David Brooks thinks American music culture is fragmented and incoherent

[BurtWorm]

Do you agree with him? Never mind that David Brooks is a jackass, do you think he has a point about the state of American popular music, or do you think he's as full of shit on this topic as he is on every other one? (See the core of his argument below.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/opinion/20brooks.html

It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.

If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.

Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.

And Van Zandt is doing something that is going to be increasingly necessary for foundations and civic groups. We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

[alarimer]

1. I don't much care for David Brooks

But I think he might have a point. But I think the real problem is corporate crap music. Most radio stations in this country are owned by a handful of stations. MTV no longer even plays music very much. Major labels only sign the kind of pablum that will sell boatloads of CDs.

What Steven van Zandt is doing is just great. His station on Sirius is pretty good too. He's right about many musicians not knowing much about the origins of their music. And of course music appreciation is not generally taught in schools, where you learn about all different music. When I took it in college, it was only about classical music. Which is fine, but only a slice of the musical pie.

I do hear a lot of Americana bands that play a huge variety of styles and have a lot of knowledge about the origins of it. Of course they only get airtime on public radio and satellite.

For me it comes down to corporatization. The Oh Brother soundtrack sold millions of copies without any airplay and with no respect from Nashville and the CMA so people want something different.

I know that Brooks was trying to extend him metaphor to society at large. We like labels and categories. A lot of the fragmentation is a marketing thing. As for radio, when the playlists are so short and limited, there is very little room for things that cross genres.

[BurtWorm]

3. I do love the Garage.

If I have a niche, that's it. But I happen to think new media have made access to all kinds of music more possible than ever. No one is dictating what music you listen to. You can explore whatever strikes your fancy, from any genre and any age.

I actually think we're at the beginning of a music revolution. My mixes range from Les Paul and Dinah Washington to The Fall and Os Mutantes to Gnarls Barkley and Yo La Tengo. No longer is my range of interests limited by my ability to afford vinyl or CDs, or by the tastes of certain disk jockies. If I want to hear something, I go on line and find it. This is a golden age for me.

[alarimer]

4. I actually prefer Disorder

I haven't listened to the Garage much. I think it's the variety that I enjoy. I love David Johannson's Mansion of Fun. He is a student of music history so he might play an aria from Madame Butterfly followed by Johnny Cash. It's weird but fun.

That station has mad me seek out lot of different kinds of music. I've always been interested in lots of different kinds of music. I blame KPIG for that. I used to listen to that station when I lived out there.

The internet has made it easier to find things you like. I listen to a ton of music podcasts and I discover things that way as well.

[BurtWorm]

8. I love that kind of mix, where there are no walls between genres and eras

and songs follow songs because of themes or sounds.

I recall there being much higher walls between types of music when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. If you listened to rock, you tended not to listen to R&B, country, oldies, folk music or classical--or to admit to it, anyway. It was a badge of honor for punk rockers to hate disco and disco lovers to hate punk.

Then again, the kind of free-form radio Johannsen is reviving was invented when FM came along in the 1960s. I used to listen to a station based in Lewiston, Maine, in the early seventies in which the Beatles might be followed by Coltrane, who would be followed by a song from the Wizard of Oz, which would be followed by Black Sabbath. Then suddenly in the mid-1970s, a corporation struck and flushed all the richness out of the joint, and it became Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin all the time--no jazz, R&B, big band or country need apply.

Musicians are usually much more open-minded about other forms of music than radio station owners, certainly, but maybe also the public at large. I can't imagine the natural cross-pollination between musicians ever ceasing to exist (barring the species' ceasing to exist).

[alarimer]

10. I missed all that growing up

For me, it was a choice between Top 40 (which I generally hated) and country (which still kind of sucked back then, at least on the radio). It wasn't until I moved to California that I heard radio stations that were different. KPIG and the local listener-supported radio. This was probably 1990.

Now I almost never listen to radio. Even when I am in a work vehicle, I take my Ipod so I don't have to listen to the crap on the radio. And we lost Air America here too, so there isn't even that to fall back on.

[unpossibles]

6. "the beginning of a music revolution"

agree 100%. Sure, the corporate whores and masters of yesterday (I'm looking at you, Gene Simmons) are confused and confounded by the new technologies, but I think we've gotten to the era where people can create and share music of any kind very quickly and easily, and love the possibilities therein.

[MrScorpio]

2. Even a broken clock is right twice a day

Corporatism has ruined American popular music culture.

Pure and simple

[regularguy]

5. I love todays music scene,

and I say this as someone who grew up in the seventies and loved that music too. I like the variety...there's just so much incredibly interesting music out there. I'd like to see more creative musicians not have to have day jobs, but that's not a new situation. I guess I'd agree that there is less creative music on the radio or the idiot-box, but so what? The Cannon will take care of itself regardless of whether or not SVZ forces kids to experience his youth culture.

