Where did all the catchy tunes go?

I don't know anything about popular music anymore, but these two articles of mine from 2001 seem pretty prescient.

Here are a couple of articles I wrote two dozen years ago that still seem reasonably prescient about trends in popular music:

“Where did all the catchy tunes go?” by Steve Sailer

UPI – January 9, 2001

Where did all the catchy tunes go? The recent Grammy Award nominations set off the usual head scratching over how to decide between offerings from wildly different genres of music.

For example, who is more deserving of the Album of the Year award: vile young rapper Eminem or beloved old codger Paul Simon?

Yet, the Grammy nominations also inspired a more subversive thought: hit songs just aren’t as catchy as they used to be.

Now, this could just be the nine millionth example of a baby boomer complaining about the unsatisfactoriness of modern young people. Granted, yet consider that the record buying public seems to agree. For example, in the Jan. 13 Billboard album chart, the Beatles’ “1” is, fittingly, Number 1, again, three decades after the group broke up.

Now, endless ink has been spilled explaining the sociological significance of the Beatles — how they were the perfect representatives of their era.

Okay, but the ’60s were a long, long time ago. So, why are people born in the ’70s and ’80s (and even ’90s!) buying Beatles records today? The simplest answer would seem to be: The Beatles wrote really catchy tunes.

“Okay,” you might be saying, “But the Beatles were unique, immortals, once-in-a-century talents. They are probably natural exceptions to the rule that songwriting talent should be a constant over time.” Maybe.

But consider that the biggest selling album of all time in America is the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975.”

While there’s still a lot of myth and hysteria surrounding the Beatles, there never was any involving the Eagles in the first place. They were just a bunch of guys who wrote a lot of good melodies. Maybe a John, Paul, George, and Ringo only come along once in a lifetime, but a Don, Glenn, Bernie, the other Don, Timothy, etc. never impressed anybody as unique genetic marvels.

The population keeps growing, so how come the number of people who can write good tunes keeps declining?

Or consider Broadway. “Rent” was the most celebrated musical of the Nineties. Why? Because, everybody marveled, it had five good songs! Of course, back in the Fifties, quite a few musicals, such as “My Fair Lady” and “The Sound of Music,” offered ten or more songs that you could hum on your way out of the theatre.

Or, think about the Grammies. Notoriously, these awards tend to go to lame, behind-the-times acts. That’s because most music is bought by people still going through the throes of puberty. Yet, you aren’t allowed to vote for the Grammies until you’ve been in the music industry for so many years that you can no longer stand the stuff that you’re helping to churn out.

For example, the first five Record of the Year awards (from 1958 to 1962) did not go to Buddy Holly or Marvin Gaye or the Beach Boys. Instead, the following Old Fogy records won: “Volare,” “Mack the Knife,” “Theme from a Summer Place,” “Moon River,” and “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Pathetic, huh? Yet, with the exception of the instrumental “Summer Place,” these are all great songs to sing in the shower.

In distinct contrast, here are the most recent winners. “Smooth,” “My Heart Will Go On,” “Sonny Came Home,” “Change the World,” “Kiss from a Rose,” and “Streets of Philadelphia.”

Yeah, I’ll be singing those in the shower forty years from now. Sure I will.

Or take 1977, the year that punk rock and new wave broke through. That style was supposed to be all about raw anger colliding with lack of training and even lack of talent. Yet, by current standards, the classics of 1977 are downright catchy. The Ramones’ “Teenage Lobotomy” has three separate hooks.

“Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” has only one tuneless song out of twelve. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones’ shout-along melodies for “The Clash” can still stand comparison to early Lennon and McCartney. And compared to what we hear today in “alternative rock,” Elvis Costello’s “My Aim Is True” sounds like the second coming of Irving Berlin.

I can’t imagine any reason why fewer natural songwriters would have been born in recent decades than in the middle of the 20th Century. And I can’t imagine that young people are less motivated to write enduring songs today. After all, the money is wonderful. Berlin was collecting royalties on “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” up to 75 years after he wrote it.

No, I suspect contemporary songwriters have simply run into diminishing returns. Their predecessors have just used up most of the melodies that are easy to find.

Heretically, this suggests that the reason the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Dozier-Holland-Dozier of Motown wrote such a prodigious number of great tunes is not because they were vastly more talented than current songwriters.

Instead, they were like the first miners to get to California gold fields in 1849. They just got there first.

Of course, this theory has been in disrepute ever since the great philosopher John Stuart Mill dreamed it up in 1826. During a long battle with depression, Mill sought solace in music. He wrote in his “Autobiography,” “I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty.”

Many thinkers have had a good laugh at Mill’s expense. MIT cognitive scientist Steven Pinker wrote,

“At the time [Mill] sank into this melancholy, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff had not yet been born, to say nothing of the entire genres of ragtime, jazz, Broadway musicals, blues, country and western, rock and roll, samba, reggae, and punk.

We are unlikely to have a melody shortage anytime soon because music is a combinatorial system. If each note of a melody can be selected from, say, eight notes on average, there are 64 pairs of notes, 512 motifs of three notes, 4,096 phrases of four notes, and so on, multiplying out to trillions and trillions of musical pieces.”

Still, as Pinker hints, the number of appealing patterns within each genre is far more limited. To make an extreme example, the Ramones invented modern punk rock around 1976. It was so quickly exhausted as a source of new songs, however, that their most talented disciples, the Clash, completely abandoned the punk songwriting format on their famous late 1979 double album “London Calling.”

Punk languished until the late Eighties. Then Kurt Cobain of Nirvana revitalized the genre by slowing it down. This allowed Cobain to better display his considerable gift for writing catchy hooks. Yet, even under it’s new name of “grunge,” by the mid-Nineties, most of its obvious songwriting opportunities had been used up again.

