Was Boomer Music Better?

By ROB PATTERSON

Yes, it’s a cliché and might seem to be an exercise in nostalgia. Yet I am not just convinced but utterly sure that the popular music I grew up with is better than what we have today.

Yeah, the bobby-soxer generation said the same thing about our music as compared with the best big-bands, singers like Crosby and Sinatra and songsmiths, such as the Gershwins and Cole Porter. And that music did have an impressive sophistication.

But something magical started happening in 1954, the year I was born, also the year that Elvis Presley first went into Sun Studios to start recording and later that year take rock’n’roll into the upper reaches of the pop charts. And let’s not forget that rock was the result of the American folk song tradition mating with the blues and R&b, both from previous generations, to create a new and, in both musical and sociocultural aspects, potent musical vein.

The music became my Northern Star, daily manna and in the end reason to both live and in fact live as I have both personally and professionally. From my first transistor radio in 1959 which at night I would tune into the New York City AM stations to listen to the discs spun by such pied pipers as Murray the K, Cousin Brucie and the man who coined the term rock’n’roll, Alan Freed, to the arrival five years later of The Beatles, the launching pad was set. Then the British Invasion and the flowering of American contemporary pop, garage and teen dance bands, R&B and soul music, roots music re-envisioners and other style shot youth music into the stratosphere. The decade found country music thriving and fostering a new sophistication.

It was all there to be enjoyed on Top 40 AM radio where all genres were welcome. What mattered was whether a song had the appeal to become a hit.

I quite love a Mott The Hoople song from 1974 titled “The Golden Age of Rock’n’Roll.” In concert, the group would preface it with the first two verses of Don McLean’s “American Pie” up to the line about “the day the music died”… and then launch into their song to assert that the music remained very much alive. As it did through at least most of the next two decades to follow.

My love of music led me into becoming a music journalist and as part of that a critic. As well, I grew up with a good musical grounding, learning about music itself and singing from a number of years in a church choir. And was exposed in the home to the classics and opera my father loved as well as Broadway show tunes.

More importantly, I developed analytical skills based on my broad musical grounding that enabled me to assess musical quality. Do note that quality isn’t just the a matter of how sophisticated a work might be; sometimes the simplest and even on occasion silliest music could be well executed. Another factor to be considered alongside quality was how well a musical piece achieved its goal. I also came to be able to separate my tases and emotional feelings from analyzing how good a musical work was.

All that said, I confidently well assert in terms of playing, singing, production and arrangements and songwriting, that what I hear today doesn’t usually measure up to what I grew up and came of age with. Technological advances should theoretically have enabled advances in quality in the 21st Century. But quite the opposite, it has made it easier for those of less skill to make music that’s also lesser.

I’m saddened when I dip into today’s music to hear how it’s far too often skidding along in the depths of lowest common denominator. And it saddens me. But on the other hand, I feel fortunate to have enjoyed a time throughout much of my life that the music was largely both excellent and enjoyable.

In my next column I explore another aspect of the music of yesterday vs. today.

Populist Picks

Album: “Texas” by Rodney Crowell – The master singer-songwriter’s latest is a collection of his varied compositions about his home state, featuring many guests like Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, Vince Gill, Lee Ann Womack, Steve Earle and even Ringo Starr. For all the big-name cameos, Crowell stands tall at the dead center of an album that brims with the spirit of the Lone Star State while being refreshingly free of often-irksome Texas yee-haw chauvinism.

Documentary Film: “Feats First: The Life & Music of Lowell George” – An excellent in-depth look at the primary singer and songwriter and “benign dictator” who led Little Feat, one of the most distinctive rock bands of the 1970s (and among the finest live groups I ever saw). Makes the compelling case for an act who never broke big but created stunningly original and imaginative music.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2020

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