Performance and Recording: “Everyone sing the chorus—including intellectuals!”

I haven’t read Wald’s book, but it will be interesting to see how much, if at all, he’s drawing on Jacques Attali’s Noise, whose arguments clearly foreshadow these ideas about changes in the production and reception of music (including the effects of the introduction of notation and then the coming of recording). I’m really not convinced by what you’re suggesting he’s doing with Paul Whiteman, however: popular, yes, but really only with white audiences and with no serious suggestion that he was doing anything remotely progressive or evolutionary – his place in the history of jazz is pretty marginal, whereas the Beatles (i) were seen at the time as offering the/a way forward, even if it’s proved to be problematic and (ii) are unavoidable in the history of popular music, whatever you think of them.

2011 and we’re still talking about the Beatles?

Whereas for some time now, dance rhythms are created in the studio, and are only reproducible on stage via a DJ or similar pre-recording or sampling, whereas white (rock, folk, indie) music can be reproduced on stage just with instruments. White people even still go to hear authors read their books out loud. This distinction does not look very robust.

“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” (I guess one man’s Dionysian is another’s Apollonian…)

Agree about Wald. I read it last year, terrific book.

“Generally the past is thought to cause the present”

Well indeed, but the question is, does the focus on the Beatles making a “studio” album really have anything to do with dance beats, whiteness, class, or any of the other sub-Q magazine dichotomies being proposed. Talking about the Beatles now in a world where many young people pay to watch one person and a couple of turntables is like having a debate on whether paperback books cheapen literature.

There’s only one way to win these arguments….

I don’t think Ong and Wald are quite talking about the same thing. Wald is, I think, talking about the irreproducibility of studio rock. I no longer have Geoffrey Stokes’s Star Making Machinery, which followed Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen for a year or so, so may be garbling the anecdote, but at one point the keyboardist found himself unable to play the piano part for a particular song at the tempo the record producer wanted. So he played the left hand part, that was recorded on one track, then he played the right hand part, that was recorded on another track, then the producer mixed the two tracks and the separate tracks of the other instruments and vocals to create the studio version of the song. In concert, presumably, the keyboardist played some maimed version of the piano part. A band that tours is in performance alluding to the definitive versions of their songs as enshrined on their records; their fans applaud the allusion (and, indeed, applaud as soon as the allusion is recognized). A touring band becomes, in effect, its own tribute band: a fate the Beatles refused, which is what makes them iconic.

Literature composed to be read, on the other hand, is still orally performable. Cigar factories used to employ readers to read books aloud to their workers. Victorian households would spend their evenings reading aloud to each other. As a child I was made to memorize and recite poems. Poems are still performed at “readings”. There is a substantial sale in recorded books. The text is the text whether read silently or aloud whether absorbed from the page or from recitation. Ong’s focus is on the changes in composing texts. Wald’s focus is on the changes in the social experience of them.

My first reaction was what Ben Alpers said – this is much more plausible as a claim about Revolver than Sgt Pepper’s. I think one of the big changes between the two is that by Sgt Pepper’s, they were much more clearly drawing on the English music hall tradition, i.e., a distinctively live tradition.

And as many commentators above have pointed out, the live/recorded issue cross-cuts the black/white issue pretty strongly here. Revolver was pretty strongly influenced by black music, notably the bass-heavy mix which was motivated by listening to Wilson Pickett. The music hall influence on Sgt Pepper’s is a much whiter influence, but made (those parts of the album so influenced) easier to perform live.

And click through from the above link to read the excerpt in the FT, which also dates the shift to when the Beatles stopped touring in 1966 (i.e. more or less the same time as Revolver).

The word you’re looking for is “retronym,” as in “live music,” “2D movies,” “silent movies,” “Coca-Cola Classic,” etc.

What Gaspard said. It really is very odd to think that you can be taken seriously as an authority on popular music or rock’n’roll while apparently having no understanding at all of any developments in the past 45 years.

