The Death of Music

Right off the bat, I will tell you that I am not sure where this will lead. If you are afraid, pregnant or have a history of heart disease, be forewarned.

I think preachers and various community leaders were right when the called rock and roll the devil's music back in the day. And I think, therefore, that I was born, inconveniently, in the wrong decade. My parents were born in the 1950s and they grew up on a lot of jazz and Motown and the music of that era. As a result my father has a decent collection of jazz records. Growing up for me, it was a natural choice to play an instrument, the only question was, which? Putting what I knew of music at the time, I thought the coolest instrument in the world was the saxophone. And so it was, 40 years earlier. Playing saxophone lead me to play jazz. By then, what do I find out? The popular kids are the ones that play guitar. So what? A fucking monkey could play a guitar. Admittedly not very well, but still. Some of the guitar players I know would be glad to have that monkey's talents. Imagine what you could do with a prehensile tail. But try to get a monkey to play any sort of wind instrument? Here's what you would hear: PFFFFFFFFTTTT CLANG CRASH BANG. Followed by monkey howls and possibly feces. Probably feces. Definitely feces. If I were writing this at the age of 60, I would have had so much poon back in the 50s and 60s I don't think I would have gotten it up since the age of 45. But since then, rock and roll has become the dominant musical genre. It's a genre that would seem to be on the decline from a historical standpoint as well. Consider that jazz really only started around the late 19th century, to peak in popularity in the mid to late 1950s. Consider again that rock and roll started around the time jazz peaks. Music appears to be cyclical. So hip hop starts back in the late 70s, so I give it another 10 years before something else comes along. But what? If it's cyclical, what is the next step in music. I give you evolution. Start with classical music from Europe. That's Daddy. Tribal music from Africa along with slave songs and spirituals. That's Mommy. Mommy and Daddy have a few kids. Jazz, ragtime, the blues. Here's where it gets freaky. A sort of musical Aristocrats. A young jazz has a child with ragtime called swing. Jazz also essentially pimps out its younger sister the blues. The blues runs away to Chicago and hooks up with a bad man called Electricity. They have kids called Rock and Roll, and R&B. Jazz travels around the country. It calls itself bebop in New York, and cool jazz in LA. Jazz runs into Miles Davis. Miles smiles and takes jazz and its nephew Rock and Roll and creates Fusion. Fusion spawns funk, which together with R&B spawns hip hop. After all this procreation, Daddy has almost died out, Mommy is forgotten and nearly gone, save the efforts of Alan Lomax. The blues have become inseperable from Electricity, though there are those who remember the days when they were the sweetest little thing in the South. Rock and Roll lives on, though there are those whose efforts do it more harm than good. Rock and Roll has since hooked up, as the kids would say, with hip hop, to create the retarded bastard child that is rap metal or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Its a mule. It is incapable of procreating. It is the death of the musical evolutionary chain/family tree. So where do we go from here? Do we wait for some indie band to save us from ourselves? I find that word to be completely overused these days. I understand if you recorded a demo in your garage, or made a movie for $20 using a disposable digital camera. I could consider that indie. But there is far too much media coverage these days to consider every non major studio project an indie project. If the budget has more the 5 zeros, as a soft guideline, it can't be indie. Maybe it's just me. But to the topic on hand. If music is indeed truly cyclical, someone is going to have to perform some kind of muscial Frankenstein on Daddy here. So get a piano and a violin and start writing kids.