Nothing New and Nowhere to Play

Has there been no new music since hip-hop and grunge? Or do I not get out much?

Duke Ellington emerged from the Harlem Renaissance, Charlie Parker from the Memphis jazz clubs, Coltrane from the Philadelphia jazz clubs, Chester Burnett from the clubs of West Memphis, before moving to Chicago in the early 1950s where he became Howlin’ Wolf. The New York Dolls, Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Television and The Patti Smith Group wrote songs together, shared band members and got their start at the same three venues: Mercer Arts Center, Max's Kansas City and the CBGB’s. From Motown in the sixties to Laurel Canyon in the seventies, “scenes” have given birth to successive waves of popular music. Wherever grassroots venues have thrived and communities of musicians have been able to experiment, collaborate and play live, these waves have rolled out every decade or so to revitalize and reinfuse stale genres with expressive force—or at least the waves used to roll out every decade or so.

I could be wrong, but it seems like there hasn’t been a new wave of American music since the mid-nineties. Sure, established genres have been rehashed and tweaked, but the changes in those genres have been relatively minor compared to the major shifts of the past, say, over that half a century preceding the nineties. With this halt in the creation of new music, interest in new music has also waned. An article on MarketWatch reported that older music is currently outperforming newer music on the digital streaming platforms. When asked to account for this, one listener, a professional musician himself, gave this description of the newer music that his daughter listens to: “Everything sounds pretty similar right now. You hear one song and then you think, ‘Did I already hear that song before?’”

The other night I was out playing pool and at the table next to ours was a goth girl, maybe sixteen, wearing an Ian Curtis T-shirt. I remembered when I was her age and Joy Division was getting play on the college radio stations. That was about when the band was planning a US tour and Ian Curtis died. At the time, they were still playing small venues in London, like the Electric Ballroom. What struck me, however, was that the music I considered avant-garde and genre-bending at her age is still avant-garde and genre-bending now. And that half a century before I was her age, rock-n-roll didn’t even exist, much less rock-n-roll that expressed the post-industrial, internalized angst that Joy Division did.

Coinciding with the homogeneity of this new music, is the disappearance of the small, live music venues that were once pervasive in metropolitan areas. When I lived in San Francisco during the mid- to late-eighties, there were small venues all over the city. You could go out and see local bands in any genre, every night of the week for less than $5 bucks at the door, if not for free. By the time I left San Francisco in 2000, the tech economy had taken over, rents had skyrocketed and three-fourths of those small venues had been replaced by gourmet restaurants, fitness gyms, juice joints, coffee houses and other such businesses that the techies of that first digital Gold Rush patronized. This disappearance of grassroots music scenes due to gentrification is not solely occurring in the US. A recent report by the Music Venue Trust showed that 40% of all UK grassroots music venues (those with a capacity of less than 400) are operating at a loss. It is being called a “housing crisis” for grassroots music.

This decline in venues coincides with the advent of digital entertainment. Digital connectivity has resulted, not in variety, but in redundancy and cultural isolation. It had not advanced but atomized music. Computerized home studios have replaced the music scenes that pushed folk, honky-tonk, blues, jazz, bluegrass, country and rock-n-roll into the subgenres they now comprise. Isolation has deprived emerging musicians of live audiences, financial support and a community of fellow artists with whom to exchange ideas and approaches. Whether it was New Orleans in the 1920s, Harlem in the 1930s, Nashville in the 1940s, Chicago in the 1950s, Detroit in the 1960s, Los Angeles in the 1970s, New York City in the 1980s or Seattle in the 1990s, music scenes have generated music revolutions over and over until now. With the loss of cultural exchange, cheap living, rehearsal spaces and live venues to support music scenes, there has been a net loss, not of quantity, but of advancement of musical expression.

Musical revolutions, like revolutions in art, are not made by machine; they are made by people playing instruments and exchanging ideas. Whatever machine-made music is now called, disco still sucks. And artificial music is still fueling endless hours of chemically induced dance or serving as a soundtrack for video games and infomercials. It is no surprise that in much of Europe, a place that has had scant influence on music in the last century (RIP, Quintette du Hot Club de France), one is everywhere accompanied by the auditory dogshit called techno. In hotels, cafes, airports, restaurants, markets and behind every single media broadcast, is the endless hiss-hiss-blip-chunk of techno. Anyone who thinks that the sound of a washing machine is “exciting and new” hasn’t spent a day at the laundromat. One note on a real instrument played by a real human is capable of more nuance, feeling and power than millions of notes manufactured by machine. Mechanized music is like gum: you can taste it for awhile and chew it all you want, but you can’t swallow it.

Music is a form of communication that, like language, thrives in a state of exchange. Its means of transmission, being organic and alive, benefit from exposure to new forms. What characterizes American music is its hybrid vigor, that is, the variety of influences that has engendered its unique, expressive power. Johnny Cash recalls having learned the songs of the workers in the cotton fields, as well as the traditional Irish folk tunes he heard on the Jack Benny show. Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, started out playing with the blues guitarist and fiddler Arnold Shulz, who infused blue notes and a blues feeling into the Celtic fiddle tunes they played together. In popular music, what is new is usually a hybrid of older styles that were themselves new hybrids of older styles. Music, like a living organism, assimilates pleasing traits from previous generations and passes them on to future generations. And America, until now, has been the good place for that to happen. It has a large land mass that has been recently populated by immigrants who have introduced a variety of musical styles—African, Caribbean, Latin, Celtic, British Isles and various European folk tunes. It is that variety of musical styles and sounds that has given birth to the unique American genres of blues, jazz, bluegrass, rockabilly, country and rock-n-roll. And this mix of traditional music into those famously American hybrids was accomplished by people playing music together, not by listening to Spotify playlists.

The decline of music communities, or scenes, has in my opinion been disastrous for the vitality of music in all genres. I know that it’s easier to sit in the privacy of your own home, avoid the crowded bar and save on ridiculously inflated prices for everything involving a night out. I know that if you do go out, you probably won’t see anything that you couldn’t have seen thirty years ago for next to nothing. But I also know that going out and paying $50 bucks to see something old is going to be better than watching the Elton John and Bernie Taupin: Gershwin Prize on PBS. Not that I didn’t like Benny and the Jets when I heard it fifty years ago. Just that a cringe-inducing, retrograde pageant of the vanities, has nothing to do with music. All it does is bring home the fact that “the revolution will not be televised.”