For the past year or so, I've been finding myself fascinated with popular music. It seems to me that one of the most important artistic revolutions in our century has been the evolution of popular songs. (The other has been the development of cinema). Even some of the songwriting of the Broadway musicals and Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths was incredibly good. But the revolution in the nature of songwriting in the second half of the century has been absolutely amazing. And yet this has occurred in the almost total lack of any academic attention. As far as I can figure out, there's scarcely a course taught anywhere that gives any attention to popular songs, and certainly there's almost nowhere in the academic world that one can go to learn the craft of songwriting.
One of the things that fascinates me about popular songs is that people love to hear a favorite song played over and over again. I am especially aware of this since I mostly hear songs played on jukeboxes in bars. On the jukebox in Anna Bannana's (and likewise in many of the San Francisco bars I know) there are many songs that first became popular in the Fifties and Sixties, and people play them every night, moving their bodies to the music and sometimes singing along. And they're not necessarily those songs which would rate highest if judged as works of art, but rather a song from the Fifties, for instance, called ``Rockin' Robin,'' or ``It's a Hard Days Night'' by the Beatles, or the Janis Joplin version of ``Me 'n Bobbie McGee.'' It makes me wonder whether it would be possible to write a piece of literature that people would want to read over and over again (just as children like to hear the same story over and over again).
I managed to find two books in the library by a guy named David Pichaske: The Poetry of Rock and a poetry anthology called From Beowulf to the Beatles. But in my opinion, he misses the real point, since he discusses lyrics as poetry, independent of the music. But to me the most interesting thing about songs is the way the lyrics of a and the melody work together to make an organic whole.
There are some songs where melody seems to be the driving force and the musical quality of the words is more important than their meaning. ``Heart of Glass,'' sung by the group Blondie, seems to be a good example. There have also been examples of songs which have been popular although sung in foreign languages that most Americans don't understand. ``La Bamba,'' sung by Richie Valens, is one example, and many years ago there was a song sung in French by ``The Singing Nun'' which was extremely popular despite the fact that almost nobody in the American public had any conception of what the words meant.
In other songs, such as those by Leonard Cohen or Tom Lehrer, the lyrics seem to be the main point.
But there are a lot of songs where the lyrics and music are such an integral whole that if one hears the melody played without the lyrics, one still thinks of the piece as a song rather than instrumental music, and many people will mentally hear the words. And on the other hand, it's almost impossible for most people to recite the words without singing them. Examples would be ``It's Just One of Those Things,'' ``I Get a Kick Out of You,'' or ``That Old Black Magic,'' or ``I'm Getting Married in the Morning'' (from ``My Fair Lady''), or ``Jesus Christ Superstar.''
But one of the things that makes popular music in the Twentieth Century a new art form, different from previous vocal music, is that a piece of popular music is more than merely melody, lyrics, and accompaniment. At the very least, one has to consider a fourth essential ingredient: performance. With the advent of recording, performance was no longer a transitory thing that only existed for a small group of people at the particular moment when a singer sang. Now people all over the world could hear the exact same performance over and over again. And this eventually made performance a much more integral part of music than it had been before recordings, so that now people commonly refer to a "Janis Joplin song," or a "Patsy Cline song," often not even being aware of the identity of the composer and lyricist. (Who wrote the Patsy Cline song Crazy? Answer: Willie Nelson. But Willie Nelson singing Crazy is a different piece of art than Patsy Cline singing it.)
For a lot of rock and roll, especially starting with the Sixties, it's a little misleading to separate a piece of music into components of melody, lyrics, accompaniment, and performance, since what the listener really responds to is the total ``sound'' of the piece: an amalgam (gestalt) made up of the lyrics, melody, instrumentation, and voice qualities. To analyze the music of groups like Santana or the Doors or Guns 'N Roses or Prince or Bruce Springsteen in terms of melody and lyrics is in large part, in my opinion, to miss the whole point. Starting with the Sixties, rock music was often no longer a ``song'' but a total experience in sound.
Well, I'm digressing from my main point, which is that in the realm of popular song, an amazing artistic revolution has occurred in our century, despite the lack of any corresponding courses in universities. And in fact, one might conjecture that perhaps the vigor of this art form might even be because of the lack of academic attention to it.