I was watching YouTuber Rick Beato and felt myself drift trance-like to a time when music had an unmistakable power over me. Nearly five decades ago, I was covering live music for an Atlanta area paper, the Purple Cow. I had a coveted press pass that got me into the front-stage enclosure to see Led Zeppelin.
Jimmy Page was bracing for his guitar solo on "Stairway to Heaven." If I reached out, I could touch his pant cuff; I was that close. Someone passed a Thai stick and I remember the thought, “if I must leave, let it be now dear Lord because life can’t conceivably get better than this.”
And then I re-entered terra-firma to tune into Rick’s convincing opinion about how music is getting worse and has been made too easy to consume. Rick is my age, a seasoned musician and producer, a heavyweight inside YouTube music circles. Most of what he criticized reflected the stale machine rhythms and lyrics of no consequence (especially if you understand them). I was nodding with Rick. Indeed, popular music does faithfully reflect popular culture — and vice-a-versa.
I grabbed my teenage (musician) son for a quick sanity check, and asked, “How many miles away from reality has your Dad drifted?” He knows what I mean. This is a father on the contours of desperation, perceiving a great gap between a more brazen, creative culture of yesteryear and a barren, throwaway culture of today, along with a need to pontificate about it. My son is familiar with Rick Beato. To my relief he concedes that Rick “is somewhat right.”
His concession is that Rick had made a good point: that music is super easy to consume. I chimed-in with, “that’s right — I worked for my music” and my sermon unfurled from there. About how I worked after-school jobs and stacked my dimes and quarters until I had enough to buy a record album; its selection, cover art, liner notes, even removing that cellophane was part of a cherished ritual. And then lowering the needle onto the first song and closing your eyes to create a space for the artist’s musical story.
What happened to ritual? To the hard-won sacred pact sewn between the listener and the minstrel?
One answer is in an email Rick shared from a subscriber: “I wrote a song. I think it can be a hit. Please listen and let me know that you think. I used AI to hear it because I know nothing about making music.” I would have replied that the subscriber ought to read his email very slowly facing a mirror and wait for the epiphany.
How did McCartney and Lennon write “Eleanor Rigby” or Paganini “Caprice 24”? Somewhat irrelevant and beside the point in the age of AI. All that is necessary is to sample a handful of Bob Dylan’s songs and you too can be an overnight Spotify sensation. The creative muses are left to wither, muzzled and blind-folded.
Each and every day, more than 100,000 new songs are added to streaming platforms. It would be a stretch to refer to most of those songs as music. Should I be made to apologize to call it homogenized background noise or poorly digested quantized drum parts with some keyboard MIDI loop packs tossed in the mix?
My son’s patience had worn thin. I paint with too broad a brush. Nothing out of the ordinary. I submitted a final plea: “As songs cascade by, one will stand out, catch your ear. Stop whatever it is you are doing, close our eyes and enter the music, let the notes escort you to some far-off place.”
And yes, I do know there is some really good music on streaming services. Laufey, a sensational jazz voice from Iceland. Her “From the Start” has more than 125 million streams primarily for a Gen Z audience on Spotify. Good music with a huge following. “Jazz!! is!! back!!” she gushes. If I close my eyes and listen, she might make a believer out of me, might whisk me back to see Page’s velvet cuffs and listen to his double-neck guitar soar once again.
After years of globetrotting, Todd J. Broadman finds himself writing from his perch on the Palouse and loving the view. His policy briefs can be found at US Renew News: https://www.usrenewnews.org
