Why is Pre-Rock Music Dead?

I'm sad there is virtually no market for black and white films (among people under a certain age) and even less for silent film. When I was young, there was a bit of a revival for old movies among people my age, although many people my age refused to watch anything that wasn't in color.

Sadly, I'm afraid that's becoming lost forever. But who knows? Maybe there will be another revival?

 

There doubtless will be, and in 200 years is there any question that City Lights will be available to anyone who wants to watch a great movie? Again, the great works live on, even while popular tastes are bound to change - and SHOULD change.

 

Charlie Chaplin's current status in film history is akin to the status of Mozart and Beethoven in music. He himself is a now permanent film icon. Even though his films may not have the same widespread appeal, everyone young and old knows the name "Charlie Chaplin" and can identify a picture him. Amazing really.

 

The music of the last 50 years is merely the soiled undergarments of all that came before it.

The revival starts with you. If you care, you will. If you don't, it won't.

 

Getting back to he original question - I question the premise.

Bon Iver is pretty damn popular today, and they definitely has throwback elements to roots music.

 

You're overstating the deadness. The entire music industry, top to bottom, is moribund and there's no clear way out. But the pre-rock, Great American Songbook is still with us as much as it were ten years ago and ten years ago this sort of music was experiencing a mini-revival. Pre-rock music is no deader than post-rock music. That is to say, it is dying at more or less the same speed as rock.

 

If Lady Gaga can record an album of Standards in duet with, 88 years old, Tony Bennett
then the " Great American Songbook " is not dead.

 

My theory: I blame the Beatles for revolutionizing popular music so completely that they cast everything else (jazz, classical, various folk idioms) and everything before (big band, vocal jazz, etc) into the shade. Now, the Beatles themselves may have had a decent sense of musical history (notwithstanding the occasional "Before Elvis there was nothing" pronouncement), but after the Beatles, and certainly after Rock became an "established" phenomenon, musical history was reconceived to support that establishment.

Hence, especially for those of us who came to musical consciousness after the rock era was well underway, pop music history was really thought to start with the Beatles, only with a special introductory chapter on pre-army Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard (ie, on the artists who mattered to the early Beatles).

I think the Beatles' popularity and their indispensable place in musical history are assured for the foreseeable future (me: I love 'em). But I do think the Beatles now function less powerfully than they once did as the central organizing principle of pop music history. And that's probably a good thing, since it opens the door once again to all kinds of still-enjoyable music that was to the side of the Beatles or that pre-dated them or that came after but with little obvious debt to the fab four.

A supplementary explanation: the rise of rock music as a form coincides, more or less, with the LP era. If the LP was taken by rock-era music historians and tastemakers as the basic unit of art music, then the singles-oriented world of 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s music is just going to get lost in a jumble of ill-organized, poorly-curated, greatest hits-type collections--to say nothing of the piano-roll and sheet-music orientations of even earlier eras.

And a final remark: these things only matter at the margins, however, since most people in the big world outside SHMF only listen to a pretty narrow range of music--they don't, for example, aspire to an encyclopedic sense for music and its history, as many people here do. Do these people in the big world listen primarily to what their peers also listen to? I would presume so! And why not? So long as they enjoy it, I don't see that that's a problem. Would it be better if their narrow range of habitual listening was a more tasteful narrow range? That's a question that sort of answers itself, now isn't it?... presuming you agree that "more tasteful" is whatever I say it is...

 

I was the age to get into classic rock, and now I mostly listen to pre-rock music (mostly African American blues, jazz, soul, but also classical and Brazilian). That is the music that is alive to me, so obviously I have no clue.

 

Just this past Sunday,Turner Classic Movies used their Sunday evening Essentials Jr. to showcase silent films.Aimed at "family"viewing and hosted by former SNL's Bill Hader,they usually have one Sunday each summer to highlight Chaplin,Keaton-even Fatty Arbuckle this time around.Hard to say how successful these spoolings are,but it is well intentioned for "the masses".I wish this channel was around when I was raising my kids.

 

So all those people that I've spoken to who talk about a time when locking your doors at night was unnecessary are all liars?

 

Music from the pre-rock era is not popular because it is not crude or vile or stupid or negative enough to appeal to current "society".

 

Pretty much, yeah. Lots of unreported crimes or crimes that were ignored by the powers that be. More information = more information, and we've got a lot more info now than ever before. People in the past probably should have locked their doors, humans are and always will be human. Not always a good thing.

 

It may not be dead, but if this is true, it will kill it.

 

Trust me, there was a time, and there were many places in the USA, where people did not take living in constant fear and distrust for granted.

 

Those places were mythical. What went on in those houses never became part of the permanent record. No one ever really lived in "Pleasantville", that was a myth.

 

Right, and we have rock music to thank in large part for the debasement of our cultural standards. Music was so much better back in the old days, but I wonder if the kids today could even recognize it.

 

When I go to a blues concert now, or a concert by a rock star who was big in the 1970s, I see many old looking people, white haired and wrinkled, with Hendrix T shirts on, or T shirts with other old rock stars. At one time people who looked like that disliked rock and told us that their Benny Goodman records were good music. Time has marched on. I have a large collection of pre-rock music but I am a peculiar music nerd to the general population.

 

They were not mythical. I witnessed them. There was a time when one could walk into an airport, buy a ticket and get on a plane without being searched like a criminal. There was a time when one could walk into any government building, including the Capitol freely and unimpeded. The notion that those were mythical times and places has been promulgated by moral relativists and apologists who want us to accept the notion that there's nothing different about our current time, that it was always the same. Those of us who knew this physical and mental freedom appreciate what has been lost.

 

My recollection of the pre-rock era is that it was not so much an age of innocence and basic morality as an age of hypocrisy.

 

Who blamed it on rock music?

 

And they took appropriate measures to maintain order on a local level. Today the victim is the devil and the trash become saints.

 

I wonder if maybe SHMF isn't quite the right place to debate whether pre-Rock North American culture was the place of white picket fences, unlocked doors, and decency or whether it was the place of lynchings, serious political harassment, threats of nuclear annihilation, and segregation. Is it possible we might return to more musical topics here?