Why is Pre-Rock Music Dead?

Because those things were usurped by Rock music, and Rock music evolved from them.

 

We need a "Mud Pit" like they have at Tapeheads where anything goes. The squeamish can simply stay away.

 

Well, many folk singers of the early to mid 20th Century sang about lynchings, serious political harassment, threats of nuclear annihilation, and segregation, so...

 

Lots of pre Rock songs were pretty subtle with double meanings in the lyrics. Life's so fast now everything has to be totally blatant. No one's got time to look at any lyric more complicated than, say, The Battle of Epping Forest.

 

Bod Dylan the visionary got it. Folk/blues music is where it is really at. Even when rocked up by the Brits


I know that evening's empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

 

Musical evolution, absolutely. That's not to say that pre-rock music sucks and should never be played or heard again, but that the style that evolved from it simply took over.

 

The degeneracy of society? Look no further than the massive proliferation of the automobile and its effect on growing up.
20 minutes... your daughter is in another state, rockin' in the back seat, warm and dry.
Music? Film? Gimme a beak!

 

Yes, Pleasantville was a movie, not reality. And maybe you never experienced such a time where you lived, but for some of the rest of us there was a time much different and trusting than today. Where I lived in the 1970's we never locked our doors. We actually left our car keys in the ignition. I know that sounds incredibly dumb in today's world, but it is the truth and how it really was, at least where I lived during that era. In big cities, I'm sure it was different, but in small towns everyone knew everyone else. If someone asked to borrow your car, the typical answer was: Go ahead, the keys are in it.

Of course it wasn't all idyllic or Pleasantville. There were some bad people. Some husbands mistreated their wives. Kids got drunk. Occasionally a bank got robbed. But at least in smaller Midwest towns, it was often a much more trusting time.

 

I did. After the rock explosion, audiences were too desensitized by all of the flash and distorted noise to appreciate good old fashioned music.

 

Some time back I had a long discussion with my 92 year old mother about how music in general has evolved over the years. She told me that she wishes that her teenage years were like mine. I was a tad surprised when she said that but maybe I shouldn't have. Even in her younger years growing up in the 1940's she loved all genres of music. And went to a lot of concerts ranging from Count Basie to Frank Sinatra to Duke Ellington to Vaughn Monroe to Dave Brubeck to Paul Whitman to Patty Page. When her and my dad hooked up she got involved with country music. If there ever was a bumper sticker for my dad it would be "If it ain't country, it ain't music!" In concert they saw Spade Cooley, Hank Thompson and the Brazo Valley Boys, and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys when my dad worked the oil fields of SE New Mexico and west Texas.

She was good about how I embraced collecting music. I bought my first 45 (Bristol Stomp by the Dovells) when it charted over a half century ago. I'd come out of the store with the 45 and also the latest weekly survey sheets. She asked me what the sheets were about and she could see what songs were coming on the charts and what was eventually being dropped off the charts. She remarked how music developed from the standpoint of information. And she would see the "rack jobbers" who worked for music labels putting up new posters and other promotional items in my favorite mom and pop record store (yes I'm old!) I asked her where she bought music and she said Montgomery Wards, Sears, and other department stores. She loved the way the music industry had grown from the standpoint of advertising, wishing she had collected to that level when she grew up.

While she isn't bonkers on current music and the various genres she loved various songs from the 50's going to the early 90's. She'd pony up two or three dollars a week, give it to me, and tell me what 45's to buy. She'd tell me to keep them but while I would be in school she would occasionally go into my room while I was at school and spin a few of my 45's on the old player. Here's a few songs she loved:

Flaming Star- Elvis Presley
Midnight Mary- Joey Powers
Wipeout- Surfaris
Navy Blue- Diane Renay
She's About A Mover- Sir Douglas Quintet

The song she got the biggest kick out of? Two of them are tied for first place- "Downtown" by Mrs. Miller and "They're Coming To Take Me Away" by Napolean XIV. Honorable mention goes to Tiny Tim for "Tip Toe Through The Tulips."

Pre rock music dead? Not at my house! Just the other day I picked up on CD a copy of "16 Greatest Songs" by Sarah Vaughn.

I collect it all! Well, I, uh, do draw the line on a couple genres. 51 years after i bought my first record I'm still buying tunes! And will till I go 6 feet under.

TUNES 24/7!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

I'm perfectly willing to split the difference. Again, a lot of what we think of as history is more like myth. The musically meaningful myth that comes out of this is the notion of a pre-rock world that was more innocent—the myth of "Pleasantville" and other movies, the misty-eyed Shangri-La of the 50's.

Every time there is a dance craze taken up by the young that the old folk can't get into, the notion of inherent morality in music and musical movements rises up in the hope of quelling those nasty 'yout'. The era of Johann Strauss Jr. and the "Waltz" craze comes to mind. In our era dance musics are dominant with rock in serious decline. In reality there is an overwhelming glut of music available for nothing or next to. Why a musical genre more than 60 years old is in decline should be obvious as all other music is in decline as well, at least from an economic standpoint.

 

There's a lot of pre-rock and similar music being played in my house. Billie, Ella, Louis, Sarah, Nat, etc etc get played a lot. As do their modern counterparts like Michael Buble, Diana Krall, Harry Connick Jr, etc.

