by Vani Viswanathan
[box]Vani Viswanathan laments the music of today and wishes she could have been born to spend her teenage in the 70s, just so she could have lived through the best English music of all times.[/box]I have always wished I was born in the late 50s or in the 60s. Just so that I would have been a teenager in the 70s. In the US; no actually better still, the UK. You know, when it was ok to be a hippie, when travelling the world as a teenager was simply the coolest thing to do, when you’d only get half-weirded-out stares if you were a flower child. But most of all, it was for the music. The best music the world has ever heard, unless something revolutionary happens to the ears of those who compose these days. The strict Rahman fan that I am, though, I will maintain this statement for English music only. International music contains to be as awesome as ever, if anything, getting more fans worldwide thanks to the Internet.
I must confess at the outset I cannot claim to know all about the songs of then or of the songs of now, but I do know enough to compare, and to say without doubt that songs of then are far more legendary, classic, and innovative than most of the hits of today.
Come on, just sample the songs that become massive hits these days – if they are not about disturbingly young children singing about their lame lives (‘Which seat do I take?’), these same children sing about their budding dating lives (‘Baby, baby, baby, OH!’). There is one irritating trend that my friend once noted about the hits of today – they are all sad (literally, yes, but often metaphorically too), and they are mostly about breakups. Adele’s song that rocketed her to fame (err, in my definition, a song so popular that I happened to hear it) – ‘Someone like you’ – has a 21-year-old singing about a man a lady loved who happened to marry someone else. The song that I am currently addicted to – Gotye’s ‘Somebody that I used to know’ – is about a man being grumpy about his girlfriend moving on. There is no innovation about the lyrics. They are a bunch of everyday, meaningless words strung together and put to a tune that rarely has any music in it.
The other painful-to-the-ear trend is how the songs of today rely almost obsessively on Auto-Tune. And the beat, oh my god, the damning beat. The beat and the software make you wonder if they even recorded the song at a studio or whether everything was simply generated with a computer.
Let’s dial back to the songs of the 70s. The Beatles were in their prime, making the world go gaga. The world of Rock was at its best time ever, and here I’m only talking about the really known ones, the popular ones: Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Simon & Garfunkel. If you are a fan of Rock, cross your heart and tell me you’ve heard consistently brilliant music in any of the recent years (I’ll discount the 80s in general, they were a brilliant bunch of years too).The Eagles were adding the American touch, The Police (and Sting) had arrived. ABBA was still rocking, Fleetwood Mac was being unique and hippie. U2 had been formed. Eric Clapton was stringing magic together on the guitar. You had your Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, Van Halen, David Bowie and others sprucing up the music of the decade. And how can I forget, there was Michael Jackson, who, thankfully, survived another couple of decades before falling to ruin. The names of the bands ring in innovation. They spell something that’s worth being heard. Today? Between the baby boy’s whose voice is just breaking to a lady gifted with a powerful voice but annoys you with her crude personality, I don’t know whom to pick.
The songs of the 70s also had a lot of character. They spanned a lot more topics and were often happy and promising. A staggering large number of the top ones had something to do with drugs, but at least this was masked in the name of discussing something else. They were about peace, obsession, love, revolution, challenging attitudes. Lyrics prodded you to think – they were poems, or they were everyday words that you’d had to put some effort into to understand, enjoy. Be it The Stairway to Heaven, Hotel California or Baba O’Riley, they leave it to you to interpret it. The music has a haunting touch – be it Kashmir’s scintillating guitar riffs, the moods through which Baba O’Riley swings, Pink Floyd’s psychedelic sounds, or Bohemian Rhapsody’s mixture of operatic and rock elements – you see diversity, you see talent, and you see music that is not the result of a computer’s interference.
The 80s were simply an awesome decade for music too, with music videos coming in to make a song memorable. The 90s were fun too. Just what happened after 2000? The boy bands left, Rock also became sad (literally and metaphorically ;)), Pop just became a euphemism for lesser clothes and raunchy dance moves. Hip-Hop became an excuse for singing to eventually dwindle to mere talking and later supplemented by Auto-Tune. I don’t dispute the fact that many singers do have brilliant voices – be it Lady Gaga or Rihanna or Katy Perry – but so often their voices are drowned by instruments and in beats that most often sound the same – or perhaps it’s my untrained ears that cannot distinguish all of this.
There is one thing just so wonderful about music today, though – the Internet. For a late entrant into the music of the 70s like me, there is nothing like YouTube when it comes to discovering ‘newer’ old music, finding the videos of the time, listening to concert versions or the occasional rare videos of the stars discussing their songs – for someone who so wished to have lived her teenage/20s in the 1970s, these videos provide some vicarious pleasure.
Vani Viswanathan is often lost in her world of books and A R Rahman, churning out lines in her head or humming a song. Her world is one of frivolity, optimism, quietude and general chilled-ness, where there is always place for outbursts of laughter, bouts of silence, chocolate, ice cream and lots of books and endless iTunes playlists from all over the world. Vani was a Public Relations consultant in Singapore and decided to come back to homeland after seven years away. Vani blogs at http://chennaigalwrites.blogspot.com
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