Pop Music Today
By CRA 1G MeGREGOR TODAY'S popular music has recently aroused many tempers. Knocking the pop, in fact, has be- come a kind of national pastime, one of the few blood sports where intel- lectuals and philistines can happily rub shoulders A handy breakdown of today's pop music would give us three main categories: Jazz, Beat and Ballad. Of course, there are variations, not I the strong English humorous tradition stretching from George Formby (and earlier) to Bernard Cribbins and his present-day 'ole in the ground. But the three main categories cover Mostother forms of pop music, including the neo-folk music which tends to waver between the at and ballad traditions.
The range is broad. Not so long ago the ballad as practically the only form of pop music; the Musical archives are dominated by a long list of crooners which starts with Whispering Jack Smith In the Twenties and progresses gradually to the _modern exponents of this style, Adam Faith and hit Richard. Beat music forcell its way into the I Parade a mere ten years ago, when rock 'n' roll enrst reached this country; and jazz as a popular, nnlmercial phenomenon is an even more recent arriVal.
, The relevant question today is not therefore are Pop songs better or worse than they used to , ? but rather 'is pop jazz better than pop bait' This is what I hope to answer. .Let us start with jazz. One of the really ,alnazing social phenomena of the last two years nas been the way traditional jazz has become the sctandard dance music of the nation's youth. a iii MacInnes thinks this jazz is 'valueless': remarkable statement. There must be over trad bands in Britain today, ranging from cifie well-known ones like Chris Barber's to the medicated groups of jazzmen who play fierce "ev,' Orleans style in their local clubs. The 1911ality of their music varies, as jazz always has, aut some of these bands play jazz as sensitive Co arresting as any 1 have ever known. Of ho urse the jazz records which top the hit parade 440v,e often been deliberately diluted; but these are ill real indication of the quality of the popular cititlic which is played, night in and night out, at mr7s all over the country. How long is it since . Maclnnes has been to a provincial all- nighter9 Sirojj hit aril' modern jazz has also broken into the ?arade. Again it has been diluted, but I still this growing popularity of jazz the most -taviortening development in modern mass enter- it today. The taste of a public which finds time to put Dave Brubeck, Kenny Ball and Chris Barber into the hit parade can't be so bad.
Unfortunately, the ballad tradition is still strong. Like Bing Crosby before him, the main ingredients of Adam Faith's songs are a certain spurious romance, banal lyrics and schmaltz. Here, if anywhere, the critics have cause for complaint : as the style itself has become less im- portant, so it has become less skilful. Cliff Richard isn't another Sinatra, and never will be —and all those complaints about 'they don't write songs like they use to' seem to be true. Very few of today s ballads can bear comparison with the classic tunes of the Twenties and Thirties, though it is as well to remember that most songs of those times haven't survived either.
We remember 1935 for 'I'm in the Mood for Love'; but who remembers 'Dinner for One Please, James' and 'Tiny Little Fingerprints'?
Yet the ballad tradition has improved in two minor ways. First, the orchestrations have be- come more experimental, less glue-like: Ketty Lester's current version of the old song 'Love Letters in the Sand shows just how improved the musical backing can be. Second, the regular infusion of folk traditions like the calypso has provided some welcome variety; the songs of groups like the Kingston Trio are usually superior to the mass-produced 'Tin Pan Alley tunes.
This brings us to what I have called Beat music. The jazz critic, Francis Newton, has given the definitive explanation of how pop music relies for its vitality upon regular blood transfusions from non-commercial music, be it jazz, Latin American, Yiddish or anything else. In this century most of the transfusions have come from the American or South American negro. The Twist, for instance, is just a variant of a music which has provided the basis for most Western pop music in the last ten years: negro rhythm-and-blues. At the start of the 1950s the first rhythm-and-blues shouters, bearing such improbable names as Chuck Berry and Fats Domino, forced their way into the hit parades, and rock 'n' roll became an inter- national language. Since then the music has incorporated elements of country and western music, and today it has almost as many varieties as Heinz : twist (Chubby Checker, Bobby Darin), rock (Ray Charles, Gene Vincent), beat ballad (Billy Fury, Eden Kane), instruoiental (the Shadows), folk (the Kingston Trio) and phoney (Karl Denver). But it still sounds like what it basically is : beat music.
This is the genre which has borne the brunt of public attack. Critics raised on Jerome Kern and Hollywood musicals complain that the tunes are inferior; they're right, but then this music depends less upon what is sung than on the way it is sung. No one listens to the lyrics themselves; beat music, like much jazz and most folk music, stands or falls upon the intensity of its performance.
Personally, I like it. Brazen, rhythmic, extro- vert, emotional and incredibly joyful, it's a little like the teenagers to whom it chiefly appeals : shamiess and shameless. In a world which tends to fall back upon sentimental palliatives (upon the whole ghastly Blitz-Vera Lynn-Sinatra- Housewives' Choice axis), beat music is a pagan shout for joy. My liking, however, varies accord- log to just how much of the original jazz-blues blood runs in its Tin Pan Alley veins; and this, I think, is where we can begin to evolve some criteria for judging just how good or bad today's pops are. It seems to me that the music of most value on the hit parade is that which draws most heavily upon original jazz and folk idioms.
Thus, popular jazz heads my order of merit; at the bottom are the sentimental ballads of Denmark Street. Somewhere in between comes beat music. The best of it is remarkably close to its jazz-blues sources. One of the most popular singers on the bit parade today is a blind negro jazz musician, Ray Charles, who brings real blues feeling to the most trite tune. Again in twist music the original rhythm-and-blues current is still strong; the most popular twist singers— Chubby Checker, Gary U. S. Bonds, Sam Cooke —are all negro shouters. And the hit parade has further benefited from the white folk music tradition; Lonnie Donnegan and similar vocalists sing genuine (if debased) folk songs.
By the time one gets to home-grown teenage singers like Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele, however, the original non-commercial invasion is losing its impetus and in Adam Faith it has completely disappeared. Every now and then, in fact, some latter-day singer like Matt Monro tries to start a counter-revolution and reintro- duce the soporific romantic ballads of the old days; the fact that he is partly successful may show that our pop music is overdue for another shot in the arm from outside sources.
It is.an interesting facet of this situation that pop music has become a more democratic ex- pression of the people's taste than it used to be. The conversion to rock 'n' roll and beat music came from below, despite the opposition of Tin Pan Alley; today most disc jockeys, publishers, record companies and critics still heartily dis- approve of the musical revolution. ('Here's Matt Monro, the man who's brought music back into the hit parade.') For the second time this century, pop music has swelled up from the people instead of being dictated to them by Denmark Street.
This alone should give the Left critics second thoughts. By allying themselves with the com- mercial interests they are opposing the develop- ment of a genuine popular culture. Perhaps it's not just their musical taste which is awry; they may well in fact be underestimating the capacity of people to enjoy both pop and serious music, without confusing the value of the two.
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