To take just a few examples, black musicians have in fact been enormously influenced by “white” music over the past four decades, from psychedelic soul, through the studio experiments of Stevie Wonder, to the cataclysmic impact of Kraftwerk on black America, to the use of rock samples since the 1980s.

Nor is the distinction between “live” black musicians and “studio” white musicians remotely tenable in the age of Timbaland, the Neptunes, Kanye West, and the rest.

The assertion that modern studio-constructed music is inherently asocial and atomising would not survive 30 seconds of Beyonce’s performance at Glastonbury, either. In general, the boom in festivals and live music performances suggests that these modes have proved highly resilient to advances in recording technology. The Beatles were an extreme aberration in retiring from touring, as a quick scan through the ads in the back of Mojo magazine will show. One might modestly propose that the culture would be stronger if a few more bands followed their example.

John suggests that Wald’s argument is more sophisticated than the summary makes it sound, but on this evidence I cannot see why it might be worth reading.

How would Wald deal with the film Let It Be, in which the band is recorded, visually and aurally, recording (performing) the record Let It Be?

But didn’t Soul Train and discos bring black music back into the live dancing halls and house parties? The music may not have been live but the dancing was. How does dance figure into the argument? P-Funk, Go-Go were dance music; people still go through their days with Gloria Gaynor playing in their heads. Now MJ’s dancing was of course not as great as the Nicholas Brothers’, but he did get people to move rather than marvel at acrobatics. So how does dance figure into the account of the musical shifts?
*
As for the Beatles & Cat Stevens,Serge Lang (the mathematician) had an idiosyncratic take. He claims that they were jumping over the classical period to the Renaissance to recover a music of spontaneity (partly the effect of the accent on the second beat) and lyricism. He thought that “the composers of the rock period knew that their antecedents were of the Renaissance period because they give hints, they quote it in their own words. I mean, ”My Lady d’Arbanville” is a title that refers directly to the French Renaissance. The trumped in Penny Lane, it’s obvious, it’s the same style as the Renaissance trumpet. The Beatles quote ”Green Sleeves” in ”All You Need Is Love” so they quote these antecedents. So they tell you ”we know what our musical ancestors are! It’s not the classical period, it’s those people from the Renaissance.”
Not sure what to make of that.

Hendrix’s status as a “black” artist was part of the wearying racial banter in ‘White Men Can’t Jump’, IIRC. This is a sign that Wald’s claims about authenticity may be part of a wider discussion about American racial politics. What’s more, Hendrix’s reception in England, like Miles Davis’ in Paris, may be a sign that American racial politics has a narrowing effect on discussions about music.

@Ed #22: “…the cataclysmic impact of Kraftwerk on black America…”: that does sound as if you think it was a bad thing…

Wald is just plain wrong about art music being white. He’s ignoring the history of jazz and its evolution into the avante-garde free jazz of Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman etc. from hard bop, an evolution taking place concurrent with the British Invasion. Jazz has been mentioned before, but its not that art music jazz stopped existing after the British Invasion. Despite the existence of Kenny G, jazz survives to the extent any avante-garde music form does. Electronic music was also pioneered in the black church: the Hammond Organ was designed to be a cheap alternative to a pipe organ, and was quickly adopted by a wide variety of musicians. What Pink Floyd and the Beetles are is the last resurgence of art music as popular music, and in that sense they represent (as Adorno noted about the popular music of the 1930’s) the end of an ability to appreciate music as a totality, and with that the decline of aesthetics more generally.

There’s this band called “Led Zeppelin” …

This struck me in the OP: Before recorded music takes off, every town has its local dance band – indeed, many families have the means of making their own music.

Vonnegut complains about this too, but most people today aren’t too impressed with the idea of local music traditions, any more than they are with Morris Dancing.

@ bert #28 –
As another data point, there’s Sasha Frere-Jones’s “A Paler Shade of White”, which struck me as so focused on the black music/white music distinction that it winds up saying dumb and demonstrably false things about actual music.

Neville @30: Erm, yes, I became over-excited in my search for a synonym for “really REALLY big.” There are people who think it was a bad thing, of course, but I am not among them.

