SATCHMO

First, I love avian worm vomit, That's beautiful... I wish I'd thought of it myself, however the context in which I was asserting that today's music was, "... the regurgitation of the culmination of 60 years of pop culture coupled with a short attention span." wasn't an indictment of contemporary music itself, beyond the fact that I'm asserting that it's not as closely tied to it's own particular time and place in history as much as a lot of the music that was created in the 60's was, but let's take a look at that.

There's a lot of music that was created in the 60's that was blandly unexceptional. You don't hear many people extolling the virtues of Boots Randolph and his Yakety Sax, but whether you're a huge fan of 60's psychedelia, or not, and, I'm really not, You have to understand that the late 60's was a tipping point in the expansion of our cultural and conscious awareness and one of the primary ways that that awareness was manifested was through the music that was being created during that time period. It was a very interesting and unprecedented time in our history.

Conversely, each subsequent era of music following the 60's has brought with it a new layer of musical and cultural influences, and each subsequent decade has also been affected by the compounding saturation of media influence in our lives which constantly jockeys for our attention. We are living in a time where our immediate cultural zeitgeist is the dizzying gumbo of everything that is and has been influencing our awareness since the sixties.

But really, There are a lot of things that make the 60's as relevant as they were. The impact of televised media was still relatively fresh and new and it's immediate impact on our awareness was full on and largely uncontrolled by the powers that be. The music industry was burgeoning. Rock & roll was a relatively new musical paradigm. The LP format had recently just become the default standard musical medium, and because of this advent, artists were releasing full length albums and creating long more cohesive musical suites precisely for that purpose. The art of studio overdubbing, invented and perfected by Les Paul, was being used to allow musicians to do things in the studio that would have, until that point, been otherwise impossible, including many of the psychedelic effects that many were experimenting with, Musicians were being much more influenced by what was possible and less by what the generation before it had done.

And on top of this, we were presented with a war, which for the first time in our history, wasn't just presented to us in typographic headlines on the front pages of a newspaper. We were inundated with images of unprecedented brutality and suffering and we, as a culture who had not seen anything remotely like it before, who had not yet been completely numbed from sensationalism being the order of the day, were deeply affected by it, and we reacted to it, among other ways, through song.

So, I'm not over here rocking' some tie die and extolling the virtues of all things peace, love, and psilocybin, (well, actually, that last part, I am). I do love me some Grateful Dead, but that's about the extent of it. And I don't think that today's music sucks at all. I own and love a lot of it. I just think that we are creating music from the foundation of a very overused paradigm, a 50 year old paradigm. There are many artists, both new and old, who have abandoned that paradigm for their own, and it's usually their music that I appreciate the most, but I do think we will be seeing another cultural and artistic tipping point very soon which will make the 60's seem as bland and uneventful as a dusty Boots Randolph record.