Most genres are less limited than punk/grunge. So, in them this cycle happens more slowly. Still, all the main popular music genres are getting creaky.

Rock in general is about fifty years old. “Alternative rock” is the name they had to change “new wave” to after it became the old wave.

Rap, rock’s great tuneless rival, is now in its fourth decade. The first Top 40 rap hit was the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” way back in 1979.

The good news is that eventually somebody will dream up new styles that will open up new veins of melody. Unless, of course, they’ve reached diminishing returns in inventing new genres.

And:

End of the singer-songwriter fetish by Steve Sailer

UPI – January 10, 2001

The constant pitter-patter of the music industry congratulating itself on TV — the American Music Awards, the VH1 Awards, the Grammy nominations, and on and on — tends to blur long-term trends.

But one fundamental shift in popular music is now clear. The long stranglehold of the singer-songwriter fetish on the public’s taste is finally eroding.

Pop music is returning to a pre-rock style division of labor. Before Bob Dylan made it mandatory for songwriters to prove the authenticity of their tunes by croaking them out in their own voices, pop music was made by teams of specialists.

In the 1950s, no one had looked down on Frank Sinatra for singing a Cole Porter tune arranged by Nelson Riddle and played by outstanding session men. It would have seemed as silly for Sinatra to pen his own jingles as for Marilyn Monroe to write her own scripts.

Of course, the recent revival of specialization has yet to produce much to compete with Sinatra’s Capitol Records Sessions. Instead, we’ve gotten mostly Britney Spears lip-syncing to Max Martin ditties.

Still, contemporary stars have far more demands put on them. Spears doesn’t have time to write songs, for example, because she is too busy changing her clothes. While hosting the American Music Awards, she appeared to have undertaken a costume change for almost every award.

The crush of media demands can be so overwhelming today that few singers older than Spears or Christina Aguilera have the stamina to meet them, unless you’re Tina Turner.

Further, the top pop acts today emphasize complex choreography far more than the rock stars of the 1960s and ’70s.

The black groups of the past that took choreography seriously, like the Temptations, tended not to write that many of their own songs, either. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau of “Doonesbury” fame and others used to ridicule Gladys Knight’s Pips because they didn’t conform to their romantic prejudice that a performer should be an all-around creative artist rather than a highly professional expert in his field.

Today, however, stylistic descendents of the Pips, such as the Backstreet Boys and N’ Sync, rule the charts.

Further, the decline in prejudice against singing other composers’ songs has gone hand in hand with the ’90s’ obsession with “divas.” The new tolerance for greater specialization has allowed women with athletic voices, such as Celine Dion and Whitney Houston, to retake the spotlight after a long period ruled by men.

Even today, there are few comparable male vocal talents. The country singer Randy Travis is one of the few examples of a male singer who is a star simply because he has great pipes.

The roots of the singer-songwriter fetish stretch back to the early days of rock and roll. This new kind of song was simple enough for a young performer to compose and arrange. Chuck Berry, for example, sang, played guitar, and wrote his own lyrics. Berry’s piano player, however, recently sued him for royalties on the music to “Johnny B. Goode” and the other classics, which he claims — with some evidence — to have written for Berry.

Buddy Holly wrote some of his own hits in the late ’50s, but far fewer than the “The Buddy Holly Story” indicated. This 1978 movie felt compelled to portray Holly as a ’70s-style singer-songwriter. In reality, Holly’s producer, Norman Petty, contributed at least as much as he.

Still, even up to 1964, the notion that there was something fake about a performer who didn’t write his own material was almost unknown. Elvis Presley did enjoy co-writing credits on many of his hits. That, however, was simply because Col. Tom Parker shook down any songwriter who wished to have Elvis perform his new composition. The composer had to give up half his royalties in return for Elvis making it a sure hit.

Berry Gordy ran Motown like a ’30s movie studio. Smokey Robinson could have sung his “My Girl” himself, for example. Yet, it made better sense for the label for the more vocally gifted Temptations to record it.

The incredibly prolific trio of Dozier-Holland-Dozier wrote endless hits for the Supremes, the Four Tops and others. Yet, they are little known today because they stayed behind the scenes.

Seeing themselves as a tribute band, the early Rolling Stones had no interest in writing new songs. They believed the Mississippi Delta bluesmen had written all the songs worth singing. There would be something sacrilegious in English kids trying to write new rhythm and blues tunes.

In fact, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards didn’t start writing until their manager locked them in his kitchen and told them they couldn’t come out until they had written a song. After eating all his food, they finally decided they didn’t have anything better to do than write.

In the mid-’60s, the tide turned. Ably preceded by the Beach Boys, the Beatles vividly showed that it was possible for rock musicians to sing, play, and compose well.

Yet, Dylan was the true revolutionary. When his imposing “Like a Rolling Stone” broke through to the mass audience in 1965, he showed that it was possible for a songwriter to sing wretchedly — and get away with it. In fact, audiences admired his incompetence. They felt it made his songs sound more “real.”

While this became a tremendous era for stylistic innovation, the cost of Dylanism came in a decline in singing quality, especially among men. Lyric-writing deteriorated as well, with lyrics becoming increasingly incoherent. Of course, the drugs didn’t help, either.

The change in taste can be quantified by comparing the top-10 selling albums of the ’60s to the ’70s.

Until the late ’60s, youths bought 45 rpm singles, while only affluent grown-ups could afford 33 rpm LP disks to play on their cabinet-sized stereos.

That’s why in the ’60s, only two of the top 10 albums (the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s” and “A Hard Day’s Night”) consisted of songs written by the performers. By the ’70s, however, the singer-songwriter obsession had triumphed. Of the top 10 albums of that decade, only the soundtrack to “Grease” was written by specialist composers.