Chris @31: When you talk about “the evidence of black listening at the time”, I guess the argument depends on what you mean by “at the time”. Certainly I would think the evidence as presented by the charts – and I can’t think of any better source – would show the influence of Kraftwerk growing in prominence through the 1980s, and becoming dominant by the end of the decade.

David @35: Indeed. I admit that my comments were based not on the book, but on what Wald and others have said about it. But if I am told: “although in any précis this book seems manifestly ridiculous, it is still worth reading,” I am afraid I am unlikely to be persuaded.

Well check the R&B number ones for 1990, for example: they are dominated by synth and drum machine based music from Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Bell Biv Devoe, Keith Sweat and others.

Admittedly, Kraftwerk are not the only source for the use of the technology in that way. Others, such as Giorgio Moroder, also loom pretty large. But through hip-hop, via Afrika Bambaataa in particular, Kraftwerk had a huge effect on all that music.

(Note that the R&B charts are a proxy here for “black listening at the time”, which was the point at issue.)

I can’t cite scholarly sources, but my impression is that the Beatles gave up live music not because they wanted to whitify their music in the security of the recording studio, but because they were fed up of not being heard. There’s a McCartney interview in one of the documentaries where he describes how the tannoy system in Shea Stadium was completely swamped by an audience that was determined to scream as loudly as possible. Not only were they not being heard, they weren’t being listened to.

If it wasn’t already obvious, I’ve not read Wald.

Kraftwerk always get namechecked by the founding fathers of house music. People like Derrick May in Detroit, or Larry Heard in Chicago. These people were completely marginal in terms of chart success. But they achieved godlike status in clubs in the UK and elsewhere, and inspired a whole musical culture which has since been reexported back to the US.
There’s a great scene in 24 Hour Party People where Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson is describing the rise of the Hacienda. “This is the moment when even the white man starts dancing. ” Now that was a cataclysmic impact.

And, because it was mentioned, here is Los Lobos (neither black nor white) performing a little dance number from Revolver.

I’m sorry that i only have the live performance on VHS, from a show back in ’93 at a West Sacramento Music Fest. It really does rock your socks off.

@43 Yes, absolutely Whitney Houston. ‘I’m Your Baby Tonight’ was produced by LA Reid and Babyface, who borrowed heavily from Teddy Riley, who started out producing Kool Moe Dee, who was at the heart of that early B-boy scene as a member of the Treacherous Three. There is a good account of the origins of hip-hop, giving due credit to the Kraftwerk influence, here:

http://www.globaldarkness.com/articles/roots_of_hiphop.htm

@46 That transatlantic cross-fertilisation is fascinating, I agree. It goes back to the Beatles and earlier, and continues to this day: listen to the way that recent tracks from Rihanna and Kelis have been influenced by euro-dance. The Wilson quote is a bit daft, though. What about jive, rock’n’roll, Mod, skinhead, Northern Soul, rare groove etc etc etc….? The idea that white people can’t / don’t dance without E is just silly.

Yes, absolutely Whitney Houston. ‘I’m Your Baby Tonight’ was produced by LA Reid and Babyface, who borrowed heavily from Teddy Riley, who started out producing Kool Moe Dee, who was at the heart of that early B-boy scene as a member of the Treacherous Three.

Is there a weaker “absolutely” outside matters of faith? Go listen to “I’m Your Baby Tonight” and isolate the bits of Kraftwerk in it. Then restate the claim of the dominant influence of Kraftwerk on the charts.

Bert,

given that the last Beatles show in the US was in Candlestick Park, I think you’re on to something. Whether that was better or worse than the previous tour when they played the Cow Palace I can’t say. One can be heard in places like that, but you have to make your music pretty simple and uncomplicated. And for the Beatles lose a large part of their appeal, which was the mix of slower quieter songs with the upbeat. Rather like Otis Redding, but he had the benefit of playing for much smaller crowds in places like the Fillmore Auditorium.

