New / Old Music - a barely coherent rant So...a few weeks ago I posted a piece about OLD & NEW MUSIC, the basic theme being that I'm a big boring crank & I should get out more if only I could tear myself away from my Chicago Transit Authority records & I know there's plenty of great music being made today (I just heard the Black Mountain LP, which is just AWESOME... Sabbath-esque heavy rock) but basically I have a preference for music recorded before the late seventies because personally I dig the way records sounded back then, though of course there are exceptions and I also dig plenty of early hip-hop, 'Madchester' indie, shoe-gazing stuff ie My Bloody Valentine, Ride etc, some Big Beat stuff, the Dee-troit garage scene The White Stripe emerged from, New York punk (Ramones, Blondie, Heartbreakers etc), and anything else good that appears on my radar, and it also must be noted that I of course recognise the fact that THE SIXTIES produced utter shlock like any decade, and THE LSD SOAKED FREE LOVE SIXTIES as we understand it today was only experienced by a minority of the Western World whlist everybody else got on with their 9-5s & generally it stands as an OVER-HYPED decade that we all need to get over if we're ever gonna get anywhere ourselves.

BUT!! And I think this is the bottom line...the mid - late sixties were exceptional because the Top 40 was full of genuinely innovative, ground breaking pop records, and however much similarly experimental / exciting / original music has emerged since that period (ie: tons & tons of it, though most of it (at least guitar-wise) has it's roots here too...house & techno are pretty SHOCK OF THE NEW, I guess), it has rarely had an impact on the mainstream on the scale it did during this period. Here are THE STATS:

From the Cashbox US Top 100, this week in 1967

.2. The Doors - Light My Fire
.8. Procul Harum - A Whiter Shade Of Pale
.11. The Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit
.14. Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood - Jackson
.24. The Bar-Kays - Soul Finger
.27. The Beatles - All You Need Is Love
.37. The Parliaments - I Wanna Testify
.47. James Brown - Cold Sweat pt1
.55. Dave Allen & The Arrows - Blues Theme
.61. The Who - Pictures Of Lily
.66. Jr Walker & The All Stars - Shoot Your Shot
.67. Van Morrison - Brown Eyed Girl
.70. Moby Grape - Omaha
.72. The Kinks - Mr Pleasent
.85. Glen Campbell - Gentle On My Mind
.86. The Third Rail - Run, Run, Run
.87. Vanilla Fudge - You Keep Me Hanging On
.90. The Beatles - Baby Your A Rich Man
.93. Buffalo Springfield - Bluebird

So...in there we have 4 ALL TIME GREAT ROCK/POP SINGLES BY ANYBODY'S STANDARDS, REGARDLESS OF GENRE (Doors, Procul Harum, Jefferson Airplane & Van Morrison - 2 of which could be considered PRETTY WEIRD CHART HITS (Procul Harum, Jefferson Airplane, arguably the defining statements of UK & US psychedelia respectively), 4 ALL TIME GREAT SOUL/RNB SINGLES (Bar-Kays, Parliaments, James Brown, Jr Walker & The All Stars - 1 of which - James Brown's Cold Sweat - is a gen-u-ine-ly important record, one of the earliest bone fide FUNK records), 2 AWESOME GARAGE / PUNK SINGLES (Dave Allen, The Third Rail - both good enough to be included on the Nuggets box-set), 2 ALL TIME GREAT INSTRUMENTALS (Dave Allen & The Bar-Kays again, Soul Finger being 2nd perhaps only to Booker T & The MG's Green Onions in the canon of STAX instrumental hits), 2 showings by ALL TIME (non-Beatles) BRITISH ROCK BANDS (The Who, The Kinks) 1 DEFINITIVE US HEAVY / PSYCHE ROCK SINGLE (Vanilla Fudge), and thats before we mention Lee Hazelwood, Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, Glen Campbell...and 2 songs by little known British beat combo called The Beatles, one of which - Baby You're A Rich Man - is certainly one of the weirder in their canon.

What you have just eyeballed are stone cold facts. Now, sure, there were plenty of great acts around not racking up sales - Velvets, Stooges, Beefheart, etc - and the charts were certainly full of alotta dross too, but that's really all by-the-by. It would be a remarkable Top 100 if it contained only had 'I Wanna Testify' by The Parliaments (proto-psychedelic soul from the band that would become Funkadelic) , or only 'Blues Theme' by Dave Allen & The Arrows (rampaging buzz-saw surf-punk instro) and every other one of the other 99 songs were a buncha garbage. But there's 20 ALL TIME SMASHES here. In ONE WEEK!!!! Thats, like a FITH of that entire weeks Top 100 being made up of records that history will (already does) record as being some of the best, most creative pop music ever made. The jury is in.

It's the sheer amount of good mainstream music I'm talking about here, facts & figures. I could list 20 great 80s acid house records or 20 great early 90s grunge records - BUT:

a) they wouldn't have sell as many copies as those listed above
b) they didn't have the same impact on the mainstream
c) they didn't all appear in the same chart on the same date, if they made it into the chart at all.

So...the point is not that there is no good music made today. Far from it. There's plenty of great music being made today, much of it the equal of what I've listed here...well, apart from the James Brown, Mar-Kays, Parliaments & Dave Allen songs, they don't get much better than those, but whatever, there's certainly stuff being made today as good as anything The Who ever did. The lack of mainstream success / impact by today's Moby Grapes & Van Morrisons speaks ill not for their music but ill for the time & culture in which they operate. And don't get me wrong, this isn't some snobby anti-pop thing. The very core of my argument is that 'White Rabbit' by Jefferson Airplane WAS POP MUSIC. And that's the difference. I'm a pop freak. I'm excited when something gen-u-inely great makes it into the charts...let's say 99 Problems by Jay-Z, or Maneater by Nelly Furtado, or I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor by The Arctic Monkeys or Biology by Girls Aloud or the new Christina Aguileria song...I dug that Eric Prydz remix of 'Call On Me' the mostest, which goes to show there's no accounting for taste because it's clearly the trashiest piece of trance crapolla ever produced but whatever, y'know, you only dig what you dig & there ain't nothing you can do about it. I'm no snob. Well, maybe I'm a bit of a snob. But my love of 50s-60s pop music has nothing to do with snobbery. Aw, jeez...I'm just defending my crankiness now. You don't need that. You're all busy people.

THE ACTUAL POINT: every decade produces good & bad music. The idea that music works in 'decades' is dumb. Any given late sixties Top 100 was more interesting, diverse and culturally significant than the current Top 100, but that is the industry's fault, not a reflection on the quality of music being made today. Radiohead's 'OK Computer' or Nirvana's 'Nevermind' are examples of LPs which could gen-u-inely be regarded as reflecting / shaping the times on the same level as, say, the first Hendrix LP. LPs are an entirely different kettle of monkeys to 45s, and we'll leave that subject to another time. Maybe. 'Jumping Jack Flash' by The Rolling Stones was a great song. So was 'Don't Look Back Into The Sun' by The Libertines. 'Louie Louie' by the Kingsmen was better than both. Pop music in general is the greatest thing in the world. Even 'Call On Me' by Eric Prydz.  ¶ 8:37 AM