Article on the sale of David Bowie's songs, schools of rock and music's future.
Bowie and Franz Lehar.
I was rereading a recent article about the sale by David Bowie’s heirs of the portfolio of 26 albums (plus posthumous ones) for “over $250M” of the “thin white duke.”
I already wrote about the “old fogey” Bob Dylan and the related sale of the entire catalog and now Neil Young and Bowie have arrived. Sure, they are all old men and those who are not already dead… it is natural that they want to ensure continuity for their offspring or wives, if they have one. But is this the only reason?
The buyer of the Bowie catalog is WMC, the “publishing” arm of one of the media oligopolists, Warner Bros. CEO Guy Moot commented on the transfer with a sentence that at first glance seems obvious: “These are not just extraordinary songs, but milestones that have changed the course of modern music forever.” If we want to be honest we can agree (maybe) with the first sentence, but certainly for the second we need a lot of time to convince ourselves.
From a point of view of musical creativity (innovation, you could say) Bowie is not one of those who “changed the course of modern music forever” - he is neither Bach nor the Duke. Sometimes his harmonic approach is singular, and unique is the tone of his voice, and after all he invented (or perfected) glam-rock. But that's how it is.
About his 'extraordinary songs' I could talk at length about a couple and Ashes to Ashes above all, plus some stuff done with Lester Bowie, or the paranoid I'm Afraid Of Americans. Certainly not the technophile tirade of Starman or Life On Mars, forewarning the “environmental emergency” that pushes some pundits into considering buying a one-way ticket to Mars (someone, it would seem, bought it too).
Heroes, beautiful song, yet after all sounds all to consoling, and thrown into the fray of the late seventies to fuel “just for one day” the myth of the Iron Curtain.
The point, however, is not just to go and see the ideology sung by Bowie. Rather to understand why these catalogs are purchased at prices that it will take decades to repay. And the reason - as Chuck Berry said - is because Beethoven has stepped aside and now, like it or not, there is (Bruno) Mars and Nicky Minaj. And this is where Bowie and Neil Young come in.
Beethoven, Bach or Respighi are good for a tiny fraction of the public. The bulk of the turnover is made by people who want to distract themselves, look for 'hooks' (= melodies that steal you) and liberating phrases. So pop has become our new classical music.
Just as opera thrilled the people, from the Greek choruses to the “Risorgimento”, a great (and perhaps the first) propaganda operation carried out with the help of music, so today the Beatles are considered “essential” by those who approach the ‘music of the people.’ They are the new Beethovens.
As anyone who knows about classical music knows, even then there were the good ones and the so-so ones. And there were the innovators and the copyists. And there were those who made music for a sort of cheerfulness that was a little more carefree than the frowning one in the style of “The Ring of the Nibelungs.”
After all, Franz Lehar and French operetta were not Wagner. And what the countless “Schools of rock” (university courses based on the study of rock music) are doing is essentially helping to build a sort of pyramidal hierarchical scale of pop from which to extract the new Beethovens and Bachs, to then sell for the next hundred years.
These arguments can be made in many other economic sectors. Music in particular shares similar destinies to other artistic expressions, such as painting. That is, in essence, it conceals a dual underlying technical aspect. One is that music (like painting) is a path of refinement that leads to conceptual differentiation (see Rauschenberg, and Cage or even
Alessandro Medini in industrial design. The other is that sound reproduction (like a painted canvas) implies a message.
So on the one hand the combinations between harmony, melody and arrangement (or painting techniques) lead to a shortage of alternative solutions: to the point that (as Giovanni Vacca well described to us blowuppists in his RPM on Talking Heads) it is better to concentrate on just two chords (or cuts on a canvas… see Lucio Fontana), if the ‘right’ ones. On the other hand it is inevitable that what can literally be defined as a medium of vocal reproduction reproduces, with those semantically important sounds, something that leads to the appreciation of a certain modus vivendi. How Pollock's abstract art did to enhance the promotion of America as a 'free' nation, versus Stalinist State realism.
The bottom line is that the more music goes on, the less combinations are available, forcing composers to discard things already heard. Add to this that singing about forbidden themes (and Jesus only knows how many there are out there) well… is forbidden, essentially - so little or no trace of that is left in mass media including the web.
The two things, only because they are together, conspire towards a severe reduction in creativity and to foresee times in which even more anodyne beats with pounding assembly-line rhythms, inane lyrics will bombard our dreams. Obviously only in the worst case scenario.
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Published on BlowUp magazine's April 2022 issue.