own rules. Amongst them we can list The Beatles, Bacharach, Dylan, Johnny Cash, Jimmy Webb and many others. But not everyone is on the hotline to inspiration, and for some, whose jobs depend on it, churning out another pop song becomes a matter of checking out what else is going on and doing something similar in the hope of getting a hit. This is how genres evolve. It’s also how dross multiplies.

At time of writing, there have been so many wretched variations of a single chord/melody idea possibly originated by Adele around a decade ago that one can pretty much guarantee any new record trumpeted on the Ken Bruce show is going to adhere rigidly to that same vapid, worthless formula. Consider all the effort that is required to record a song, release it, and get it played on air, then think of all that time and money expended on some piece of dross that will be heard, liked for five minutes, downloaded by the gullible, and instantly forgotten, forever. So much time and effort, wasted. To those involved, I say this: go and do something more worthwhile. Stop writing songs, and stop kidding yourself that you can. Go away and re-learn music from scratch, because you’re adding nothing to the sum of it, and that which doesn’t add to a quantity merely dilutes it.

The whole point of this rant is simply this: that old ‘hotline to inspiration’ has long since been disconnected, and I don’t hear many artists trying to reconnect with it. Why should they? Ed Sheeran knows that whatever he releases will top the download charts pretty well the minute it comes off his ipad. This being the case, there is no longer an incentive to be any bloody good. If half-arsed drivel sells like hot cakes, and takes no effort to create, you’re onto that old winning formula of money and old rope. So the artists who can guarantee to sell their music have stopped worrying about whether it’s any good or not. Meanwhile, those who still believe in integrity and originality simply don’t get a look in.

Music as a commodity is nearing the end of its life, certainly in the way we’ve known it for the past six decades. The idea of singles and albums is being eroded by the ubiquity of downloads and streaming, and actual songs don’t sell in anywhere near the quantities that they once achieved. The successful artist, rather than releasing their tour de force, is now forced to tour (I nicked that one from Richard Hawley). And on tour, they will, invariably, be expected to churn out their greatest hits. Nobody wants to hear new songs at a gig. Nobody. Touring is now the big cash cow in the music business, as ticket prices head up into the rarified atmosphere of hundreds or thousands of pounds where once you could get into a gig for mere shillings. Managers and promoters have realised that people will pay through the nose to see an iconic, successful artist. And so it goes...

Pop music is dead. It has absolutely nowhere left to go. All the exciting discoveries, the lightbulb moments of insane inspiration lie in the distant past. You can’t be the first man on the moon more than once. Every time I see an act being promoted as something new, different, original, it takes just seconds to confirm that they’re only doing what artist x did forty, fifty years ago. You can argue that even The Beatles started out as imitators, but they didn’t stay that way for long, and back in 1962 there was still all to play for. Pop music has become a confusing, byzantine network of artists and genres, and sub-genres, with no clear coherent identity, no sense of purpose, no direction. As a commercial endeavour, its days are numbered. As an outlet for creativity and originality, it is as good as bankrupt.

What will replace it? If we look, we can already see the seeds of the post-pop landscape beginning to push through the barren ground laid waste by a decade of X-Factor, downloads and hollow posturing nobodies. Music was once, long ago, an unpaid endeavour, performed by wandering minstrels who might receive the occasional spread of cakes and ale in acknowledgement of their efforts. And this is its future. Our wandering minstrels now do so in a virtual sense, online: some of them stream live performances from their bedrooms, and instead of cakes and ale they get likes or positive comments on YouTube. Money? Don’t make me laugh.

They’re probably all playing the usual worthless sub-Sheeran songwriter dross, but like it or not, this now is the model for how music will be produced and consumed in the future. You do it, you upload it, you hope people like it. Earnings do not figure anywhere in the equation, unless you somehow successfully monetize your YouTube upload. Pigs may also take up aviation.

The only hope is that the talentless multitude, the attention-seekers and wannabes who all think that anyone with an acoustic guitar can write a hit song at the first attempt, and are only moved to do so out of a pathetic need for self-aggrandizement: their kind will wither away in the face of failure and indifference. Only the fittest will survive: those who write songs because they feel a need to express something real, something valid, something that will withstand the vacuum of online and industry apathy; those who write and perform not out of a need for attention but because they are driven to it by, I don’t know... how about talent?

Take it from me. Popular music is dead. I’ve seen the corpse. It’s still walking, but it won’t for much longer.