10/24/07

Thoughts of notes

Tri-O's oddities, observations, and opinions
by Herb Kandel

It’s strange but not rare that one observation can trigger a series of thoughts that lead to memories long past. This happened to me again two weeks ago. It’s course went bumpity, bumpity, bump ---from a recent TV show to an almost forgotten college class. Follow this journey- start with David Letterman go to 50 Cent then to George Carlin, which leads to Rogers and Hart that reminds me of Kern and Hammerstein then Cole Porter, when up pops poetry wherein it lands me smack to a conclusion of a Sociology term paper turned in close to 40 years ago. WHEW! Let me ‘splain:
I was watching “The Late Show with David Letterman” his musical guest was the hip-hop rapper 50 Cent who ‘sang’ something I later learned was named “Ayo Technology”. It’s opening line was something like “She want it” repeated over and over. The repetitive ad nauseam chorus rhymed “hypnotized” with “hips and thighs”. For me it went further downhill and became 50 scents, none of them pleasant. George Carlin then entered the process when I recalled him recently saying that he “lived through the Golden Age of radio, television, movies and American popular standard music”.
How had the musical taste shifted from the once popular ballads of those talented people who scored and penned words which almost sing themselves off the page?
Read and listen -“I took one look at you/That's all I meant to do/And then my heart stood still/My feet could step and walk/My lips could move and talk/And yet my heart stood still”
“My Heart Stood Still” Music by Richard Rodgers , lyrics by Lorenz Hart
Or: “You are the promised kiss of springtime/That makes the lonely winter seem long./You are the breathless hush of evening/That trembles on the brink of a lovely song./You are the angel glow that lights a star,/The dearest things I know are what you are.”"All the Things You Are" Music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.
Or: “Night and day, you are the one/Only you beneath the moon or under the sun/Whether near to me, or far/It's no matter darling where you are/I think of you/Day and night, night and day”
“Night and Day” by Cole Porter

The marriage of those words and music seem as poetic as any of those from Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman. Which in turn jolted my memory to a term paper I had submitted for the term project of a Sociology class in my Junior year. It was entitled “The Times and the Tunes”.
The major thrust of the paper was to follow the course of the then popular songs/music to see if they correlated to the historical events of the times. After much research at many libraries, using the old 3x5 index cards (no Google or Ask then), and after many footnotes, references, and bibliography the conclusion was “Yes, the tunes did mirror the times in which they were popular”. From the Psalms of David to ancient ditties in the earliest recorded periods unearthed right up to the time when my treatise was submitted for evaluation.
If this be the case then the ‘standard’ popular musical taste has morphed from a ‘love’ song into a ‘lust’ song much as the transformers of today. Is it any better, will it survive or is it just a fad?
Music is still evolving . From the classics (forever music) to the trendy (here for now) to the ‘one hit wonder’ (“oh yeah, I remember that“). During the last half dozen decades we have listened to the scat of Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme, the avant-garde of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Stan Kenton, and the innovation of Steven Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Elvis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and their ilk provided a new twist.
The entire musical gamut has the capacity to embrace myriad genres. I like most of them, but I can’t help hoping that the ‘songs’ with incomprehensible (at least to me) lewd lyrics that denigrates women, coupled with a lack of melody, grace, and civility fade fast. I know that this too is a reflection of a part of this timeline of existence, yet I cling to the concept of a happier, optimistic, and more innocent view. It may be true that this generation considers the current hip hop prattle to be modern love songs, if this is so my only comment is, “They’re writing songs of love, but not for me.”
“But Not For Me” Music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin
There you have the encephalographic roller coaster, from David Letterman to King David to dissertation. But in the words of William Shakespeare, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
PS the term paper got an A-
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http://www.baldwincountynow.com/articles/2007/10/24/columnists/doc471e538f416d3311777963.txt