Ed, I agree that Kraftwerk was an inspiration to early hip-hop. I was listening to it. Every article that mentions Afrika Bambaataa rehashes what I already know to be true. But that is a far cry from claiming chart-dominance for Kraftwerk’s influence in the form of Whitney Houston (who, it must be said, was a model and was looking good). Dr. Dre in particular, when he made his name, liked real instruments played by musicians because he thought samples were crappy quality-wise. This is neato, but it too sounds like Dre’s had someone rerecord it.

Western culture is still predominately oral and now televisual. At least half of the people do not choose to read, although they may be able to read, and have even graduated college, and are quite smart. I am a plumber on the west side of Los Angeles, a pretty smart crowd lives here, I have been in more houses than you will ever be in for the rest of your life, and I would estimate that less than 30% of the households have any books in them.

In writing, I think that the loss of the oral accompaniment to writing may contribute to the misleading modern reification of words. Writers become separated from their referents and start to write as if words are objects that can be recombined like math symbols, and things like “alienation” are manipulable objects which cause other things to happen. Their first causative link may be valid, but soon they are often lost in absolutely unreal gibberish of the sort that Alan Sokal satirized.

Literature seems to have been written to be read aloud at least to the end of the 19th century, with some true hangers-on into the 20th, such as James Joyce. Much of 20th century writing is tone-deaf and unrhythmic when read aloud. This is true in both fiction and nonfiction, and is true of even a great stylist such as my favorite, Mencken, who has lovely and memorable phrases but many orally unwieldy sentences. The fact that older writers like Dickens wrote to be read aloud is forgotten. It is very odd to find that many, if not most, poetry lovers today would not think of reading Paradise Lost aloud. Yet that text is merely the “score” for the real experience. And yet, no one but a musician would think of reading a Beethoven score instead of hearing it.

Joyce went the other way, and may be the only great writer so far who has taken it one step further, and made ear AND eye BOTH absolutely necessary to the story, in Finnegans Wake. It must be sounded aloud but the variant spellings carry additional and crucial meanings. Unfortunately you have to study it in order to read it aloud, and there are sometimes many different voices on the same page, and so we are going to have to find some trained actors and train ’em some more, and thus it is a deal-breaker for all but crazies like me.

I’m not so sure that the Beatles made pop music into a mature art form, so much as they were among the first great beneficiaries of what is really a completely NEW art form: multi-track studio production. Of course they were also prolific, sophisticated melodists, which is also quite rare, and adds to their profound and timeless impression, and places them with Tin Pan Alley and Schubert. But what seems to be the point here is that they also came alongside a new technology, and it is not simply “recording”. You cannot begin to discuss the impact of sound recording without understanding that the 20th century falls into two distinct halves, and they are very very different: before and after multitrack. Before, studios were capturing live performances of musicians playing together in the studio; any orchestral or jazz recording for example. Any mistake, and you went back to the beginning. (Occasionally someone like Glenn Gould was so rhythmically and tonally controlled that they were able to cut together different performances into the same movement of Bach. Cutting mag tape!)

After multitrack, tracks were recorded separately, if the musicians were playing together they might be playing in different rooms so each instrument was miked the best way possible, then the tracks could be processed with different timbres and other effects, and even combined with additional sounds. That is the new art form.

The impetus came from Les Paul’s home inventions in multi-track recording, and was picked up by an astonishing person named Tom Dowd, whose earlier history was working on the Manhattan Project (atom bomb) and recording the likes of Coltrane and Charlie Parker at night. If you have to pick one person who was most central to the sound of 20th-century recording after mid-century, it was Dowd. The Allman Bros, Derek and the Dominoes, and much more. There is an excellent documentary about Dowd, and it will be a revelation to all sound-lovers:
http://www.thelanguageofmusic.com/

I don’t see or hear that the new development is crowding out amateur performance, however. Every town still has its local dance band, because real performance (as well as the audience mating ritual) will never die. What every town now has also is a very young producer who is good with producing software like Garage Band and is being sought out by the local musicians, to record. One thing I find interesting is that many young musicians I have talked to, don’t think or want to do it themselves. Studio producing has become a separate job title, down in the basement.

