The Issue of Modern Songwriting

So I am thinking of songwriting again, as I have been in the past few posts, and I want to write up a little something that I was just discussing with a friend (on text message) about how so much of the "modern reality", I feel, is no longer reflected in modern songs, in the way that "Reality" often was reflected in older songs, from the 70s and so on.

I think a good image to start with will be one we take from the John Mellencamp song "Pink Houses", which was a fairly big hit in the early 1980s. The first verse has long been one of my favorite verses, and it paints a beautifully simple scene :

There is a black man, and a black cat
Livin' in a black neighborhood
He's got an interstate running thru his front yard
You know he thinks he's got it so good
and there's a woman, in the kitchen
Cleanin' up the evening slop
He looks at her and says "Hey darling,
I remember when you could stop a clock"

This imagery is very simple, and it is very powerful too, in its own way, but what I think is so fascinating about it is that, even though this exact scene is still playing out across the nation today, you will never , ever see a lyric like this  in modern songs. And it is not just because of race, not at all really, but rather just because both the characters in the songs, simply don't seem to be doing much. Or, at least, they just aren't doing enough as far as these great holy modern people are concerned. The black man, for example, one imagines him just sitting in a lawn chair on a hot day, looking out at the highway, and the woman, well, what on Earth is she doing, the modern person wonders? Cleaning up evening slop? What on earth? Do people really do that anymore, in the year 2017? Does "slop" even still exist in 2017? And does anyone actually have to clean it anymore? For that matter, does anyone grow old anymore, like this woman in the song clearly has?

Well, taking a look at the modern hits of today, written by young people (because don't forget Mellencamp wrote this when he was young, and it was a hit) one would almost be led to believe that nothing about the verse ever happens at all in the World of today, because nobody in the world of today seems like they remember any of that stuff anymore. It is a tired complaint I guess, but the truth is that almost all of the songs of now don't just endlessly discuss riches and luxuries that no one has...they also do something else that is even more curious: They blatantly ignore the reality of the world right in front of their audience. Not just the bad parts of it either, like many might think. They also completely ignore the good parts as well. I find it quite sad, I think, speaking as a songwriter, but the thing that strikes me about the great modern world and its songs is that, for as liberated as it claims to be, it seems that it has chosen to forsake, if not outright banish, three quarters of the World from its pretty little home.

Think, for example, of a modern song in these new genres, that would ever dare speak about something like, say, crickets chirping, dogs howling, or even something like "the smell of diesel fuel". Imagine a modern hip song where the singer would open up saying "the crickets were chirping, and I saw Maggie pass by in the dark light..." It's almost unfathomable. Of course, in the world of old songs, all of that stuff is very commonplace. In the "oldies", people talk about things like crickets, dogs, gravel roads, tractor trailers, the smell of the bayou, cooking bacon in a pan, burning coffee,  ...the list goes on and on, in a way that you would never hear them do in modern songs. And again, this wouldn't be so weird, until of course you sit back and think for a second, and you remember that literally none of these things have gone anywhere. They're all still with us. I'm listening to crickets chirp right now as I write this.  I just got done burning coffee on a stove. The smell of diesel is everywhere. Dogs still howl. So, if all of this stuff is still around...why then, one wonders, have people ceased to write about it? And what on Earth have they found to write of in its place? What has replaced it?

Years ago I don't think I ever thought of it much, and it never occurred to me that someone in the modern day  singing about "frying bacon in a pan" would probably get pigeon holed as "trying to sound old". Now, however, as I myself get a little older and my senses more attuned, I have begun to realize that I was wrong to ever consider such a line as that as something that seemed "old". For it is not old, and it can never actually be old, unless of course frying bacon in a pan becomes impossible. But we all know that this has yet to happen. Like I said, people still do this -- the only difference is that now they no longer think it's acceptable to write of it in their technological songs. So what is it really? What is the problem? Here is what I think it is, and I myself admit that I fall prey to it: Our modern time has now become so cluttered and filled with technology, with gadgets, with strange new drugs, and with fantasy too, in terms of TV etc, that we have now reached a point, it would seem, where many simple things about the environment and atmosphere right around us ...no longer stand out the way they once did to people, even just 20 years ago. So, basically, though there is still a woman cleaning up the evening slop in the kitchens, people no longer notice her, or see her, like they did back in the 80's. That woman has now, one could say, faded out into the darkness . No one sings of her now; she is left to clean that evening slop alone. People perhaps look up for a moment and see her, and then o fcourse they look right back to their cell phone. They also probably don't have to hear her, because they have their headphones in. So even the sounds of the lady have now faded out. Just like, of course, the sounds of the crickets have faded out as well.

