In a post awhile back on great jazz clips on YouTube, Rusty made an interesting comment. When I stated that the jazz we remember today is a much-filtered and refined sample of all the jazz that existed back in the mid-century, and that I doubted whether a similar tradition-formation was happening with rock ‘n’ roll, he answered, “I believe we are doing the same thing to rock that was done to jazz oh-so-many years ago. It may not be Devo in the long run, but Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and a small cadre of bands seem to have a staying power that surprises me.”
He’s right, they do have a staying power, and it surprises me as well. I was a hard-core Pink Floyd and Zeppelin fan in college, and I attended one of the few “The Wall” concerts they gave (I think the entire U.S. tour was a week in New York and a week in Los Angeles). But when I listen to “The Wall” today, it sounds like a mix of adolescent resentment and pretentious sensitivity, and some of Robert Plant’s love/lust sounds are downright embarrassing (although the drumming of Bonham on “Achilles Last Stand,” “Kashmir” . . . is great).
This issue is more than a matter of taste, though. It’s a temporal matter.
Isn’t it odd that popular music from the 1960s and 70s echoes on so many radio stations and loudspeakers without sounding antiquated or old-fashioned? The music was recorded up to 50 years ago, and yet it seems contemporary and ordinary. When a song from 1965 sounds out in a chain restaurant, not many people perk up and remark, “Hey, listen to that old stuff from before I was born.”
Think of it this way. We hear music from 40 years ago without blinking. What would have happened if in a bus terminal in 1970 a song from 1925 played on the speakers? Not a 1960s version of a song written decades earlier, but something actually recorded in 1925 — Eddie Cantor doing “If You Knew Suzie (Like I know Suzie)” or “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby,” by Ace Brigode & His Fourteen Virginians (I got that one off of Wikipedia).
Sure, there were oldies stations and Big Band music here and there, but they were just that: a decidedly old thing. It doesn’t seem that we think of “Hey Jude” and “LA Woman” and “Gimme Shelter” like that.
Fans of popular and mass culture might attribute that condition to the Sixties marking an explosion of free creativity and social energy, and that it’s continuance proves its worth.
Perhaps, though, popular music in the Sixties formed a dead end of a particular kind, freezing popular music in genres of rock and its spin-offs.