Most interesting are the newer combined formats. Consider the case of Kutiman, a young Israeli musical artist who has started something unique. He finds instrumental home videos on YouTube, of course there are hundreds of thousands, he analyzes the sounds, writes his own completely different songtracks, then uses only the instrumental sounds from the videos to make the music, and then cuts the synched videos back into a montage so that the original musicians appear to be “playing” the song. And the outcome is that they are all tickled to death to have been included.

It might be easier just to look at one than to describe it: It is important to understand that the musicians you are watching are playing the notes, but not the song, you hear. Each Kutiman vid has a list in the YouTube text underneath of all the contributing vids with their own links, so you can go and hear the original stuff too. Kutiman is a phenomenally talented person. His finished tracks are in different genres and they are great. My favorite is “The Mother of All Funk Chords”: 1.3 million views:

I thought the other Beatles wanted to keep touring but George said no — he didn’t like it.

Actually, didn’t a guy called Don McLean do Wald — whom I haven’t read but now will — 40-odd years ago? (“We all got up to dance/ But we never got the chance …”)

And now that I’ve read Lee A. Arnold’s comment, thanks for that. That was illuminating.

@65 I’m sorry: I think I’m still missing it. Is the point now that relatively more people are consumers rather than producers of music today compared to, say, a century ago? Is that really true? I am prepared to be convinced, but I’d like to se the data. My impression is that there is still an enormous amount of music-making going on, from kids on their Playstations to the choir of Brian Eno’s mates. The Internet is absolutely stuffed with music, most of it made by amateurs.

And if people do consume more and make less music, surely that has less to do with the sophistication of post-George Martin production techniques, and more connection to the rise of TV, technological change creating competing attractions for leisure time, economic pressures, social fragmentation and the decline of organised religion.

Here are 239 primarily hip hop examples of kraftwerk being sampled http://www.whosampled.com/sampled/Kraftwerk/ which actually understates the number as more obscure records are overlooked and clever disguises of kraftwerk samples are sometimes not noticed (not to mention mixtape blends or freestyles.) Furthermore, there are tons of 12″s that sample kraftwerk in edm genres where sample spotting culture isn’t as large as in hip hop, and as such are not represented on stuff like the-breaks or whosampled.

“Rather than being a high point of rock, the Beatles destroyed rock ’n’ roll, turning it from a vibrant black (or integrated) dance music into a vehicle for white pap and pretension [= white art rock].”

In addition to what everybody else has said, this is a historical travesty. The artist who turned rock’n’roll from a vibrant dance music into yadda yadda was in fact Bob Dylan (Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited). John Lennon went on record as saying that it was Dylan who explained to the Beatles that it was possible to write more lyrically complex songs at the cost of omitting the “It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it” factor.

_so popular with black Americans is a central narrative – arguably the central narrative – of music in the late 20th century._

Well that’s a strong claim. Is it borne out by, say, the number of records Kraftwerk sold in the relevant market?

@spyder, #49: Thanks for the link. Wonderful!

Also, there’s Clint Eastwood’s film on piano blues in Scorsese’s PBS blues series. A lot of the music there isn’t blues by any reasonable (ethno)musicological definition, but neither Eastwood nor anyone else tells us that. But it’s all piano music, and a lot of it owes as much a debt to Chopin and Czerny as to backwoods blusers.

Note that New Orleans had the first opera company in North America.

& WC Handy was musically literate, etc.

@bianca steele, 36

Well delta blues started out as folk music. Very arguably, the hacienda (@bert, 46) was a modern folk phenomenon; certainly it didn’t spring from academic elites or commercial marketing power.

So long as it’s not petrified as ‘heritage’ — a word that always puts me in mind of mammoths trapped in Siberian permafrost — genuinely popular music can retain power and relevance. I really like this inter-war anarchist song (English speakers may appreciate it better having first listened to a translated version here (track 2)). What’s essential is that it stands on its own merits — the folkishness is incidental but unapologetic.