I'm not necessarily saying this is the worst thing to ever happen, but I do think it's certainly a bit strange, and I suppose the only word I can really think of it for it is to say that reality has become "augmented" to such a degree that, again, the atmosphere around you fades right out. For example, one thing that has always struck me about listening to the old blues songs from the 40s or 50s, and watching some of the videos where an artist like Skip James can be seen performing, is that so much about the old "ghettos" doesn't really seem all that different from the modern ghettos of today to me. In fact,there is a great deal that looks frighteningly familiar to me in many of the old black and white blues videos. They look exactly like the ghettos I used to often drive on delivery routes in my truck.  And yet, if you were to completely forget the atmosphere and only focus on the music itself being made, you would think that the ghetto has undergone titanic changes in absolutely every department. You would be led to believe that the houses have changed,that the furniture has changed, that the beds have changed, the bureaus, the baths, everything. In reality of course, the only thing that has changed is the automobile and the fashion, and now there's a fancy TV. The ghetto outside still looks just as unsightly and scary to me, just as disorganized and unclean, and the small towns too, look just as "plain" as they ever did, and yet... all of this uncleanness, and all of this plainness -- it is as removed as can be from the modern song landscape. Nothing about the outside atmoshpere is reflected in these modern songs. Because atmosphere has been effectively banished. Even the big modern aspects of atmosphere have been banished from these new songs. People are just as unlikely to mention a nice new highway bridge in these fancy new songs, as they are the crickets chirping, or the bacon in a pan. It's simply unheard of to focus on a bridge anymore, or how nice looking or not it is , or how it may or may not make you feel. No one looks at bridges in a modern song the way they once did years ago. You could probably listen to about 500 of them that have been released within the last two years, and you won't hear so much as a single reference.

This is because songs today are all about solely emotions that one feels inside somewhere, and never about anything happening outside. Modern songwriters will write endlessly about the ticking in their heart, or the chill up the spine, the ring of their cell phone, how they're dressed, what shoes they are wearing, their car, or of course their hair - but they will not write about what anyone else in the world is doing, aside from them. Interactions, in my opinion, very rarely happen in modern songs. In old songs it was fairly commonplace to have interactions between characters -- some hits from the old days, like Dylans "Hurricane", even feature a sort of novel-esque type dialogue between characters. Modern songs can't do this: Nobody cares about what anyone else is saying anymore. It's all about them, now, and them alone. They'll tell you what they are saying - but they'll never tell you what anyone else is saying, because does anyone else even exist? Of course not. Just like no atmosphere exists, aside from maybe a night club with fancy strobe lights that flash , or a highway with headlights that flash -- but that seemingly never has anything else on it.

And again, when it comes to this discussion of just how far songwriting has descended in this respect ,of banishing every topic besides the night club, you must remember that all those obscure songs you like, that might talk of this stuff at times, just don't count --- because we are talking about HITS here, and once upon a time, HIT songs, even the most popular ones, even the ones people danced to, actually had interesting lyrics that went beyond the tick of the heart or the flash of a strobe light. Hit songs actually once had good lyrics that reflected on a wider reality. The song "Hurricane" by Dyaln tells an incredibly long winded tale and features writing that looks like it came from a book as I say, rather than a song --- and that was a hit! Mellencamps song from earlier : it was also a hit. There is an idea today where musicians and fans often seem to think that "hit songs were always terrible"; but this isn't true. Were they ever the absolute best? No probably not. But they did once have at least some depth to them. Some HUMANITY. And in my opinion this humanity is indeed largely gone. Many people say autotune is the main problem , things like this. They blame the "sounds" of the modern songs for why they seem so odd. But it isn't the sounds, in my opinion, so much as it is the lyricism. People have become terrified, I think, of writing "typical scenes" in their songs. Because they no longer believe there is passion in anything typical.

-- NOTES