As a fan of jazz and singers like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, the state of popular music today is, to me at least, quite distressing. Instead of songs that actually force you to listen to them and understand them, we have the bubble-gum sounds of Madonna and Britney Spears. And don’t even get me started about rap…….
Via Reddit, I found this interesting article that discusses why jazz isn’t more popular in the United States and what that means for the state of music today and in the future:
To be able to enjoy instrumental music, you must be able to appreciate abstract art, and that requires a certain amount of effort. Just mindlessly drinking wine, for instance, would not make you a wine connoisseur. Mindlessly looking at colors (which we all do every day) would not make you a color expert either. Great art demands much more from the audience than the popular art does.
In this sense, the American ears are getting lazier and lazier. It wasn?t so long ago that most people knew how to play a musical instrument or two. Now the vast majority of Americans couldn?t tell the difference between a saxophone and a trumpet. Thanks partially to music videos, music is now a form of visual art. The American culture is so visually dominant that a piece of music without visuals cannot command full attention of the audience. For Americans, music is a background element, a mere side dish to be served with the main course. If they are forced to listen to a piece of instrumental music without any visuals, they don?t know what to do with their eyes, much like the way a nervous speaker standing in front of a large audience struggles to figure out what to do with his hands. Eventually something visual that has nothing to do with the music grabs their attention and the music is push to the background.
This is a good point, although it’s undeniable that jazz wasn’t any more popular in the United States in the days before music videos than it is today:
Visual dominancy isn?t the only problem. The bigger problem is the dominance of our thought. Most Americans do not know what to do with abstraction in general. To be able to fully appreciate abstraction, you must be able to turn off your thought, or at least be able to put your thought into the background. This is not as easy as it might seem. In modern art museums, most people?s minds are dominated by thoughts like: ?Even I could do this.? Or, ?Why is this in a museum?? Or, ?This looks like my bed sheet.? Etc.. They are unable to let the abstraction affect their emotions directly; their experience must be filtered through interpretations. In a way, this is a defense mechanism. It is a way to deal with fears like, ?If I admit that I don?t understand this, I?ll look unsophisticated.? This type of fear fills their minds with noise, and they become unable to see, hear, or taste
And jazz, probably the most abstract of all forms of music, is thus like an abstract painting. Unless someone tells the lazy listener what the think, they won’t pay attention to it.
The entire post is worth a read.
