The latest music controversy comes to us from the world of YouTube, where music professor/producer Rick Beato made a couple of videos talking about the current state of music, and whether or not technology is to blame for what he sees as the obvious and apparent decline of quality in popular music.
The biggest problem with the entire conversation occurs before we even consider any of the points he wants to make. It is the same problem I have encountered with him, and others of his age who talk about music in such terms. Namely, they never define how music has gotten 'worse' in terms that aren't, to use a very technical term of my own... bullshit.
The main thrust of Beato's commentaries for years is that modern music is worse because it isn't 'real', and it's put together by too many people at a time. A regular feature of his breakdown of the current hits is his railing against how many songwriters are listed in the credits of any particular song.
Can we please stop with this ridiculous type of thinking? Art is art, and a song is a song, regardless of how many people were involved in writing it. Let's look at one of his favorite bands, The Beatles, for an example. There are plenty of songs written by John, or Paul, or George, alone. There are also songs written by John and Paul together, often with George Martin adding invaluable parts. Are we to believe that the collaborative tracks are somehow worse than the others because more people were involved in making them? Oh, and that's without even mentioning the input of the engineers who had to create and figure out the ways to make all the sounds the band was trying to achieve. It was absolutely a team effort.
Beato's answer to that is to apparently draw a distinction between people in a band, and people from the outside. Why three members of a band collaborating on a song is more acceptable than collaborating with an outside songwriter is never explained, other than in the mythos of the band mentality.
He can't even keep this consistent, as he mentions how hard it was for Frank Sinatra to make a great record, because they had to perfectly calibrate the microphone for the performance, and then Sinatra had to sing a perfect take. Yes, that was difficult, but he glosses over the irony that Sinatra had other people write, arrange, play, and produce the music. He walked into the studio and sang the song, which isn't all that different than how the pop music he currently rags on is made.
The rub in all of this. Despite being a professor of music, someone who had to explain things clearly to his students, Beato doesn't actually explain what he is talking about, because I think even he must realize he is actually arguing a matter of feelings, not one of facts.
He will explain that popular music now has more average songwriters on a track thna it did forty years ago, fewer key changes, and fewer chords per song. Those are facts, and they are not in dispute. What he never does is actually make a case for how those things make music worse. Some of the greatest songs in the world only have three chords, or never change keys, or were collaborations. The form a song takes, and the manner in which it was created, is irrelevant to whether the art itself is any good.
This goes all the way back to when Metallica cut their hair during the "Load" era, and exposed a wide swath of 'true' music fans as being just as shallow and image-obsessed as everyone else. If the only thing that matters is the music, we are mostly all idiots.
To get back to his main point; does technology change the way music is made? Absolutely it does. There is more music now than ever before, and if you want to make the case that there is too much music being made by people who aren't up to the task as songwriters, I'd be right there with you. That doesn't actually have anything to do with whether technology is making music worse, though. Many of those people would have still been writing songs and playing them at their local coffee houses anyway. We just get to hear them now, because they can upload everything to the internet. Things haven't changed as much as he thinks they have.
As always, this comes back to our inability to see and admit that culture changes as time goes on. Do I think pop music is worse than it was when I was young and invested in it? Absolutely I do. But I also admit that is more to do with the tone and tenor of the music moving in directions I'm not particularly fond of than it is to do with the talent level dropping. The music being made by the generation behind me isn't going to be the same as what my generation made, and that's ok. It was justified when the classic rock bands upended the days of Buddy Holly and Tin Pan Alley, and it's justified today. That's just how time works.
There is no such thing as a 'golden era' where music was all amazing. Every period has its own identity, and anyone who is saying that today's music is garbage needs to take a look in the mirror and remember that there was a time when "Disco Duck", "Convoy", and "The Streak" were all number one hits. So much of all these arguments comes down to the selection bias of forgetting the crap that existed in the past, because it was crap, and today's crap being too new to forget yet.
Perspective is a hard thing, isn't it?
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