Also surprising is the enduring appeal and power some popular music of long-dead peasants can still possess. For example when Thomas Moore set an old folk tune to lyrics and it became The Minstrel Boy it was well on its way to becoming kitsch, but a sort of kitsch that would give rise to many strange and wonderful outcomes.

It became both a pro- and anti-war song and an anti-slavery anthem. Paul Robeson sang it and if Star Trek is to be believed it’ll still be sung in distant parts of the galaxy in the far future. A version by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros played over the credits at the end of Black Hawk Down.

The old tune went through far wierder transformations than this, however. The messianic hymn “The Son of God Goes Forth to War” was set to the same music for the (excellent and entertaining) John Huston film “The Man Who Would be King”, which was based on a Kipling story of the same name. Wikipedia quotes Roger Ebert as writing that “it’s been a long time since there’s been an escapist entertainment quite this unabashed and thrilling and fun” in his review, but I’m not certain Ebert didn’t sell Huston short on this one. The characters’ inordinate self-confidence and pride in their Britishness leads them to heroic follies but also makes them remarkable and proud individuals. The song comes once more at the very end of the movie (start watching at 2:01:00, but really the film is so entertaining it’s worth setting aside an evening to watch; Pity Donald Rumsfeld never did).

This new arrangement has taken on a life of its own. This version on youtube isn’t the most dramatic or polished but the oddly modest and human delivery of the messianic lyrics makes for a fascinating 47 seconds. I love it. Though quite alien to modern tastes, I feel it retains some of the power Christianity held over its adherents in its heyday, when it was as natural and universal as air instead of something to be clung to defensively. It’s not possible to comprehend European history in all its horror and glory without reference to such relics.

Also essential to retained vitality is the intersection of popular and elite culture; there doesn’t have to be an attempt to be exclusive or academic as such, rather to be particular about an ideal listener. I suppose Captain O’Kane belongs to the past but it was a past where folk music was just music, be it good bad or indifferent, and not something introverted or backward looking.

@everyone

On art music, my fear is that the ability of the critical elites to distinguish quality from dross has almost vanished. There’s more literature, more art, more music and so on than ever before but the territory remaining to be undiscovered is shrinking all the time.

I listen to a lot of classical music, Baroque mostly. One modern album I’d classify as music of great importance (please take a moment to practise uttering these words with appropriate gravitas) would be “Music for Babies” by Howie B (fragments on youtube, but really it plays like a suite; you’ll just have to buy it!). Sadly nobody is listening it seems. It’s entertaining and very easy to listen to after a bit of getting used to, but also uncompromising and brilliantly original. I reiterate my claim: important.

Hardly less bold is Benny Benassi, for example Satisfaction. My feeling is that Kandinski or Mondrian would react to this with excitement but the middle classes reject such music. I don’t expect Howie B or Benassi will be featuring alongside the likes of Miles Davis in the favourites lists of the great and good anytime soon, let alone as part of a modern orchestral repertoire. More’s the pity.

Before recorded music takes off, every town has its local dance band – indeed, many families have the means of making their own music.

For ‘many’ read ‘most’, or possibly ‘all’. Before the first form of mass-market recorded music – which was of course the piano roll – the only way to hear a piece of music was to play it (or sing it), or else have someone play (or sing) it to you. Playing music and singing songs was normal in a way that it hasn’t been since – it had to be, or where would all the music have come from? People like music; in the absence of other less demanding distractions, people will make music just to pass the time. (This statement is harder to test than it used to be.)

This has sod-all to do with the Beatles, but I’m not convinced the Beatles – or the replacement of live-in-the-studio with sub-Pepper sound sculptures – made that big a difference.

Anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter, a disciple, like Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan (whose close friend and collaborator he was) of Canadian scholar and pioneer of the field of communications, has just died.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Snow_Carpenter

“Ong, like McLuhan, is pining for preliterary, prelapsarian holism, re-integrated community, the whole ball of wax, before the shapes of letters were impressed upon it.”

