(And why the Beatles will be forgotten by 2064)

I hate popular music.

Since I met and married Rachel – the Center Of My Universe and the Reason For My Existence – I have been subjected to a particular genre of popular music each morning as she and I drive to some useless location in an effort to rid her pants of ants. I perused the website of Billboard which, I am told, is the popular music business’ commercial compass but was unable to discover the particular genre to which I am subjected each A.M. (morning, not “dial”).

My Beloved’s favorite station touts itself as the “Home of Soft Rock” but Billboard has no such classification. In my youth, radio stations were at leisure to inform their listeners of the title and artist of each presentation, but the competitive nature of modern FM radio must be such that precious air-time cannot be devoted to such trivia, so I am forced to provide you with a list of tunes based on sketchy information.

* Miley Cyrus employs a southern accent to discuss “other mountains” and “uphill rides (?)”.
* Some other female vocalist moans about the fact that she “keeps bleeding”.
* Another female named “Fergie” (I trust this is not the ex-wife of Prince Andrew), informs me that “big girls don’t cry”, something I thought Frankie Valley had already told us.
*A group of men who have assumed the name of a CIA airplane sing that they still haven’t found what they’re lookin’ for.
* Kelly Clarkson is a regular feature, shouting (with a terrific voice) that she is afraid to cross the street, walks away, ponders about her life since you’ve been gone, and has hazel eyes.
* Yet another female asks “how do I live?”
* Some guy repeats, about a billion times, “Say what you mean to say.” Say it, already.

Popular music is trash because it is written, performed and marketed to be disposable. That which we dispose of after use is, by definition, trash.

As an outsider, my impression of the mechanics of the popular music industry is that it is in constant need of fresh material which, once unearthed, is played to extinction on popular music outlets such as radio, which creates the demand for yet more new material. Billboard serves as both midwife to the newborn and undertaker for the recently disposed. Billboard accumulates sales data on a piece of popular music and uses this data to track the health of the song through its charts of rising and falling pieces. What gives the whole process a “chicken or egg” dilemma is this: If radio airtime drives sales and sales drive Billboard and Billboard drives airtime, how does it get started? It is, as Rachel says, a quandary. My theory is that a secret coterie of Illuminati, housed deep within the earth below the Bavarian Alps, picks works of popular music at random and they drive the whole thing.

When a piece of popular music has been played to the point where the mere hint of its opening theme causes drivers to swerve around the road as they desperately punch buttons on their car radios, sales will invariably fall off and the piece will begin its slide into pop oblivion. Sales go down, Billboard lowers the rating of the piece, radio stations give their listeners a break and only play the damn thing sixteen times a day instead of forty, which further depresses sales, etc., etc., etc. Back under Munich, the gnomes rub their hands gleefully and throw another dart.

Now, I confess to be a lover of “Classical Music”. By that I mean the orchestral and operatic masterpieces of the past 400 years. When She Who Is The Light Of My Life was orchestrating our wedding ceremony four years ago, she instructed the deejay to play “classical music” as a token of her love and affection for me (because she loathes the music I love). What we got was an evening of Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme and other lounge singers – that’s what “classic” meant to the r-e-t-a-r-d running the CD player.

More on that anon, but first, here is a five-part test you can conduct on the music you hear on your radio, I-pod, music library, the crap they play in grocery stores and every other enclosed space where people tend to congregate. Tell me if I’m wrong.

1. Musical Time: 99.9% of all popular music is written in standard time, i.e. two or four beats per measure. In the past six months I have heard precisely one melody in three-quarter (three beats per measure) time. By contrast, not only are there plentiful examples of classical music written in other than standard time, some are written in musical times that defy toe-tapping. The opening bars of Tchaikovsky’s “Capriccio Italien” and Wagner’s “Siegfried’s Funeral Music” are both written in something like nine-sixteenths time – difficult to play, but wonderful to hear.

2. Theme: 95% of all popular music has “love” as its theme. Getting it, abusing it, losing it, regaining it, whining about it, missing it, hoping to regain it, dying for it, living for it … in short, everything about love other than cooking it for breakfast. Other thematic elements appear from time to time, such as trucks and prisons (Country-Western) rape and cop-killing (Rap). To my (limited) knowledge, there has not been a strictly instrumental popular piece since “Wipe Out” (‘60’s) and “Classical Gas” (70’s). Contrast this with the bulk of Classical music which contains no lyrics. It’s important in the same way that the Mona Lisa is a superior piece of art than a poster of a daisy with the words “War is unhealthy for children and other living things.” The former demands something of the viewer in order to realize its importance. The latter is a spoonful of Pabulum poured directly into the ears and brain of the observer. It is not important because it was never meant to be so.