My young daughter also has a big affinity for musicals, so we watch a lot old musicals. Rodgers and Hammerstein, "My Fair Lady", etc. All good stuff. All great stuff, in fact.

 

As far it being a more innocent time back before rock really took hold, that's a myth. My dad has told me some stories of his very young childhood that wouldn't seem out of place on the nightly news. As others have mentioned, certain things just weren't talked about or swept under the rug or not considered as unacceptable as they are today. And of course, now things seem worse than they are because of the mass media.

 

This is the band that played at my wedding (three years ago, I was 30, my wife 25).



People loved it. However, it didn't end as a drunk fest with everyone jumping around to hip hop. Of course, that was as designed by us.

 

The secrecy involved in developing the atomic bomb and the Red scare that followed can be blamed for a lot of negative change sin our culture. All in all, some things were better in the old days, some things worse. I lived in Chicago in the mid-1990's and never locked my door, so what?

Back to music - lots of good stuff here but I just wanted to add that (imo) kids today are very lucky, both to have a creative new music scene and to have to easy access to all the great music of the past. It's far cry from the 1980's when underground bands were just that, and most above ground acts were either insipid dance or watered-down heavy metal at it's shallowest and dumbest (which is really saying something). The best record store near me (about 20 minutes whether by bike or public transportation) had maybe 75-100 blues albums TOPS, and you actually had to pay for them (!) and without jumping online to check reviews or listen to samples, either.

 

It may not be a myth for everybody, but life certainly wasn't universally swell, or moral. I recently read a book about an 1880's pickpocket, thief and opium addict who lived a life any gangsta would be proud of.

 

Beyond—way beyond mass media. When the bulk of the population is running around with video cameras in their pockets and purses and the internet grants the ability to transmit that video throughout the world, all sorts of stuff is coming out of the woodwork. No place left for the woodbine to twineth no more.

 

I would LOVE a Hoagy Carmichael concert tape! For those keeping score, I have more Hoagy music than Monkees music.

 

I also think that the rhythmic aspect of pop music has evolved over time. Many present day listeners, especially younger people, seem to need a very strong, danceable beat in the music that they are listening to--and danceable by 2014 standards, which often means heavily electronically enhanced, so strong a beat that it just about blasts you out of the room. Even rock music of the 1970s does not have the right beats for many people today--too sparse and mellow. Go to a young person's dance club late on a weekend night, and your eyes will be opened. The rhythms of every song are quite unlike anything that came before. I think that this is why rock music has declined in popularity--wrong rhythms for many people today.

Count Basie commented about this in his autobiography, "Good Morning Blues." In the late 1950s, his band lost its appeal to younger audiences in live performance, because they said that they could not dance to it. Basie's comment was that "there was dancing before now."

Recorded music of the pre-rock era either does not have a strong danceable beat, or the strength of the rhythm section was not recorded well, or was not emphasized by the recording engineer. The films of crowds of young people wildly jitterbugging in the 1930s indicate that there must have been a strong danceable beat to that music, but you can't really hear it on the records of the time. On the early Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong records, you can hear the drummer striking a pad or a woodblock, because drums could not be recorded with the technology which existed. But even after that, the drummers who are remembered as powerhouses from the pre-rock era don't really sound like that, on the records of the time.

The ideal goal for rhythm on some pre-rock music was a swinging, lilting, subtle beat that moved you without hitting you over the head. That is not much valued today, by most listeners.

I was on an all night party bus recently with a crowd of people in their 20s, 30s and 40s (don't ask why). A professional DJ, who turned out to be quite intelligent when I talked to him later, programmed a non-stop hip hop soundtrack for the journey, at high volume. The rhythms are what the people on the bus loved. I thought to myself, even if there was a Rolling Stones uptempo song dropped in here, that would seem like such a drop-off in stimulation and intensity that the whole bus would erupt into a chorus of boos. A swing or jazz song dropped into the bus soundtrack would have seemed like something unwelcome from another world.

 

I like your mom! She's about the same age my mom would have been, had she not died 20 years ago. But yours is much hipper than mine.

 

Rather than asking, "Why is Pre-Rock Music Dead?" (which it most certainly is not, BTW), I think the real question is, "Why has the blues, along with American and British Isles folk music, become the dominant musical idiom in the western world?" I don't know the answer, but the question contains a lot of the answer to the OP's question. As Hot Ptah just posted while I typing this, I think a lot of it is about rhythm.

So in a way, one could say that the most widespread, well-known, commercially successful musical "thread" begins in Africa hundreds (or thousands) of years ago, winds across the Middle Passage and up the Mississippi river, and then spreads out across the U.S., into the British Isles, and then back to the U.S. and all over much of the rest of the world.

 

Hoagy Carmichael (imho) is one of the greatest composers of the 20th century! I don't know how he came up with the melody for Stardust, but it floors me every time I hear it!

 

This is who played at my wedding (and no, people did not "clear out"):

A lot of folks on this forum have very narrow, parochial tastes in music. Nothing wrong with that per-se, but just because you're not interested in something, or don't know anything about it, doesn't mean it's "dead."