It's Trad, Dad

It seems to many of my generation (b. 1959), that pop music is not what it is. Like our parents before us, the music subsequent generations are served up with doesn't pass muster. They don't make them like they used to, etc.
My dad once came into the room when Top of the Pops was on and said, 'Good Heavens, what's that.'
'That's Hawkwind,' I said.
Yesterday, the announcement that One Direction were to have a temporary hiatus caused tears and distress among hordes of young teenagers, presumably mostly girls. But in a purely marketing project, after five years, the plan to see if individual solo careers can extend the cash throughput seems a sound one with the guarantee that the reunion concert is always there to fall back on when it's required. However, I'm sure the distress was genuine.
Although we can't prove it, though, we know that not much today stands up against whatever it was we liked. Let's say David Bowie, T. Rex and Roxy Music, for example. I'm told that young people today are just as devoted to their stuff as we were to ours. But, firstly, it doesn't seem to constitute the same lingua franca that pop music did for us and, secondly, it's not their fault it's not as good.
It's not Brahms' fault he wasn't as good as Beethoven, which is something he very much regretted, but he had to do his best in that shadow. It's nobody's fault now that they can't do what Bowie did. Suede have made a bold attempt and done well but you can't uninvent what went before and then re-do it as if you thought of it.
That old trick has been round the block a few times now. Perhaps for me the last time all the riffs and attitudes were re-cycled to genuinely exciting effect was in The Jesus & Mary Chain, which is not to say I haven't bought an album since.
So, it's gratifying to see this prejudice given a bit more support, if and when it does, which it did in a book review in The Observer yesterday. Neil Spencer, if it is the Neil Spencer I think it is, is older than me and so not a reliable witness and his status as ex-NME man doesn't give him that much more kudos in my book, but, he writes,
As pop music's grip on young lives has weakened, along with its creative pulse and commercial clout...

I'm not going to claim that is Quod Erat Demonstrandum and rest my case but it is a subordinate clause that succinctly expresses a view that we all secretly know has some truth in it. It is a long time now since anything like as revolution occurred in pop music along the lines of Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Glam Rock, Punk Rock and then, I suppose, hip-hop, which I was happy to pick from, from Grandmaster Flash to The Fugees. But whereas pop would regenerate every five years, or ten, it doesn't seem to be doing it now and doesn't look likely to do it again soon.
In line with a number of set-piece arguments I've signed up to here in recent months, it is due to commodification, orthodoxy, marketing, capitalist realism and institutionalisation. I'm no more a fan of the cultural theorists who make play with such phrases as I am of the Simon Cowell's and suchlike who seem to have pasteurised pop music into mere product but their critique has a point.
Perhaps Brian Epstein did the same thing with The Monkees, or whichever band it was that he promoted, but at least they were any good.
It's a shame that the quote I have is from Neil Spencer. It would look better coming from Pete Waterman, or even Harry Styles, admitting, yes it's all over but we were still flogging the dead horse. The bored irony of The Pet Shop Boys captured it beautifully but that was 30 years ago. And it's still happening.