Rick Beato – The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse
An evening pause: His conclusions have implications far beyond music itself and on the entire worsening of our culture.
Hat tip Chris McLaughlin.
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This sounds like the old craftsman lamenting the rise of factory products. Yes, many important things were lost then. But overall, industrialization was good for mankind. It also reminds me of many upper middle class people lamenting the loss of old downtown stores to Walmart supercenters. Yet a Walmart provides cheaper goods for the masses than the old store owners did. It also provides more opportunity for advancement for its employees. An ordinary clerk in an old small town store in the 50’s will have to leave town for a higher position if the owner’s son is his manager. The idylic Disney “Main Street” USA downtown never really existed. Spotify and its competitors give us yahoos better access to music than the old record stores did. You can even find a far greater variety of stuff if you are willing to look for it, just like you can still find all sorts of crafts and high art like the old craftsman made before factories came to be. Want some obscure piece of church music? Its there somewhere. What about a theme from a little known 80’s movie? You can find it on the web. We are just not forced to buy expensive stuff made by highly trained specialists when all we are willing to pay for is something cheap, in the monetary and cultural sense.
Said in another way, this video has a lot of good points about the state of the music industry. Yet it is an industry, pure and simple. It exists to serve consumers. Most people value their own individual needs over society’s nostalgia. Thats why stuff is made in factories rather than by hand. It is why Walmart replaced downtown stores. It is why spotify replaced CD’s. That is the way it is and should be, because the old days are never as good as we remember them to be. They will not come back, ever, and efforts to bring them back will likely fail. See Ecclesiasties 7:10
Another video by Beato, on what is essentially a similar topic, the comparison of Taylor Swift to The Beatles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrwjJHXPlQ
Cloudy: Though your points are well taken, making music is not the same as making shoes or selling cosmetics. Music, like literature, is art, the highest expression of the creative talents of a civilization. For it to be debased in any way by laziness by its artists debases the civilization itself.
Beato is noting how too much music today is produced in a lazy manner, and thus has no individuality or more important, a sense of unique originality. The same could now be said of much of our literature, which even as I write is being further debased by a faddish desire to use AI to replace human thought and creativity.
That lack of originality gets reflected throughout society, as originality is increasingly seen not as a good thing but a liability that must be squashed so as to maximize profits. This is also one of Beato’s main points.
Finally, just because there is change and a new way of doing things does not mean that change or the new way is something to accept blindly. Questioning is always good, and Beato raises some questions here that everyone should think about.
Cloudy —
Astonishing. You have *so completely missed the point* of everything that Mr. Beto is saying that I am tempted to use the term “invincible ignorance” (in the Catholic sense of simply not knowing what you don’t know) in your case, but perhaps I am being too kind.
Indeed, your comments about Walmart and the decline of Main Street America are so inane and historically inaccurate as to be as laughable. Check out James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, or almost anything that has been written in the last several decades about the New Urbanism if you think that Walmart has, on balance, been a “good” influence in American life. Rather, as Chuck
Harder used to say, its ascendance is one of the purest examples of the collective “race to the bottom” in terms of both economics and human values. Or, for extra credit, look into the analogy between how sustainable ecologies (cf. Howard T. Odum) work and their replacement with “profitable” monocultures. You may be in for a nasty shock.
Getting back to the topic at hand, while there is certainly, as you suggest, a music business, “an industry, pure and simple [that] exists to serve consumers,” that is like saying that ringing the cash registers is the *only* reason that human beings have made music for as far back into history as we can go. *Music,* my friend, is such an inexorable and important part of being human that we would hardly be human without it — whether it is “profitable and easy to obtain” or not.
Finally, if you are looking for an appropriate piece of scripture that relates to your argument, check out Mark 8:36:
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Robert —
You have put it far better than I have, and you have gotten to the core of the argument. “Music, like literature, is art, the highest expression of the creative talents of a civilization. For it to be debased in any way by laziness by its artists debases the civilization itself.”
Sadly, the debasement of our civilization proceeds apace, and there are few enough voices crying out against this trend.
Music that never existed….
John Denver sings “War Pigs”
September 3, 2024
https://youtu.be/L5m5ycA_QHk
(2:02)
As Rand so powerfully argued and demonstrated, esthetics if the fifth branch of philosophy following politics – which in turn, follows morality, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Music is but one branch of esthetics. Rather than “debate” what perhaps amounts to nothing less than a college course on philosophy, the sad state of philosophy has brought us to the point where reason is used to deny reason itself and the knowledge gleaned from what is termed, “the age of it!”
This has led to “post modernism” wherein existence and causality have become ‘”suspect,” consciousness and free-will rejected, morality thought arbitrary and subjective, politics as rule by the mob or a leader of the mob.
The resulting esthetics? Ask yourself what now passes for visual “art?” In my judgment, music has simply followed the same logical path in music as has happened in the visual arts.
