Good Music vs. Bad Music

I really don't intend to make this blog about myself, but I guess I should present my bona fides at some point, such as they are. I have worked as a freelance writer, mostly in entertainment, for the better part of 25 years, primarily with a daily in a medium sized Southern California city. 'Nuff said there, and as you know, nobody ever argues with that Nuff guy.

In that very same Southern California city I also host a blues show on the college station. I have been doing that more years than I care to admit. I'll just fess up that Reagan was still president -- in his first term, thank you very much -- when I started.

I have been fortunate enough to interview quite a lot of artists, both world-famous and barely known locally. One of my favorite interviews was with Roy Clark, the country singer and entertainer whom is best known for co-hosting "Hee Haw" for a gazillion years. He was every bit as nice and down-to-earth in our conversation as he appeared to be on the TV show. He said something to me that I had long thought but, hearing it from him, validated it in my mind.

Roy Clark

"Robert," he said, "I believe there are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music."

It was my bad for not getting him to go into more detail on that statement, but just in the course of the interview I could tell his idea of what consists of good music and bad music was much the same as mine. None of my aforementioned credentials make me any more of an expert than you when it comes to music. I'm just a schlub who, at various points in my life, had a lot of time to sit around listening to music. Having said all that, this is what I believe.

For me, it comes down to how attached the artist is -- or appears to be -- to the music he is performing. Good music is when an artist actually creates art. Exactly what does that mean? It's when he or she reveals part of themselves to us. It's when they make a statement, be it about something going on in the world, be it the world at large or simply their own world. It may be just making us think about something we gave little thought to before. Or, most of all, it's when they make us look at something we may have looked at before in a new or different way.

"With rock and roll, you're supposed to feel, you're supposed to get carried away," Genya Ravan recently told Garagerocktopia. "It's like a biopsy of the soul."

In short, it doesn't have to be deeply personal or at all controversial -- just something that sort of gives us a peek at what this person or band is all about. Is that asking too much? In my humble opinion, apparently a lot of "artists" think so.

Bad music, in contrast, happens when you can tell the artist in question really couldn't give a rat's pi toot about what they're singing. They're singing about an episode in their lives they never imagined until a producer stuck in their face. They're just doing it for money, or attention or whatever, but it has very little to do with them. And I don't know about you, but that shallowness frequently comes through in the music -- or should I say the product, because to me that's exactly what it is.

Robert Cray

I have heard this stuff many times, and I wondered if maybe there was a recording studio at Guantanamo Bay, because to me that's what it sounds like. OK, maybe that's an exaggeration, but so much of rock music today has become, in my mind, joyless, passionless and strictly by the numbers -- paint-by-numbers and most of all, revenue captured.

Does that mean good music has to be true life? No, not at all. Bluesman Robert Cray, an artist whom I frequently play on my blues show and whom I have also had the good fortune to interview, told me that his songs, often about lyin' cheatin' and sometimes murder are not things he actually did or lived through. He just creates a persona and is able to pull it off perfectly in his music. I'd say he's very good at creating that persona, but really, that he's been around for more than 30 years, says a lot of other people think so, too.

 Does good music have to be complicated? Not just no, but hell no. Again, referring back to the blues, any experienced guitarist will tell you you can learn the technique of the blues in just a few lessons. Ditto with Garage Rock. In fact, a large part of the appeal of both is their simplicity, their lack of complication but most of all, their honesty.

And that's what makes them so tough to do well. They're simple, but making them sound good is very tough indeed. When I took guitar lessons, I figured out after a few weeks I could probably play everything Lightnin' Hopkins ever wrote. But, ol' Lightnin' had a way about him. You could play like him but you could never sound like him. And to my knowledge, though many have tried, nobody's ever gotten there.

Let's keep it real here, too. There is plenty of bad Garage Rock, and almost certainly more bad than good. I have heard a lot of bands who think all they need to do is play a few Beatle chords, wear tye-dye, and viola, you have Garage Rock. And maybe you do. But that doesn't mean it's any good.

I believe in any genre of music, there's more bad than good. A lot more, and Garage Rock is no exception. But here is a link to a song that is ridiculously simple, yet I can never get enough of: The Kare Takers, "Have You Seen My Baby?." To me, this song is good music, regardless of how uncomplicated it is.

Bad music is never far away, and no I don't just mean your shower or the family member that won't stop humming no matter how many times you ask them to. Just turn on your radio and go to the nearest commercial station.

Once upon a time, listening to the radio was a lot of fun. Sure, there has always been a lot of garbage. As one radio talk show host here in SoCal, Johnny Wendell, once pointed out, people think the '60s were all about the Beatles and all the other great rock and roll bands, but they forget all the atrocious middle of the road stuff that dominated the charts. I think you could look at any part of the rock era and come to the same conclusion.

But for most of my life, listening to the crap was always the price you agreed to get to the good stuff.   Maybe this is a generational thing, but I haven't been able to listen to much commercial rock radio since the mid-90's. To my ear, it has grown more pretentious, more superficial, and more predictable each year.

Some would argue that it's always been this way, and if it's good music you're looking for then maybe you need to break out with some Davis or Coltrane. But again, I say good music need not be complicated. Ask a Hank Williams (I or III, definitely not II) fan.

Speaking of which, country radio? Egad. Country was built on honesty, and again, there has always been lots of bad country music, but country seems to push itself to sound more and more like commercial rock. These days, what some of us would call actual country music comes under the catch-all designation, "alt country." It's safe to say that had Hank, or George Jones, or Merle Haggard come along 30 or 40 years after they did, we'd have no idea who they were. Country radio today wouldn't probably have anyone caught bringing their records to the station arrested.

