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20 March 06.
Picked up a copy of Blue Swede's "Hooked on a Feeling" the other day. The reader will recall the song as the one with the a capella "ooga chaka ooga chaka" opening.
That lasts about ten seconds, and then it switches to disco horns.
Darn it, every time I hear a song from way back, I'm worse off. In my head, I'd edited out the embarrassing horns and synths and just kept the fun parts.
The easiest way to sound bad a decade from now is to follow to the cutting edge of technology. In the 60s, this included any of a number of electric tricks, like the advent of effects boxes on electric guitars and tape effects in the studio. In the 80s, it was synthesizers. In the present day, it's digital multitrack editing. Ten years from now, we'll say `you see how it's got fifty gratuitous layers and yet sounds perfect and sterile? Must've been recorded at the turn of the millennium'. And who can forget the advent of the drum machine in the early 90s, or the advent of keyboards that could actually play some dynamics in the early 1800s?
Some bands are ahead of their time. When My Bloody Valentine comes up on the playlist, people think `oh, how late-90s', but their amazingly high-tech albums came out in 1988 and 1991. It just took the mainstream six or seven years to catch up. I recall the first time somebody loaned me a tape of Loveless. I put it on my walkperson and was convinced that it was broken. After a few tries I stopped playing the tape because I was worried it'd get eaten.
Eventually, the technology becomes accepted and becomes just another tool. All sorts of modern songs use 80s-quality synthesizers, but since they're no big deal now, they aren't the center of the song. When people say that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sounds like a 70s song or an 80s song or something, they're picking up on choices that were at some point trendy but are now used as just another instrument to be mixed and matched, like harmonica on synth. In that respect, the dated music of any given period is the necessary step of incorporating new technology into the repertoire, and we're better off for it. Of course, the experimentation and overuse phase can be overdone. I don't know if slap bass will ever be usable in a song without evoking disco.
As I'm typing this, Pink Floyd's Wish you were here popped up on the playlist, and it's as fine an example as any of a song that doesn't sound dated. It's from 1975, but it doesn't sound thirty years old because the great majority of the song is just vocals, a twelve-string guitar, bass, and percussion. Low tech.
The Velvet Underground's Velvet Underground stands out in their catalog as one of the two albums that anybody still listens to (really, when's the last time you listened to Loaded all the way through?). The band's cutting-edge effects boxes and other toys were stolen at the airport, so they had to play their songs stripped of the sort of fashion that pervades Lou Reed's work without John Cale. The band was thus forced to make a timeless record that still sells today instead of a trendy amusement.
Low tech never goes out of style. For any given year, you can find a guy with a guitar: Simon and Garfunkel, Bob 'Dylan' Zimmerman, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Scud Mountain Boys, Iron and Wine, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. The liner notes will say something about the resurgence of that old school sound, but if it never disappears it's not a comeback.
One can come up with occasional examples of when the music as written gets trendy (like the bossa nova), but it's the embellishments and tricks on top of the music that makes for trendiness. As Mr. Billy explains: "I dug beneath the wall of sound./ I wound up right back where I started./ The song is always the same." The technology provides novel means of evoking states in the listener, but in the end it's up to the creative powers of one person or a small group to make the technology evocative.
Letras The other method of dating yourself is by opening your mouth. In Wish you were here, the lines "did you exchange/ A walk-on part in the war/ for a lead role in a cage" seem a pretty clear reference to Vietnam War protest. There are still wars to be protested, but the line always sets me back a few decades anyway. I love The Goats' Tricks of the Shade, a well-written hip hop album from 1992 which frequently complains about President Bush. I know they weren't happy about it, but Bush protest songs have scored an extra eight years of relevance. Randy Newman's "Louisiana, 1927", about a flood and an apathetic president ("Louisiana./ They're trying to wash us away."), should have been playing on a continuous loop after Hurricane Katrina. But hey, political music is an aural newspaper; it's supposed to get dated.
The 70s also had that unfortunate dungeons and dragons-style balladry thing going, not-unrelated to 60s self-conscious psychedelia. In the 80s, there was a whole host of songs about how you're a creature of the night, as a soundtrack for the clubbing yuppie ("You belong to the city/ you belong to the night/ living in a river of darkness/ beneath the neon light.") The second person has been underused in pop ever since.
Lyrics matter because they do indeed affect the emotional setting of a song. If the singer is attempting whisk the listener away to a YMCA in the 70s or a rave in the 90s, then you'll go, feeling dated through the whole ride. That means that club music is very likely to become dated even though the instrumentation is usually uncontroversial and the lyrics fundamentally universal ("Dear Listener: Please shake your booty").
80s gothdom is an interesting case study. Primarily, the stuff from the 80s that survives today and does not play solely for kitsch value is the gothy stuff: I know one or two places that has Cure vs Smiths nights. The instrumentation tends to be generally synthless. The lyrics don't really stand out in any direction---not even the sullenness that these guys are famous for. I mean, the Cure wrote Friday, I'm in Love, and most of the guitar work on the Smiths' albums is the jangliest stuff this side of The Edge at Joshua Tree. I picked up a few Love and Rockets albums (OK, all of them), and kept having to cut danceable tracks from the playlist. I read that all of these guys had a look that was decidedly 80s, but I wouldn't know, since I never look at the album covers. But, in the end, these guys got it right: they didn't overuse cutting-edge technology, and they made some effort to sing about universal themes like love and rocket design.
So pop music doesn't have to wind up dated, but you can see that it's easy for it to do so. Pop is simple music, because it's oriented toward children and dancers, and the easiest way to make a love song in 4/4 time sound original is to use the newest effects and talk about the latest fashions. Nor does this make it bad music. Half of my playlist is songs with instrumentation that followed new technology or lyrics that followed cultural trends too closely, and in a day of headphone-wearing I do wander from sock hops to raves. But the desert island discs, the ones that I keep spare copies of in case of emergency, like Davis & Evans's Sketches of Spain, Arto Lindsay's Corpo Sutil, or R.E.M.'s Reckoning, didn't bother with being cutting-edge.
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on Monday, March 20th, Ms. ALS of SD said
I agree with the potential of "cutting edge" technology to date the music, but I think there are two distinctions to be made. First, the distinction between dating pop music and introduction of a new musical genre. Sure, slap basses are all sorts of disco, but disco was a new genre; the wa-wa pedal basically defines funk, but again, new genre. Not just bells and whistles layered onto existing music.
Now, also, we have the introduction of technology which is used in an avante-guard manner. Take Os Mutantes for instance. All sorts of wacky--and "cutting edge" stuff went on in the Os Mutante's studio. However, when you listen to their album today, you can't tell what era it came from because it's just bizaare. So maybe if it never catches on, not dated? Only if it inundates the decade/defines the era will the use of cutting-edge technology date the album?
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