I do not appreciate music as I should. Afflicted with a lead eardrum, I am like General Ulysses Grant, who said “I only know two songs. One is ‘Dixie’; the other one isn’t.” Furthermore, I have not only a poor appreciation of music, but a lot of longevity to my poor appreciation.
When I was growing up, musical genres were simple: music was classical or pop. With the exception of instrumental music of my youth, all music had two uniform characteristics: melody and lyrics.
Sounds simple, yes? You might well ask how something lacking one or both of these characteristics could be music. You need only look at our modern era.
Rap music should immediately come to mind. For the most part, the lyrics have no relation, or trivial relation, to the melody. Now, I don’t belong to that group of old guys who say that, in rap music, the “C” is silent. It does have redeeming features. In some respects, it recalls the time of epic poems, bards recounting famous battles or achievements of the king (Beowulf; Chanson de Roland)) While some of these were sung, the duration of many such ballads required poetic speaking, accompanied by a lute or rebecq.
The modern rap concept, however, would not travel well through other popular genres: Rap lullaby-‘sleep little baby before I bust you in the head.’ And what about country western music? Anybody thought of a gangsta brandin’ cattle in the ‘hood?
Perhaps, more than the tenuous link of lyric to melody, what confuses me most about Rap music is its curious orthodoxy. Embraced by the so-called rebellious age group, the clothing, appearance, and even hand gestures are curiously uniform. Virtually all the males have a ball cap on sideways; a shirt open to expose flesh or flashy bling; hands displaying a horizontal peace sign; a harvest of tattoos that seem to combine Kama Sutra and the encyclopedia of potty mouth.
The open shirt often displays a six-pack abdomen. Do I have a six-pack abdomen? No. Am I envious? No. (Who needs a six-pack abdomen when he already has a keg?) The universal low-slung pants derive from ‘jailin’- when a guy gets arrested, the police remove his belt lest it be used as either a weapon or a way to hang oneself. Upon release, minus the belt, the guy returns home dragging his britches. In homage to this upstanding community ideal, the gangsta rappers have pants that migrate south, regardless of season.
I know it is an in-vogue fashion and that I am hopelessly out of date, but I find it hard to imagine what a woman finds enticing about a man wearing his pants low enough to strangle his buttocks. Maybe it’s the fact that he is, in fact, already half naked.
Whatever the result, their conformity reassures that they will never be found guilty of originality. It also creates an image conundrum: one hand to hold up the pants, one hand to hold the cell phone to the ear. There is now no free hand available for rude hand gestures.
I actually have a greater issue with what I call ‘Tonsil Gymnastics’- where the singer takes one word of lyric and throws his voice all over the octaves, up and down and back, like a butterfly with the hiccups. Look at American Idol, they all do it. It is almost obligatory; he who doesn’t gargle his lyrics shall not triumph.
This is not new. Old-time singers knew perfectly well how to do this. More importantly, they knew when Not to do this. Ella Fitzgerald called it ‘scattin’, and did it with no lyric at all. Folks like Frank Sinatra would put one or two short trills into a song, a bit like a dash of spice in a meal.
In the modern era, this tonsil gymnastic is the whole meal, much like throwing out the French fry and just eating the salt. A little salt is savory; salt by itself nauseates. The error is that these singers place no faith in the beauty of their melody or the compelling message of their lyric. Either that or it is irrelevant to them; they merely come to gargle.
Roseanne Barr assassinated the National Anthem with just such yodeling. There is no song, written in any era, that cannot be destroyed by tonsil gymnastics
I submit that these music forms confuse me. While I don’t know if this phase will pass, I am sure that asking these performers for advice on popular music would be a bit like a woman asking for marital advice from Henry VIII. For those who want to try tonsil gymnastics, I would advise:
- You should be on the stage… there is one leaving at noon. http://casefilesofanangel.weebly.com/
- Leave such gobbling to turkeys- they have a better talent for it than do humans and, better, they know when to stop.
Dennis Garvin is the author of ‘Case Files of an Angel’ and has co-authored with his brother, Lucky, a collaborative diary of growing up- ‘Growing up in Stephentown.’ These books are available online at Amazon, Barnes& Noble, westbowpress.com Visit his website http://casefilesofanangel.weebly.com/