3. Instrumentation: 85% of pop music is scored for guitar, bass guitar, keyboard and percussion. There is a good reason for this. Popular music must be as portable as possible, else the coming wave of new artists will never emerge because they’re too busy schlepping around orchestras. These guys have to bust their humps in the minors for many years before the Alpine Seers choose them for stardom, at which point they can go on the road with entourages, roadies, groupies, agents, camp-followers and all the other hangers-on whose purpose seems to be nothing more than to deplete the income of the stars. Their concert appearances are replete with pyrotechnics, light displays, gaudy visual effects, etc. Some performers – Celine Dion comes to mind – perform musical arrangements with a violin or two, perhaps a flute and maybe even a harp. In contrast, consider the piano composition “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Musorgsky. It does an adequate job of presenting its themes, but Ravels arrangement of the piece for a full orchestra – with more than twenty different instruments – is nothing short of magnificent. The “Polish Cart” section features saxophones and they manage to convey this cumbersome beast of a vehicle with amazing accuracy. Various permutations of the “Promenade”, as Musorgsky strolls through the gallery, express the musician’s mood as he views the various pieces painted by his recently-deceased friend. “Pictures” is a minor classic but popular music has yet and never shall produce its equal.

4. Vocal Quality: 70% of the people who yowl the lyrics of pop music have no vocal talent whatsoever. It is remarkable to consider that popular music, which is almost completely lyrical, grants no importance to the quality of the voice(s) which deliver those lyrics. Make it easy on yourself – listen to some really good singers like Celine Dion and Kelly Clarkson.  Afterwards, listen to the vocal quality of almost anyone else purveying their goods in popular music and you should immediately understand my meaning. The truly adventurous should then go on to experience Pavarotti’s rendition of “Nessum Dorma” from Puccini’s opera Tourandot or Maria Callas’ performance of Bizet’s opera Carmen. Some will then understand that the human voice is a musical instrument more difficult to play than any mechanical contrivance found in the orchestra pit.

5. Structure: Perhaps you should pull off the road for this part. 65% of popular music observes the following structure: First refrain, chorus, second refrain, chorus, instrumental interlude, chorus. The percentage is so low because what follows the instrumental interlude can vary considerably. Nevertheless, the marketing requirements of popular music are such that three minutes more-or-less is allotted to each performance before it is crumpled up and disposed of.

Popular music has a half-life of one generation. Testing this theorem requires a minor assumption. For our purposes, we will assert that a generation is whatever number of years has elapsed since you and your parents were in high school. I will use my own family as an illustration. My parents were in high school when big bands and swing music were popular. Only half of my generation appreciates this music (and I count myself among them). I know nothing about what my parents’ parents enjoyed. My son knows a lot about my generation’s music (because he was a brief fan in his pre-adolescence). He is completely familiar with his generation’s music but pays scant attention to swing jazz and absolutely none to what his great-grandparents enjoyed. Once he and his wife provide me with a grandson, the kid will have access to a completely new variety of popular music which will shock his parents just as hip-hop has shocked me. He will abhor mom and dad’s music and appreciate his grandpa’s psychedelic music not at all. Swing? Never heard of it.

By 2064 – 100 years after they broke into the bigs by appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles will be forgotten by that generation. The existence of billions of the Fab Four’s oeuvre immortalized on tapes, L. P.’s, sheet music and C. D.’s will be of negligible consequence because nobody will care.

At the aforementioned wedding between Rachel and my humble self, she selected, as the processional music, Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major”. Many people would recognize this melody without knowing who wrote it or when because it has the power to soothe frayed nerves and bring about tranquility (something we both needed on that memorable occasion). The composition has no lyrics with which to accomplish its purpose and must rely on the subtleties of harmony, melody, theme, orchestration and contrapuntalism (look it up). The composition is 325 years old – more than three times my estimate of the Beatle’s musical duration, yet hardly a day goes by when some chamber group somewhere does not perform the work to an admiring audience. If anyone can produce a piece of popular music that old (and popular music has been around at least that long), I will eat my hat, tie, shirt and trousers.

Classical music abides despite the fact most of it was created at a time before copyright laws, electronic means of sound reproduction and university professors of “popular culture”. The works of Beethoven, Mozart, Puccini, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and others are timeless because the vision that drove their creators was likewise. It is not the words of Rossini’s “La Centerentola” that makes the opera immortal, it is the music itself. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Mahler’s First, Mozart’s 41st, Rachimaninov’s First and Verdi’s “Mass” will live forever because they represent more than any poster-words can ever express. They represent “beauty” which will not tolerate explanation.

I have observed that the lovers of popular music can no more tolerate classical music than the lovers of classical music can abide the popular variety. Each camp describes the music of the other as “boring”. Nevertheless, they are wrong and I am right. I am no slave to research, but I have been able to find only one piece of eighteenth century popular music that continues to be performed on a daily basis. The tune was penned by John Stafford Smith for the amusement of the Anacreonic Society – a British collection of gentlemen of an artistic nature who met from time-to-time to raise their glasses in praise of high culture and good ale. The tune was adopted by an American poet after he witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor in 1814 and his verse was later set to Smith’s music. In 1931 Congress adopted Francis Scott Key’s lyrics, set to the tune of John Stafford Smith’s music, as the National Anthem of the United States of America. Other than this, the popular music of the past is dead and forgotten.