How I'd love not to be sick of music

I think longtime LITD readers are aware that music is at the heart of most of my side endeavors that flesh out my career as a writer.

I play guitar. I currently play in a band the repertoire of which encompasses soul music, roots rock, swamp boogie, Chicago blues and touches of funk. We do quite a bit of original material and give great thought to what else we're going to include. I also play jazz in various configurations. Nothing really out there, mostly Great American Songbook standards and hard bop charts by the likes of Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver and Miles Davis.

I teach some guitar. My students have ranged from grade-school kids to orthopedic surgeons.

For years, much of my writing work was for a website called Indie-music.com, for which I wrote hundreds of reviews of albums by hopeful independent artists looking to break out of their local scenes, as well as interviews (notably Buddy Guy and Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls). I occasionally write some promotional material for various acts.

And I teach rock and roll history and jazz history on an adjunct basis at the local campus of our biggest state university. In the first week of each course, we sprint through the first 250 years of American music. We  take a sprint through the first 250 years of American music: the Bay Psalm Book, Stephen Foster, minstrelsy, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, vaudeville, development of the Broadway musical, Mississippi Delta barn dances and fish fries, Appalachian string bands, Chisholm Trail cowboy ballads, New Orleans marching bands, ragtime, the development of the recording industry, blues, the Kansas City scene of the 1920s-40s, the swing era, the American Federation of Musicians' recording-studio ban, the shift in the radio industry from live performances to playing records, the WWII shellack shortage, how black American music went two divergent directions (bebop and jump blues) in the wake of the end of the swing era, Johnny Otis, Lucky Millinder, the late-40s rise of the independent record labels. From there, if it's the jazz course, we embark on the semester by going down the bebop path. If it's rock, we head in the jump-blues direction.

But I run into a conundrum in the last two or three weeks in each case. That's when the syllabus says we cover developments of the last four or five decades. And I have to come up with erudite-sounding content when it seems to me it could be covered by saying, "It's all been a bunch of crap."

In the rock course, I show the students a five-part BBC documentary on the Laurel Canyon scene spanning the 1965 - 1980 period, from the Byrds to the Eagles. The milieu of the singer-songwriters, the country-rock acts, producers such as David Geffen and Lenny Waronker. I always wonder if the students, who for the last few years have primarily been millennials, are equipped by their upbringings and educations to date to see that this documentary is the story of some of the most hedonistic, hollow-souled, narcissistic morally-preening hypocrites who ever inhabited the planet.

All this comes to mind this morning as I read coverage of preparations for the upcoming Grammys. Several paragraphs are devoted to the rehearsals that Elton John and Miley Cyrus are engaged in for their performance of "Tiny Dancer." That's enough to ensure that I will be nowhere near the televising of this "ceremony." I couldn't care less about either of these people. And I'll bet there are those out there who would react with, "Really" I can see that in the case of Cyrus, but Elton John is a venerated icon." Not in my book. I thought he was overrated as soon as I heard him back in 1970. 

The rest of the offerings eaves me equally cold:

After largely being overlooked in major categories for nearly four decades, hip-hop figures prominently in this year's nods — an embrace that acknowledges the genre's ubiquity and pop influence. Jay-Z leads with eight nominations, followed by Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar with seven. Both emcees are front-runners for album of the year and landed in either record or song of the year. One of the night's highlight performances will come courtesy of an explosive set from Lamar, which will feature U2 and Dave Chappelle.

Among the other artists on tap for Sunday's show are Rihanna, DJ Khaled, Sam Smith, SZA, Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee, Lady Gaga, Little Big Town, Bruno Mars, Cardi B, Chris Stapleton, Emmylou Harris, Pink, Sting and Childish Gambino.

I don't ever want to hear one note from any of these people.

You see, they are all products of the bloat of the music industry that has been its main characteristic since the 1970s. Every generation since then has spawned its share of hot-shot producers that all the artists want to work with, and they are ever-more disconnected from anything resembling genuine warmth, humanity, dignity, or even actual soulfulness.

I can't stand all the talent shows that foist upon us warbler after warbler who has excelled at the formula for impressing judges and getting record deals, but who have nothing to offer humankind.

The whole thing, all the deliberations about how particular genres are evolving, about sales figures, about the staging of shows, and certainly about "wokeness," has nothing to do with anything.

Perhaps even more than the movie or television industries, the music business over the last forty-plus years has been the chief agent of cultural rot in post-America.

I don't like that I feel this way. As a musician, I want to believe that there is a place for non-phony art.

But in an age when nearly every musical act has some contrived pseudo-quirky name, when said acts usually can't keep their mouths shut about social issues, when the ever-more-extravagant awards shows inflate these people's self-importance, I don't see a path to reversing the process.

Just one more reason why I no longer place my faith in the improvement of this world in anything but the Lord.

Nothing but Him is impervious to ruin.