During my lifetime I judge the seventies. though it represents an embarrassingly gross generalization, as a turning point in music (much as, say, the thirties and sixties represented turning points in politics). Personally, I find the music of the seventies in terms of melody, harmony, chord structure, complexity, and orchestration, superior to most music that has been created/produced thereafter. As a close friend astutely points out, the seventies seemed to be “Romanticism’s” last gasp.
Visiting the crash site;
Clear Lake, Iowa (February 3, 1959)
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/the-evening-pause/thedailywoo-the-day-the-music-died/
The Surf Ballroom is still in business .
I had already seen this (and commented on YouTube). I mostly agree with Cloudy: There is something there, but mostly rose coloured glasses.
Though your points are well taken, making music is not the same as making shoes or selling cosmetics. Music, like literature, is art, the highest expression of the creative talents of a civilization.
Thus spake an author. I disagree. Music _is_ the same as shoes or cosmetics. I don’t spend a lot of time shopping for shoes. Why should I spend a lot of time shopping for music? I expect my shoes to just be there and function when I want to walk. I expect my music to just be there and play when I want to listen. It’s a thing produced by humans that other humans wish to consume. There is a reason that “intellectual” is an adjective in the phrase “intellectual property”. It’s just a different form of property, nothing particularly special.
Would I miss it if it were gone? Of course – but I would miss my shoes, too. “highest expression of the creative talents of a civilization”? Very, very occasionally, but certainly not in bulk. How many tavern songs from Mozart’s era survive? The dross falls to the wayside while excellence lasts.
I have expressed the opinion that several songs are proof G*d exists (e.g. Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, Bach’s Ode to Joy). That some songs (pieces? opi?) are the highest expression of the creative talents of a civilization in no way implies that music in general is.
the seventies seemed to be “Romanticism’s” last gasp.
One could only hope. The difference between “romanticism” and “post-modernism” is mostly labelling. Barbaric Yawps resounding from Stately Pleasure Domes are all well and good, but turn on your brain, too.
I also watched the video of him quizzing his child on “AI or not” (the child is not on-screen). I couldn’t tell. Since then, I have been noticing some definitely AI songs. If I can tell, anyone can tell. They are more uniformly mediocre than universally dreadful.
Cloudy wrote: “The idylic Disney ‘Main Street’ USA downtown never really existed”
‘Main Street’ USA downtown may have never really existed, but it still exists in at least four towns within 20 miles of me.
I think that Cloudy misunderstood the complaint. It is not that the price tag is lower, these days, it is that the quality is lower, that the art is not as much appreciated. Quantity is no substitute for quality, and if the art lacks quality, it is not worth bragging about. If the quality is poor, it is not worth the lower price. It is similar to getting Taco Bell drive through (essentially Mexicanized American food*) vs. the sit-down Mexican restaurant with the skilled chef.
I largely agree with Beato and Robert, except that in my opinion music peaked in the 1930s with composers such as Rogers and Hart, Johnny Mercer, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and others, too. Their songs are still wonderful and still enjoyed. The singers tended to be better, too, still great to this day, especially those of the 1950s. Ninety-year-old music seems to be better and more appreciated than the more modern twenty-year-old music. These 1930s people worked hard to create the right tunes to go with well crafted lyrics and who sang with heart and soul to express the sentiments. Today, music seems to be mostly cranked out merely as a profit center, not as a means of expression, and it is a rare piece or performer that rises to the level of a century ago.
Music was already on the decline in the 1960s. Dylan, Hendrix, Richie Havens, and Joan Baez, too, are part of that decline. Johnny Cash was much better, and he is still much more appreciated than any in the list in the previous sentence. The rock era was when the entertainment and art began its move away from the music and the lyrics to the visual part of the show. The sound of the instruments degraded and became the star of the show, rather than the lyrics, which is why they are so difficult to make out in so many songs. The poetry and art of the lyrics began to be lost under the inharmonic sounds. Louder was seen as better. Why else would it be so important that the amplifier go to eleven?
As for the Beatles, they disbanded just as they were beginning to get good. The tragedy is that they could have been great, but instead they have had to settle for being popular. Popular does not mean good, as we have seen with actors, such as Gary Cooper. The Beatles started out with atrocious music but were improving with time. Unfortunately, they never made it to great status, as a group, just a popular one, and not as popular now as the greats still are.
Artificial intelligence is only a race to mediocrity. It isn’t as intelligent as people want to believe, otherwise it would know not to help students cheat on their term papers.
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* I say this as a joke, but it turns out that the guy who started Taco Bell, Glen. Bell, started with hot dogs, chili dogs, and hamburgers, but decided he didn’t want to compete with other American restaurants, so he switched to tacos, apparently using his chili recipe as a taco sauce.
[*** Language Warning ***]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZftldlrLfLk (Fat Files, 13 Minutes, “Biggest Troll In The Food Industry – Taco Bell”)