[Withywindle]

7. Despise Brooks, adore Van Zandt.

Brooks is right about fragmenting subcultures and all, but I think he's wrong about why and what it means.

For one thing, corporate culture sucking all the life out of music and actually promoting ignorance has been around for a long time. When I was a kid in the early 80s, I had classmates who had never heard of Bob Dylan or Led Zeppelin--because all they listened to was the Top 40 station, and those artists didn't have Top 40 hits that week. OTOH, I also knew kids who traded mix tapes of obsure punk and metal bands with pen pals through the mail, and I had a zine of my own in high school. (Cut-and-paste, Xerox--oh, pre-Internet lost art forms!)

There's always been a divide between people who care enough about music to research it, and those who don't. The former group always winds up "fragmenting" a bit, because the first thing anyone doing any independent research about music discovers is that most of what's played on commercial radio is a tiny iceberg tip of utter crap compared to the vast wonders beneath the surface. This is true in every genre I can think of. So it's passion that drives people to specialize, not snobbishness.

Of course the internet has made this process of finding new stuff MUCH easier and cheaper for everyone. It's also made it easier for artists to get their work heard without the corporate industry structure--if not necessarily easier to make a living at it, alas. (The indie-label movement of the 80s and 90s set a good groundwork for this.) This has squeezed the big labels hard, and to maximize their dying profits they become even less adventurous and more profit-oriented than they were before, and their product even more creatively-inbred and manufactured as they try desperately to at least hang on to that "listenership" that doesn't care about music much.

So I don't see this "fragmentation" as necessarily a bad thing at all. I see it as healthy diversity. As much as people can wax nostalgic about how the Beatles seized a whole generation at once, if that moment really happened as they remembered it, it was an aberration that probably won't be repeated, and that's OK.

[alarimer]

9. You are right about fragmentation not being a bad thing

Diversity is good. Someone like Brooks would not think so and would want everything homogenized into blandness.

What I was trying to say is that media consolidation (in all things, not just music) has made the corporatization (I know that isn't really a word) of music even worse than it was before. We are force-fed so much of our culture these days, from books to movies to music. But fortunately there is the internet and plenty of ways to hear great independent music. I download most of mine from Emusic, which is all DRM-free (the big music corporations do not like that one bit).

[tigereye]

16. exactly!

:thumbsup: ww

[idgiehkt]

11. typical conservative point of view

Individuality is bad and must be stamped out. Conformism is comforting and therefore good and must be enforced. If you don't go along, something is wrong. It's not the 'fragmentation' that is bad, it's the urge to conform and the fear behind that. As far as music, I don't see this culture as fragmented, I see it as nauseatingly homogenous, as the corporate music overlords take their last dying gasps.

It cracks me up, the way these rich conservative white guys see the world. This is where he gets his info: "If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches." This man needs a lobotomy, or someone needs to sell him a clue that that corporate crap isn't reality. And it never ceases to amaze me that what is at root of these complaints about fragmentation is that the underclasses are having their voices and their demographics recognized and marketed to instead of slurping up whatever the overclass of conservative rich white males deems is appropriate, i.e. his social segment is losing control of dictating culture, and they can't stand it.

As far as the musical U.S. history thing, that sounds cool, as long as he's giving an authentic history and not just showcasing the thieves that made millions by aping the authentic artists, many of whom who never made a dime from their recordings. I'm not sure where the Allman brothers fits into American history in a significant way...I'd use Leadbelly instead of Muddy Waters and put a zydeco band in there in place of the Allman Brothers, etc.

[regularguy]

12. Very well put! nt

[Withywindle]

13. Yup, it's an authoritarian mindset.

To have everybody of a given demographic listening to what the "market" says they should be into is his wet dream, and therefore there's something wrong with music fans if they pursue their real passions, whatever that may be.

To have "unity" is an aberration. It used to be in old-time Appalachian music that every region and county had its own distinctive style of fiddle tuning. You could tell from listening where a player was from and who his influences were (because his influences were people he knew personally and learned from directly). Records and radio changed all that and homogenized the sound. In a way this was good because it allowed musicians to diversify their own store of knowledge, they weren't just limited to musicians they could hear in person. In a way it was bad because it destroyed a lot of regional idiosyncracy.

But this is a change that started to happen a hundred years ago. The whole audienceship thing is ALWAYS in flux. Technology changes it, and it always has been that way.

I've always been suspicious of that "voices of a generation" stuff because it reduces something as complex as how music moves people to a crude marketing survey.

[taterguy]

14. I respect Van Zandt but a high school curriculum of "great" music is just stupid

The natural tendency of every 17 year-old is to rebel against everything that adults like.

If they try to force feed kids great music the kids will just resent it for spite.

[rug]

15. He's confusing American music with American foreign policy.