By Colin Marshall, New Yorker | Earlier this year, the critic and historian Ted Gioia published an essay called “Is Old Music Killing New Music?” At first, this looks like a textbook case of Betteridge’s law, which states that “any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no.’ ” Nevertheless, old music’s encroachment on the cultural space once occupied by new music has become difficult to ignore. Gioia marshals compelling evidence: from a music-industry analytics firm that found that old songs represented seventy per cent of the U.S. music market in 2021 to recent bidding wars over song catalogues by artists who are now septuagenarians, octogenarians, or dead.
Some of us will hear this trend reflected in our listening habits. My own musical life in this decade offers an extreme example, dominated by the likes of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. This resoundingly un-idiosyncratic list is the result not of an ossified musical incuriosity but of a deliberately undertaken project: whereas Gioia listens to two or three hours of new music every day, I’ve made a daily habit of listening to “old” music—music by artists who began their careers in the nineteen-sixties and have made the largest, most obvious marks on popular culture. Working my way through their entire studio discographies, I take one album per week and play it once every day, straight through. This method (which I used most recently to navigate the nearly half-century-long catalogue of David Bowie) requires both an obsessive streak and a certain degree of patience: the studio albums of Dylan alone, which number thirty-nine as of this writing, took up most of a year.
Just by chance, Dylan’s “Christmas in the Heart” happened to fall in mid-December, which enriched the experience of that spirited if bewildering holiday album. (For me, it will never again feel like Christmas without hearing Dylan croak “Adeste Fideles” in his surreal Latin.) Every discography adds another chronological-cultural layer atop the ordinary passage of time: the year 2020 yielded nobody’s idea of an ideal summer, but for me it was at least enlivened by earlier Beach Boys releases, from the 1964 hit “All Summer Long” and the 1966 critical-consensus masterpiece “Pet Sounds” to the 1973 ambitious conclusion to the band’s long heyday, “Holland.”
The reason I began this discographies project was to address the embarrassing condition of having reached the age of thirty-five without having really listened to the Beatles. Their music’s very unavoidability had kept me from engaging with it: the world, so it seemed to me, hardly needed another Beatles enthusiast. A friend suggested that I fix the hole, as it were, by listening to the Beatles’ collected work while reading Ian MacDonald’s “Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties.” The book—an examination of every single one of the Beatles’ recordings, some of whose entries constitute short essays in themselves—also makes the case for the band’s œuvre as the unsurpassably vibrant sonic record of Western civilization’s collapse.
“Anyone unlucky enough not to have been aged between 14 and 30 during 1966-7 will never know the excitement of those years in popular culture,” MacDonald, who was born in 1948, writes. When “Revolver” came out at the beginning of that stretch, “the album’s aural invention was so masterful that it seemed to Western youth that the Beatles knew—that they had the key to current events and were somehow orchestrating them through their records.” With that release, the band arguably invented the form of the album as we know it, an artistic innovation, MacDonald explains, that was enabled by novel studio technologies: “Using the overdub facilities of multitrack recording, they evolved a new way of making records in which preplanned polyphony was replaced by an unpredictable layering of simultaneous sound-information, transformed by signal-distortion and further modified during the processes of mixing and editing.” Committing a song to tape became merely the first stage of an elaborate and unpredictable artistic process.
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Read the full opinion here:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-case-for-listening-to-complete-discographies?
The Case for Listening to Complete Discographies
