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If You Don't Know Jorma...
Read this great story on The Fur Peace Ranch in Delta Magazine this month
Missing the Melody
By Bob Welch
"I lose the beauty of the melody, until it sounds just like a symphony."
That's a line from Chuck Berry's "Rock and Roll Music." In the song, which was a big record for the Beatles early in their career, the lyrics go on to explain how rock and roll has "a backbeat…you can't lose it.”
For a while, we had a golden period when a delicate synthesis between 200-year-old "changes"-based music and the newer backbeat-driven metronomic stuff was achieved. These years gave us Lennon and McCartney, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson and others whose music maintained a steady beat while remaining harmonically interesting. And I'm sorry, but even Josh Groban, the Dixie Chicks and Celine Dion just aren't as interesting to listen to as the aforementioned geniuses.
When disco and punk happened almost simultaneously, a certain monotony began to take over. At first, I found a lot of the strictly groove-based music—such as that pioneered by James Brown—really wonderful. Sly and the Family Stone and Prince expanded and refined these concepts of groove into a fine art. Back then, these metronomic grooves were achieved before the advent of drum machines, and the rhythm players who could execute these machine-like hypnotic patterns were seen as superhuman gods to us young players.
Sequencers and sophisticated drum machines changed all that starting in the early eighties. By 1990, a supertight, unvarying groove could be had just by pushing the start button on a Roland Rhythm Composer or one of its many descendants.
Rap took rhythm-based music to a whole new place when it dispensed with melody and harmonic complexity entirely. I'm sitting here looking at a current Billboard "Hot 100" list. Out of those 100 entries, as I count 'em up, about 85 are essentially rhythm tracks where the vocal melody—if and when one appears—is a riff based on some simple minor blues or pentatonic scale. Many of the singers on the not strictly rap pieces in this list are very good at riffing endlessly on the minor scale variations within the limited scales they have to work with.
But the songs, as songs, never go anywhere. They don't open out, modulate, change key centers or build to any kind of melodic or harmonic climax. The tension and release in these 85 pieces is provided by things that the producer or vocalist does with rhythm alone. It's kind of like having a relationship based only on sex or a mutual interest in football.
Now there's nothing wrong with this on the face of it, the problem I have with it is it's become extremely boring for me to listen to this stuff. I'm "rhythmic-surprised" out. I'm burnt on the beat. I'm as brain-fried on these bump-beat songs as I was on the equally repetitive nursery rhymes of my childhood, which is what some of these songs sound like to me.
If you can't understand my problem, relate it to cooking. It's as if you had a thousand chefs who baked and fried and whisked for days and days, only to come up with infinite variations on…an omelette. An omelette…just eggs; no meat, no fish, no endives, no cheese, no tofu. And to extend this analogy, think of the poor restaurant patrons of these omelette chefs. They've been served omelettes for so many years they don't know there's anything else. The menu just offers omelette soufflé, omelette whisk and so on.
God forbid if you can't watch the booty-shaking, bellybutton-gleaming video that inevitably accompanies these same songs. Turn that picture off and you're left with a very threadbare sonic experience.
My purpose here is not to just be negative. I'm saying, "Please, some of you young people out there with all the new tools and techniques at your disposal, please do something new and/or interesting!" Please don't be like that guitar player that I had to fire years ago who just twiddly-twiddly-twiddly -twee'd me to death!