While McLuhan was more conservative and skeptical of the electronic world, neither he nor Ong longed for a “preliterary, prelapsarian holism, re-integrated community.” Even in *Orality and Literacy* Ong offers qualifiers to indicate that he’s not favoring orality over literacy (or literacy over orality as some people have also claimed). A reading of *The Presence of the Word* and his many post *Orality and Literacy* publications, the last of which were published in 2003, finished and submitted before his death, will clearly demonstrate a much more nuanced and ever developing understanding of these issues, thereby giving your own developing ideas greater depth and nuance. I’ll conclude by noting that he intentionally titled the 1982 book _Orality *and* Literacy_ rather than _Orality *versus* Literacy_ because he understood this as a continuum, something he argues in *The Presence of the Word* back in the late 1960s. (See the section on overlappings and complications.)

eight that are in some way shaped by Kraftwerk: two electro dance (LMFAO and Lady Gaga), three poppier versions of the same (Katy Perry x2, Maroon 5), and three hip-hop (Pitbull, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne.)

I say they are influenced by Giorgio Moroder and that Giorgio Moroder’s influence dominates the charts.

I don’t think I even need to prove that Kraftwerk were the most influential band of the past half century

Yes you do. Using drum machines is not the same thing as being influenced by Kraftwerk.

Adrian Kelleher @ 80
Yes, “heritage” is another way of describing what I had in mind–I’m not sure how far the accusation should be allowed to apply, though. This isn’t consistent, but folk music seems generally to evade those charges when its practitioners are non-white (and in a few other cases as with Celtic music, though I don’t know how many bargoers in South Boston take up fiddle), as with your blues example. Otherwise, what’s new is often preferred.

I haven’t followed the discussion of Kraftwerk; my wife whose aunt worked on the show tells me they appeared on Soul Train. But I can’t find it on YouTube. I did not do a thorough search in part because I am now really paranoid about doing google searches after reading Cranky Observer’s post on the google thread!

@John Holbo, #51: Well, you’re still not doing Wald any favors. He strikes me as having a broken guitar neck up his ass. Great discussion, though.

Also, the Velvets have a better claim to influence than some of the rest of your list.

Cf. also the continued popularity of Hansi Hinterseer in the land of Kraftwerk, Neu!, Can et al. Someone should do a mash-up…

@95: Which means giving up on writing a history of music as a history of art. Would anyone read an art history book in which Thomas Kinkade and MC Esher take precedence over Salvador Dali, Matisse, and Jasper John? Absent teleological discussion, the past makes no sense.

@100: But if you wanted to write a social history of art and popular taste then it would be a very good approach. And art history without social context is just taxonomy.

He was very popular in his time

What might that mean for painters then? What was the size of his audience?

Here you go:
“… artiste parmi les mieux payés de son temps”
The article says Jack Nicholson collects him.
I remember hearing Nicholson is also a big buyer of Jack Vettriano.

Chris @95: Well just because Wald eschews the teleological style, that doesn’t mean I have to, I think. (At least, he claims to eschew it. More on that later.) My argument was aimed specifically at a claim he seems to be making in that Time interview: that after the Beatles, black musicians stopped being interested in what white musicians were doing. That isn’t really true even in the case of the Beatles, and it is even less true for some of the white art rock that came later.

Obviously I will have actually to read Wald to see for myself (obviously!), but I am sceptical as to whether his “look at what was most popular at the time” approach really is more productive than the “look at what was most exciting, innovative and influential” methodology used by most critics for rock music (and most other arts, as the comments above make clear.) If you are really interested in what was most popular, the ‘Guinness Book of Hit Albums and Singles’ does an excellent job for the 1950s onwards, without any tendentious claims about who “destroyed” what.

(Incidentally, the Nietzsche quote cited by Neville @101 makes a good point about how teleology can make for bad history. But the story of how the Beatles persuaded white Americans to stop listening to the Marvelettes and start listening to ELP is in itself surely a present-centred view of history, albeit of a Golden Age-ist rather than Whiggish variety.)

