Posted 4:45 PM by Gene

I will make a prediction: minus a gale-force stink of Effete Edelsteining (which may well happen), popular music won't recover in our lifetimes. It's in the same morbid shape as our movies, with a fake glow of health from technology. Again we must look back to the 19th century. What has survived from it save stray folk tunes? Or the occasional Gay-Nineties weepie like "After the Ball"? (And that from its use in Show Boat.) Stephen Foster, the pre-eminent pop composer of his time, wrote songs dead to ours: minstrel tunes about "darkies", and flowery parlor ballads. Perhaps the technology can preserve the junk, as formaldehyde preserves the corpse; the professional toady Michael Wolff shrewdly observed that technology kept stupid rock tunes alive far longer than they had a right to live, and thus set up the current downfall. But the 19th century had its technology too: it was called the piano. Nearly every decent home had one, and some households were voracious buyers of sheet music; multi-million sellers were not uncommon. The piano in turn was overtaken by the phonograph, and the early days of the industry teach us a lesson too. Anyone here remember Alma Gluck singing "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny"? It was a million seller for Victor. Not long after Paul Whiteman, on the same label, recorded a multi-million-selling whatisit called "Whispering", starring a slide whistle. Today Whiteman is remembered, if at all, as a fat man with an odd face who introduced Bing Crosby (who has himself suffered undue neglect), Bix Beiderbecke, Hoagy Carmichael and the Rhapsody in Blue. Even a titan like George M. Cohan, the first consistent writer of good, memorable pop songs, is forgotten but for his patriotic tunes and Jimmy Cagney. There is one more reason a new creative burst of pop music can't happen: the three decades of immortal songs of the twenties through the fifties were largely an accident, and today's long lemming march of lousy tunes is intentional.

P. S. on 4/2/2006: Scholarly research of Victor Talking Machine's files by those fine antediluvian-record buffs at Mainspring Press indicates the old-tyme record biz was just as good at propogating untruth as the new: Alma Gluck's recording sold "only 70,189 copies," and Paul Whiteman's sold 214,575 -- excellent sales for their day, but hardly a million.