Hip Hop? Once upon a time, it was a lot of fun. Again, I'm no expert, but I'd say the rapper went down the crapper with the advent of Gangsta Rap. There are still plenty of hip hop artists making challenging, vibrant worthwhile music, but you'll never hear them on a top-40 station (with the exception of maybe Common or, like him personally or not, Kanye West). What is the moniker for Rap with some artistic merit? Underground Rap, of course.

I understand that rock and roll has been a business from the get-go. I'm not a college radio music nazi  who brandishes the label "sell-out" to any artist or group who dares suggest they'd like to quit their day job. But I think there was a time when artists and labels could sort of balance the two. They could make a crapload of money and still make great music, and the list of artists who have done this is endless.

But the music biz has changed to where labels and investors not only expect an instant return, but actually depend on those quick turnarounds for profitability. The days of an artist putting out nine artistically fantastic but commercially-tepid albums, as Bruce Springsteen did, are long over. And that's too bad. Can you imagine a world without Springsteen? Well, I think we're living in a world without the next Springsteen.

Now I'm going to get into something that I'm sure will have many of you thinking that I'm in serious need of intensive psychological services (which those whom have known me a long time will tell you is true.). I think bad music is not just bad music, but that sometimes it serves a sinister purpose.

Have you noticed that when you go to the mall (I try to avoid malls as much as possible) or big box store, they are always blaring one of two things: Top 40 or '80s/90's music.

These are businesses that examine, exhaustively, every aspect of what they do, and that this seems to be the music of choice, to me, cannot be a coincidence. These retailers spend a LOT of money researching ways to get you to divorce your money for a bunch of stuff you probably don't need. If they thought this music would stop you from that, you wouldn't be hearing it in their establishments. Instead, it's used almost literally like a jackhammer, pounding your head until the part of the brain that controls spending money is beat down to a defenseless pulp.

With the oldies, I think the agenda is pretty clear. It gets you to think about happier times, better times. Rightly or wrongly, I think people perceive the '80s and '90s as a simpler, more straightforward time. You worked and got paid, and the more and the harder you worked, the more money you made. Now, you work as hard as you did then just to stay barely afloat. The music reminds you of better times, and you happily spend your money. Or maybe those of you who remember when that music first came out, you get depressed thinking about the fact that. if that music is getting older, then you're getting older too, and that realization leads you to self-medicate -- namely, buy a bunch of stuff you don't need. But this is a gross oversimplification and a post all its own.

With the bad top 40, I think the effect is a little different. I think a lot of people agree it's bad music, and played loudly it has the effect of breaking you down. I know this sounds nuts, but consider this: In military campaigns, the U.S. Armed Services and the CIA have used loud and obnoxious music to break down the enemy (perceived or otherwise).  From the Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com/entertainment/music/article/CIA-torture-methods-included-these-21-songs-5427375.php

Though not mentioned in the article linked above, this was infamously done in 1989 by U.S. forces in Panama to force the dictator Manuel Noriega to surrender. It worked. And, loud music was used as a torture device at Abu Ghraib in the last decade.

In the United States -- I am not making this up -- a police department in Florida in the late '90s got into trouble for forcing a suspect to listen to Rupert Holmes 1979 inexplicable hit "The Pina Colada Song" over and over again. I'm not making this up. And yes, the song is THAT bad. Holmes actually has gone on to a great career writing for Broadway, but that doesn't change the fact that this song (as well as its follow-up, "Him") could rightly be considered a crime against humanity.

But back to my point, you hear bad top 40 in stores, I think, to break down that resistance to making purchases, or fighting with your kids when they want stuff you don't want, can't afford, or simply don't need.

Rupert Holmes

This is hardly a scientific observation, but one personal experience I had with bad music sort of being used as a cudgel. I have to be vague because I think the individual in question, despite her abysmal taste in music, checks out this blog.

Once, at a job I had at a small business, one of the owners insisted on putting on some vapid pop-rock that was popular at the time. It wasn't just a matter of entertainment -- this person wanted the music on in the very worst way and was quite insistent. The music was overbearingly loud, and that owner all of a sudden got very bossy, whining about the quality of the work but insisting we all work faster. This person was a manager at another business, and I'm sure she used this there, too. I ended up with a headache that wouldn't go away for two days.

Getting back to Garage Rock, there is plenty of it that's not good. The genre is purposely amateurish, but sometimes artists take that just a little too far. But simply put, good Garage Rock (or good music of any other kind) makes me feel good. When I hear "Have You Seen My Baby?" or the Sonics "Have Love Will Travel," I think of breezy nights, of guys driving mustang convertibles, the wind whooshing through their hair on the way to the beach. I think of times when, with apologies to Elvis Costello, Peace, Love and Understanding weren't funny -- these were noble goals that people actually strived for.

Am I buying into a an oversimplified, perhaps mythical ideal? Probably. People listen to music for all different kinds of reasons, and none of those reasons are wrong. But for me, it's simple: I want to feel better after the song than I did before. For me, no music does that as well as Garage Rock. I can't tie people up and force them to listen to The Pretty Things or The Gants. The best I can do is what I endeavor to do in this blog, make my case for why I love the music so much.

Again, comments are welcome. If you have a band, or want to recommend a post, let me know. I will be trying in the coming weeks to set up some interviews. I enjoyed writing this blog, but I'm sure I there are guys, at the very moment you are reading this, who are buttoning up their white suits and pulling out their butterfly nets and tracking down the threat to society that wrote this blogpost. And they're probably being paid by Rupert Holmes.