@96: Yes, that’s a good point. The Velvets have been the textbook case of “tiny sales / huge influence” since that Eno quote about “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought one formed a band.” It is true they have been very influential through David Bowie and Roxy Music, punk, the Smiths / R.E.M./”indie” continuum and – of course – Kraftwerk. But I wonder how much you hear their legacy today, compared to that of, say, Black Sabbath, whose children are everywhere.

Try this for size: the clearest descendent of the VU now working in pop is Beyonce, thanks to the chain of influence that runs: the Velvets -> Kraftwerk -> hip-hop -> modern R&B. I like to think LaMonte Young would enjoy ‘Run the World (Girls)’, anyway.

@109 Sorry: I should have replied to you earlier. You are dead right about Moroder, of course; I had him in an original draft of that comment, but edited him out because I thought he was covered by the reference to “disco”. Although, IIRC, while he was huge for House and Techno, he was never such a big deal for Hip-hop. Some of the early Hip-hop figures (eg Chuck D) were explicitly anti-disco.

Anyway, my point was not really Kraftwerk vs Moroder; it was to demonstrate how the interchange between black and white musicians remained fertile and exciting long after Sgt Pepper. Moroder, as a white Italian who lived for many years in Germany, makes that point just as well.

Ed: Yes, but as several commenters have pointed out, notation puts that era a long time before the recording of ‘Sgt Pepper’, and indeed before recordings of any kind.

Yes, but . . .

Yes: As we do with the evolution of print, we can take the long view and see long developments. Let me just mention Richard Lanham on that and take the rest as said.

But: Notation does not capture performance. Notation is composition; every performance is a fleeting event. You can sing your Gregorian chants following the notation of past generations of monks, but you can’t hear the actual voice of the guy who first sang them that way. Notation is langue and performance is parole. But recording and playback technology (definitely the playback is the crucial part, come to think of it) muddies up that division in many ways. It is, if not a turning point, a major leap or inflection point. Multi-track studio work is a less huge change, but still a moment of transition.

Even in classical music notation is only part of the story. There is much that notation cannot capture that is conveyed by oral tradition, transmitted from one teacher to another over time, down the generations. It is a curious thing that the invention of the phonograph set off a crazy for playing “only what was written on the page” — but this was never how it had been done in the past, when it was the rule to improvise. The improvised additions and ornamentations, were one-time events that didn’t translate well to recordings designed to be played over and over, however.

I’m a bit late to the thread but I’ve been thinking about another important aspect of Sgt. Pepper’s lately. A little over a year ago, I started to learn how to dance. Knowledge how to actually dance things like swing, foxtrot, or various other dances used to be much more widespread. At least in the States, dancing knowledge was considered important enough for schools to offer it as an elective when my parents were in the public schools. This would be in the early 1960s. Than knowledge of dancing sharply decreased.

My personal theory is that Sgt. Pepper is symbolic of this. Before Sgt. Pepper, rock music was more danceable to, partly because it was meant to be listen to live and with others rather than at home as Wald argued. At concerts, people would dance with each other. However, from Sgt. Peppper and onward, rock music grew more sophisticated musically and lyrically and considerably less danceable. Since a good chunk of pop music and danceable music experienced a split, knowledge of how to dance decreased rapidly.

Attn Robert @ 117: I think when people are lamenting the demise of dance music culture, more focus should be placed on dance rather than music. Its helpful we divide dance music culture into encompassing two types of dancing: (1) moving in time with the music and (2) specific dances like fox trot, hustle, or swing. At least in the dancing community, when people mourn the death of dance music culture; the really mean loss of common knowledge of specific dance types among the general population. How many people know how to swing or fox trot these days unless they get into the dance scene?

Thats generally how I view eulogies about the death of dance music culture, its more about lamenting the fact that most dancing these days is free-style and that even that sort skill isn’t that widespread.

Max Roach: Great drummer. Full of bullshit when it comes to theory or music appreciation. I truly would not want to live in a world where his attitude determined much of anything.